Minutiae

Mixte

2010-06-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of a ship that had been washed inland by a ferocious storm and came to rest on a boulder with weeds and sunny hillsides lapping about. Occasionally a little bird would land so that the boat pivoted and its bowsprit pointed out towards the ground, then a few random gusts would come along and the boat would once again tip skyward.

I used to think the ship would dream of surrendering to one side or the other, but I’m settling into the notion of it turning forever.

Vapor Trail

2010-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I hear the land rumble with millennia as I drive 45 minutes late to meaningless days. Then I hope the birds and air are defiant with creaks and not resigned to the dilapidations of my efforts and the people who hoard them along with other’s into little piles to block peaceful streams and eviscerate pastureland.

With the sun radio reports, car chase hubcaps and lipstick cases dropped in nightclub passion come to rest. Living room bulbs are snapped on to reveal wine glass ponderances and cushion defecting television remote controls.

The roadways hold me to their course with rumble strips on either side. Then between fluorescence and linoleum I jingle machinery and tickle notions unimaginable to aboriginals here. Returning, I will pull over and run, maybe guard rails are no match for me.

Plumbing, OK it’s Plumbing

2009-10-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

Argh

Good Will Prescription Eyeglass Bin

2009-10-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

Trapped inside the bellows of a concertina playing unsent letters and forgotten promises to harried crowds unaccustomed to foreign tongues, my smiles stick like barbed wire peanut butter.

Somehow this billboard marches along where I think I am with people tilting their heads to read the words.

I can look up all hot day but plumb line brick layers will never fit this in their wall no matter how sturdy or bright my mica sparkles from its uncut rock.

Last years poinsettia where my steering wheel stood missing roads to cut diagonally through back yards and retention ponds with a laundry line and trash can lids crimping wiper blades missing the glass to interfere menacingly with radio reception.

Retiring to drift on air mattresses splashing to Cuba my dreams instead take me past Blackbeard commandeered cash registers swashbuckling paper cuts in lemon juice seas.

Auto

2009-08-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

In boyhood Saratoga my dad leaned on the antiques case as a clerk described tools made from worn 19th century farm implements. A file, you see, will always retain it’s grooves, never relinquish them.

They kicked most of me out just after turning sixteen, the police station would have none of it. I slept in the driver side back seat of a trash filled Mustang, February. When I snuck into the Y to warm up in the shower there was a man watching with a lit cigar. I paper toweled off and dressed to become a display for other kids behind passing school bus windows.

Concourse

2009-06-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

My car is remarkably slow and tiny so I’ve grown accustomed to muscling the teal speck into a middle lane from an on-ramp abreast scoffing semis and braking sports cars. But even amidst that today I was able to notice a disemboweled animal lying just where the slow lane merges.
Whenever I see the image of roadway carnage I brace myself; feel alone. A gentle amorphous part of me begs to resist further knowledge while something from almost the same place feels obligated, as if there is something to be gleaned. But what can be? An insight into the moment? A gesticulation languishing in the discarded body? Or maybe the satiation of a darker need. I hope not.

So there I find myself horrified, jostled about by traffic and unable to look away when I realize that this viscera is nylon batting oozing from a toy. And now there is no other place for my original emotion but aside that bear in the path of oncoming motorists.

Bound

2009-06-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

On a long, slow Southern coast I settled in for a bus ride as the eager congestion of signage abated to homes, then farms. Resting my forehead against the air conditioned pane, rutted side roads permeated with a heat and stillness deeper than skin. Toiling from the city, stoplights stretched further apart as the vehicle’s groan from them became a tympanic hum. From beyond wool checkered seats two disembodied British voices happened.
I gathered that these friends were returning to Danville, a city not far from my own stop. As I listened they continued:
-If we’re meant to stay we’d best figure this out
-It seems more like something you’d best figure out
-I won’t be handing it off to you then
-I don’t see why not, you seem to be done with it
-Would you rifle through to dial the numbers and
contact all my girls?
-No…not all at once. I’d start where I was a weak fist
and a strong second
-You see, how can I trust you?
-With the contacts of women you stole from me?
-Jenny will not have it in the house
-Two valid passports stamped by agents of the Queen
-She’s the one
-Very page three
-I won’t have it
-Then let me…If you’re sworn to be done with them
-There’s a finality to it
-Or to your feelings for Jenny?
Here there was only the motor’s comment as we accelerated through a remote stop light. Well ahead, beyond the drivers shoulder in his recessed compartment, the bus’s curved tempered windshield heaved through humid cicada air as that tumbled around the rectangular body to succumb to a vacuum behind in a gentle serif.

Lead

2009-05-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

The heat and intangibility of sound, flora and cadence of the place leave me feeling like I’m below water. Lizards and insects bob upside down, under eaves and throughout improbable surfaces like fish in their composition while the sun shimmers overhead unwaveringly. As my cigar smoke wafts bubbling surfaceward I crush the butt surprised to notice my flippers unafixed.

.009 Bosch

2009-05-08T10:49:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I think back and say Schenectady, what the hell was all that? And find myself remembering white and black tiled bathrooms in catacombs under San Diego that only one other person I’ve met knew of and am glad that even though all that comes to me about it is four pints of apricot brandy and floor to shoulder urinals I know I was there and so was the High School biology teacher I met in a store that sold kites, and even if the day comes and goes intertwined with cricket ball collisions of unidentifiable memories I still have that with the same evening coming up from them almost as drunk as I was that afternoon in the kite store to find a dark café where people were waiting for us along with a bowl of Captain Crunch which preceded another from the counter with the woman who knew the name I used to go by and was laughing about how the biology teacher was saying that even the kites couldn’t pass a breathalyzer after I stepped into the store and that’s why she said hello.

A Brim Slightly To Wide To Go Unnoticed

2009-05-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sunk half asleep in the leather backseat of Robert’s car zooming across Tampa to the Cuban section with sunlight kaliedescoping through palm trees not much of it matters anyway. And as we make a sharp turn onto Bayshore Boulevard and the conversation up front switches from Heulobecq to Morales and the Sunday New York Times catches wind and a laptop case leans against me, the debate remains the debate remains the debate.

Forrest Dwelling Bearskin Capped Eastern European Collaborationists

2009-03-31T11:21:00.000-07:00

I just love everything there is about my delightful little neighborhood…but I think the guy next door is a Nazi war criminal. The evidence, which I’m sure you’ll find convincing, is as follows.

1) Resilient European Tendencies: This man and his wife have a way of sitting about and enjoying the day which I find particularly alarming. There’s something about their overly worn lawn furniture, wine grape trellis and meticulously ironed clothing that just doesn’t seem to lend itself to normal suburban living. They smile to much, and I think I remember her arm resting on his while they spoke. Believe me, I’ll be looking into these things.

2) Longevity: These people seem very old and yet remarkably healthy, and not in that patriotic old-people-propped-up-on-pharmaceuticals sort of way either. People with clear consciences enjoy their elderly years, but so do those without a conscience. And part of the reason there’s so many strudel shops in French Guyana is that this same agedness preys on our capacity to seek, and therefore grant, redemption through personal enlightenment. Which in turn, of course, provides the perfect camouflage for a sick death camp butcher.

3) Mailbox Lettering: There are far to many Cs, Js and double vowels in their name that send normal tongues somersaulting during pleasantries. Now if the newly immigrated simply want to save a few Rubles or Kopeks or whatever at Home Depot by purchasing decal lettering from the bargain bin that’s one thing, but all these consonants are bound to remind a civilized person of that funny a/u/e sound Europeans make when they’re mispronouncing Treblinka or Birkeneau.

Anyway, I’m not saying we should string these two up or anything, but if I see any lederhosen on the clothes line I’m rushin’ the place with granddaddy’s Confederate sword, that’s all.

Omaha

2009-03-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Several blocks away in a shuttered cape there lives a nice plump and friendly cat who enjoys sitting on his street corner. As neighbors stroll, which some do while others hurry off to barter crescent wrench sets containing missing 10mm counterparts for moth eaten Indian Motorcycle sew-on patches, the cat watches on. Slower travelers are approached for a pet, and many who notice the lovely feline’s coat and kind demeanor decide that he would make a fine companion. Removing his collar they take him back to their dwellings, whatever that may mean. When struck by the notion the cat returns home unfazed, and no party shows any wear and tear from the process but the tattered Missing Cat signs which are repeatedly hung. When I pass the corner with that missing cat I note his absence sometimes with the same sort of attention I might pay to pinto beans on sale two for a dollar. Stroking his fur right where he belongs I still think of him as missing.

_______________________________________________

In the fashion of traditional Southern cities this one also was designed to have alleys running between the lots with houses that sail neatly pointed through manicured lawns. These back avenues offer a secondary view of the workings which power the neighborhood. There, a crying child may be explained the next morning by a new white sofa with a large chocolate milk stain on it left out for trash. Beer bottles whisper tales of unseen homeless and local teenagers, trash that mingles in a temporarily ominous way. Kitchen smells and Tungsten shadows sneak over the sandworn brick in early evening as bougainvillea toss their violet capes like matadors braving garage doors.
Diagonally against the sky a rare temperate oak stands with sturdy arm quietly braced against muted watermark pastels. And from that gesticulation comes swooping death between in-law apartments to tiny peeping birds bent toward seed and insect beside a gurgling fountain.

I arrive home from work to find my neighbor shouting into his cell phone and wonder if someone somewhere is listening to his counterpart on her patio replete with hawk and tiger cat and bougainvillea conquistadors.

DeLonghi

2009-03-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

After the nose picking there would always be a wordlessness, just as she had once seen my confidence round the corner in an argument.
With those faults we were pleased to lie in bed late into the night whispering and peering out the wintry headboard window sipping our sleeping hours away.
In Florida you miss the cold as it rattles around lead painted window frames to kiss a backside edge of glass with fog. And the way your girl’s feet come to you in sleep for warmth.

Root, Structure and Truncated Meaning

2009-02-24T17:22:00.001-08:00

I live in a small community in the South once fabled as a cherished and tucked away retirement and holiday Valhalla. Long ago in the days taken from Nabokov Chevrolet cross country family vacations, sleepy homes and motels nestled in the balm and bougainvillea along cobbled streets and avenues numbered for the ease of tourists and newcomers. As the heat of the days bleached bricks, though, they cracked to recover less and less frequently by repair, and the prevalence of greed and banality which crept through sidewalks elsewhere overcame like Kudzu the easy ways of this town.

There are porches dotted about on which seersucker suit coats hung in pre air-conditioned breezes with sounds of groaning wicker rocking chairs and clinking mint juleps caught in their folds. Remnants of that, and that thinking, can be found; in the furniture and golf clubs one comes across at tag sales, or unexpectedly Sunday shuttered storefronts. And today, astoundingly, a gym of adolescent boxers barked at by aging men in Wal-Mart sweats as I froze half seated on my bicycle to peek through an emergency door.

2009-02-15T17:31:00.000-08:00

Title:
Just outside Georgetown Connecticut there is a small mill left over from the days of last century’s industrialization. There you will find a business owner who, noticing in the late fifties a trend towards large steel and glass corporate architecture, specialized in the small orders of plate glass those buildings would require, and that larger producers would be loath to supply. On most days, were you to drive down the slender cobblestone lane beside this factory, you might pass by and observe yourself doing so in a mirrored plate glass panel tilting against the building waiting to be shipped.

Post:
Even as they hung on my lips the words struck me like handfuls of pennies thrown against a mangled dimestore concertina’s bellows … “excuse me Sir, may I assume it’s my hat and newspaper you have about you”? But the yelling and screaming afterward seemed easier to assimilate as the face under my visor somehow held me accountable.
But I sat still.
Because in the end I was not leaving without my cap and paper.

Only Buy Used Potato Peelers from Left Handed People

2009-02-11T19:40:00.000-08:00

I just got my first email from a right wing nutbag celebrating the accomplishments of the bush administration. Of course she's someone who’s become quite well to do working for a contractor to the U.S. military so things are pretty rosy there. I, on the other hand, recently left a job where I was responsible for phoning the inhabitants of inner city Florida, the ranks of which are recruited for military service in the Middle East. This is what one guy who still had hands left to pick up the phone had to say:
I was a sniper over there. When people think of snipers they think of someone lying on a building top with a rifle. What they don’t realize is that you have to silently fight your way to that position. I just spent four years sneaking up on people and killing them with a knife while muffling their screams. Or getting ambushed by combatants trying to do the same to me. Do you have any idea what a scene it is when my kids jump in my bed to surprise me first thing Saturday morning? I’m not a human being anymore. My job is gone. I came home to a drug addicted wife and soon I’ll loose my kids to homelessness. Everyone I speak to from my service days is going through similar stuff. Why are you calling man, what are you selling?
I guess when you’re snuggled in expense-accounted digs snacking on freedom fries next to the fire you don’t have to worry about your wife hitting the pipe thousands of miles away or some guy who may be walking around the desert with the rusty blade that’s going to scrape against your vertebrae as it passes through your jugular and trachea. Healthcare isn’t an issue when you’ve got a cushy gig like that and you sure don’t have to worry about its obsolescence. All you have to do is make sure you don’t stop and ask the guy wheeling himself on the sidewalk why he’s rattling a can for your spare coins.

Longevity

2009-02-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

I used to think I had a drinking problem, but I’m starting to doubt that now. Don’t get me wrong: I was drunk a great deal of the time and consumed, daily, amounts of liquor that would send others to the hospital. I was unproductive, slovenly and hopelessly maladjusted. But still, I’m not sure I had a problem.

Now I work almost every day as hard as I can to accomplish as much as possible. I live a tidy life dedicated to improving my lot, attempt to be kind to others while managing my affairs in a responsible fashion. I maintain positive relationships, keep my eye peeled for opportunity and strive to display virtue to all around me. And for almost two years now this attitude has kept me in the exact same oppressive, grinding poverty experienced while drinking.

Two days ago I was faced with a decision: wether to risk seven dollars on an enterprise that could help me bring things around. Seven dollars. I weighed the decision very carefully and examined all it’s possibilities. I applied effort and enginuity into surveying its possibilities and decided to roll the dice. By that time though, hours later, the opportunity was gone.

If I were smart enough to drive a large National bank into failure I would have been compensated with hundreds of millions of times that seven dollars. If I were nakedly aggressive or unscrupulous I would have had thousands of times that seven dollars. Or if I poured myself into a meaningless, socially detrimental occupation I would have had a hundred thousand times that seven dollars. But I am just a worker so I don’t really even have the seven dollars.

When people offered their sympathy for the horrors I used to endure I would glibly reply that all was nothing six or seven martinis couldn’t fix, though sometimes now I think those words may have been profound. The martinis didn’t make anything better, but they made me feel better, and either way two years later I still don’t have the seven bucks to change.

Cotton Candy/ Cobweb Mélange

2009-01-31T09:38:00.000-08:00

Once, on the phone, a guy described it as an Elephant Burying Ground which of course could have been almost justly misinterpreted to mean a place where old people go to expire and have parasitic estate dealers rummage through their hoard. But being the kind that he was I understood it immediately as a creepy place that one mishaps upon through unruly circumstance only to discover ghastly mementos kept from our knowledge by beings with a sounder grasp of the general futility and suffering of it all.

Sometimes it seems like the only rule around here is unrelenting exception. You’ll be soothed upon spotting a well jacketed business man in a café only to reveal his coat pocket adorned with greasy screwdrivers and half smoked cigars. Or a sundressed blonde will smile down at you when asked driving directions to reveal nostrils bulging like a basket of avocados with antiquated mucous. It doesn’t end when you notice that the slender, lisping shopkeeper is sporting a seven pound bronze Skoal belt buckle: It doesn’t end when the one Mercedes in town turns out to have a rotting garbage smell to it when you walk by on a hot day: And it doesn’t end when you see the father who lives down the street riding his eight year old’s bicycle with a paper bagged pint in his hand. The guarded responses these people offer when greeted are not indifference, they’re suspicion coupled with a snap analysis of their own firearm’s load.

You can catch glimpses of how it all came to be, too. As you’re driving by sometimes there will be an empty lot or a field and you’ll realize what used to be here: nothing. Scrubland. Palm trees and the kind of hard grass that would saw off a toe through flip-flops. It’s all just backstage behind the tourist catalogue shoot where skill and effort is applied with cakes of makeup to dress up the fetid appendage oozing on the inner thigh of the country. And these are the people who sprung from it. Or worse, came to it. Like me.

I Was Thinking That Abandoning and Discovering Ideas May Just Be Shades of the Same Thing

2009-01-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

I woke up at the same time this morning but this time it was a little earlier so I took a moment to listen. To the news and birds. And some music. It all kind of made me feel like I thought adults would feel when I was little.

I wonder if being French is the answer to being American.

Your love is a soap bubble in a twister and my arms are a meddlesome bumble bee in the cockpit of a helicopter hovering in its vortex.

People’s torsos and trunks weren’t lining up again today. This time some were also on backward and one woman in line at the grocery store had two. I wonder if it’s getting worse.

When In

2009-01-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

Recreate old Charlton Heston movies with NASCAR taking the place of chariot races.

Next Ham

2009-01-14T18:22:00.000-08:00

The only reason I had the job was to see for myself how this store around the corner stayed in business. I couldn’t imagine how these people kept their doors open, unless they were a front for the mob or a cardboard set for a John Watters movie or something.

So of course all I discover is that not only are there idiots out there dim enough to speculate their dead grandfather’s hard earned money on a softball, Prozac-housewife idea like a spiral cut ham store, but also that the only thing the average American can turn his TV off long enough for is to drive around the corner and pick up a frickin’ spiral cut ham. Incredible.

Of course all the businesses ideas I came up with were good ones. That’s why they never succeeded. If I opened a store selling flannel and silk garden hose cozies I’d probably be writing this from a private 747.

So last night on the way home from getting smacked in the face by my ATM I noticed an office holding some sort of new years celebration, which sent me driving home to put on a nice shirt. Back at the door I turned to a guy who looked like he was about to ask me who I was and said I thought Caruthers was out here for some reason, give me a hand finding him, will ya’? And of course the guy turned and disappeared and I was in. People seemed to be mingling in a predictably awkward way, the 30 year old music was just enough to get the white guys doing their weird wiggle and the sheet cake and meatballs looked like they would be happy to start an argument in just about anybody’s lower GI tract without discriminating.

Fielding and sweeping up little pieces of conversation these people turned out to be regional transportation brokers for CSX; Large and stable enough. A few minutes later I turned to laugh at one of Cindy’s personnel department anecdotes and mentioned that a friend had just come on board and was asked for an ID when he came to say hello at my office. She was nice enough to mention that the attendant at the photo ID office was still in at this hour and if Tim was around he could just step in and take care of it. After my photo was taken the guard congratulated me and mentioned that he’d look forward to seeing me on Monday at 8;30 where he offered new hires a ten minute security briefing.
In 24 days I’ll have dental.

Mammals In Their Habitats

2008-12-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Today there was an accident on the long bridge I traverse home from work and I found all traffic stopped, so I pulled over on the embankment approaching it to wait for things to clear. As I sat on a Jersey barrier facing the bay, a pod of dolphins swam by me more than several times. I was able to lean over and see one, at times less than ten feet away. Once, he swam by very slowly on his side and we shared about ten seconds of eye contact, the exchange distinct enough for me to know that we were engaged in a clear but very subtle and intuitive gesture of non-hostility.
As the dolphins lollygagged about the surface I noticed that they all had deep crevices which ran along their bodies and gouged their fins. It made me sad to think that I was looking at animals which bore the scars of their proximity to humans. They were so intent on play that it was hard to imagine their finding time to forage and hunt. I didn’t think they should have to worry about anything else.
The dolphins went on to address more pressing matters and the traffic dispersed while I stepped back to my car. As drivers we filed past ambulances, fire trucks and a long, sleek white sheet pulled over a body.
Squinting into the sun I found myself wondering if that dolphin was empathizing.

Street Sweeper

2007-12-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

Most of the time I would have remembered, but somehow I found myself holed up in Richmond with the Hawaiian Schefelera and a pile of bologna wrappers. I think there was an after hours club somewhere, going out a bit before the clubs shut was ok and I could sleep through afternoon. The lesbian down the hall would knock on my door sometimes, and I think some of my early flip book drawings were passed under her door in jest.

Most days had me lonely lonely lonely. My face was plastered on me then. I think the flying gate was the only bike I had, before I put the old Super Record on it, I rode with some guys from UofR who were trying to start a velo team. They thought I was in much better shape than I was. The bike only got out one or two days a week anyway, so there was more time in the room.

My old friend Cindy wanted to know why the girl down the hall plead to come out with us, sounded incredulous when I told her, maybe excited. She winked towards my bed on the floor.

The brownstone was high-ceilinged and had nice breezes, passing out in the kitchen or den bothered no one. One couple downstairs was shooting and the lesbian told me she wanted to try. I asked her not to and she didn’t, came to listen to my radio one night.

I had a police scanner with two shortbands as well. There was an Israeli show at five in the morning, European House that we enjoyed. Not wanting the lesbian felt fine, she slept nicely in my arms: had been abused by her father and carried a gun in her purse for that.

The police were always at our door. That was still the South then, in the 70's, crew cutted good old boys not much for our sort of abandon, some things coming to us just a little to easy. They were waiting.

Once the door in the room opened to a patio but now it is gone. A summer day the lesbian and I pryed its painted jam and sat in our underwear legs dangling the alley. The sun was beating the needles down the hall into a plan.

The lesbian said no so I left for Israel myself. Cindy tried to take care of her but she finally stepped onto the lanai.

Necrophilia

2007-12-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

The stewardess turned mid word and caught herself saying Sir, realized that I didn’t intend to appear belligerent, wouldn’t want to ask me to disembark for that. Smiling askew I fumbled my bags overhead reaching inside for the vile, elsewhere everyone settled in. The fitted polyester uniform swaying the isle, finally looking down to Her smile.

I felt her looking and didn’t want to. Three pills came from my pocket and a tiny bottle of bourbon. Then, as our plane taxied we came to rest at the runway with brakes locked and engines revving. “This is the best part”, her eyes held my flashing glee. Smiling in acceleration I opened the bottle to find her hand grasping mine, opening the palm. The plane tilted upwards as she nodded, indicating two pills be returned to the vile.

In the white silence of Pratt and Whitneys, succumbing to the give of flex and fold brushing whispers back into me. Then hours later, just another unexpected landing.

Past Light Cone

2007-11-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

I had never spoken to Ray, the guy who sat behind me in Algebra, but I read about him in the newspaper. Apparently he had been hanging out with friends at one of their house’s when someone discovered what they thought to be an older brother’s cocaine stash. After inhaling the entire quantity between them they quickly succumbed to the affects of PCB and one by one fell into a deep comatose state. Just before collapse one of the girls had dialed 911 and Ray, hearing this, miracously climbed into the attic and hid there until paramedics found the open door to climb in and administer cardio pulmonary ressesutation. That, to me, represented a certain level of experience and dedication.

Our Algebra class took place after lunch and I frequently smelled booze on Ray. That, Ray’s reputation as an ass kicker and the fact that he was older and had an easy hundred pounds on me combined quite effectively to instill draw clenching fear every time I sat down. Still, I knew that if liquor was detected in our vicinity the blame would certainly fall on him since no one at the time suspected I was drinking my lunch. I would have let that happen too as I knew that the address given with the police report had listed Ray as living at some church, and I imagined a poor derelict orphan rattling around echoing halls badgered by clergymen to do homework. I didn’t care what happened to him.

In the silence of our first Algebra test a finger in my ribs pushed me to the side of my chair. I understood and let him copy my answers.

The school was undergoing a large renovation project then so afterwards I ducked into a construction zone for a smoke. When I was done Ray was just heading in, surprised to see someone like me there. As we stood for a moment he looked over and said “cool”. I knew he was talking about the exam.

*********************************

I was a loner yet also a bit of a loose cannon, and there happened to be a rather pleasurable circumstance with a nicely formed specimen which had gone awry. I didn’t blame her but apparently that generosity of spirit was not reciprocated. During an inopportune moment surrounded by many people she accused me in a loud tone of being gay, and I let loose. The verbal assault attracted a great deal of attention, including that of some athlete type senior year dork in the mood to play night in shining armor. Undeterred I went on as this guy came in for my neck, but just as he was about to land he was yanked from the ground. Ray. After the smoke cleared a gym coach came through the waning crowd and asked me if she called me a “fag”. I confirmed that and he smiled and said “well done. I didn’t see a thing”. Imagine, a coach and a 225 pound juvenile delinquent abandoning their differences to come to my side? The feeling of that sort of comradery during my time of duress has stuck with me to this day.

Last night I was hanging out with a bunch of guys down by the cay. We were all more than a bit schnockered and feeling pretty good. I didn’t know everyone but, you know, I knew someone that everyone knew. One of the guys I didn’t found it necessary to grab his guitar and smash it against a tree. I thought to myself What an impetuous fool, stay away from that one. And then I remembered Algebra, how I had been deceived by my early impressions, understood that all I knew about this guy was that he
harmed nothing but his own guitar.

It turns out that Ray truly was the orphan I imagined him to be, and to many people made the mistake I did in class. So now, even though I’ve forgotten most of the Algebra, I’m going to remember the sentiment and see if I can save the next guitar.

Constitution

2007-11-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

For the past four weeks I’ve been aboard the unregistered Pacific Seacraft Dana marked Collette off the coast of Eastern Central America. The waters have been, for the most part, calm and delightful. As I’ve tacked easily across the Gulf schools of fishes have been traveling afoot as I’ve teased them with my fly rod, using circle hooks to ensure that most could be safely released. Because the owner has installed a propane refrigerator I have had reliable food storage so I take about one fish every other day. On the first day I have sashimi then throughout the second and sometimes the third I have yaki sakana and ceviche. Other than that I read, listen to shortwave radio and scan the horizon, always beset with guilt for not doing so for fear of missing a distressed vessel or crewman.
Though I have experienced remarkable sites during this delivery I have not enjoyed the sensation of sharing them. I have painstakingly corroded two circuits on my radio to provide an explanation should the Coast Guard board Collette. I do not watch TV or movies. The lapping of wave on hull is small comfort to my ears.
Very Large Crude Carriers known as Panamax or VLCCs frequent these waters, and sometimes when I go to sleep I wonder if I will succumb to their inertia and mass, woken only to drown among sunken fiberglass splinters. I’m sure I would not be the first and only wonder how many Chinese junks Collette would join in heaven.
Unforeseen factors aside I will birth in Miami in three days. Before then I will adjust the aspiration on the spotless Volvo diesel and test, analyze and monitor the entire electrical system. I will polish teak with lamp oil and eat from cans to maintain a spotless deck. Within one day’s sail I will no longer allow weary birds to rest aboard ship as they will be well within land’s and other’s reach.
On the morning of the last day I will also uncleat collette’s halyard and lower the jib, spray it with fresh water, allow it to luff dry, then stow it below. Within an hour of port I will do the same with her mainsail. Both will be inspected carefully beforehand.
Shortly before port I will shower and don a ridiculously pretentious nautical cap, blazer and slacks. I will wave only to sailors, then motor in awkwardly so that my skills appear to match my outfit, cleat up and come ashore. I will hand the keys to Collette’s cabin and electrical system to a man who has been hired specifically for the occasion to relive the harbor master, strip off my cap and glasses in a rented car and disappear into traffic.
Twelve hours later a flight, a bus ride and a cab will bring me to the cottage. I will double check my pockets and backpack for any paper, put my marlinspike in a drawer and step on the scale in my bathroom. As the mechanical dial spins I will take a deep breath, hear my weight finally register and come back into being to prepare for my bed. In Vermont. Impossibly inland from VLCCs.

Theft

2007-10-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

If you’ve never heard Foghat’s “Smoke on the Water” you’re probably an Amish farmer reading a computer screen for the first time or one of those Japanese soldiers they found on Iwojima ignorant of the outcome of WWII, so none of this is going to make any sense to you.
The rest of you recognize this Rock anthem from Beavis and Butthead, every stoner movie made, or heard it blasting from that primered El Camino the weird guy who hangs out downtown drives.
My brother and I witnessed the introduction of this beacon of pop ignorance around the time we were in junior high and of course recognized it for the genius that it was.
Our father, having studied bassoon throughout his youth and early adulthood was unaware of “Smoke on the Water”, or pretty much anything that came along after the Gutenberg press.
We used to get to tag along with him when he performed at The New York City Ballet, which of course meant a chance at a brief interlude with a Balanchine-sexy ballerina. There was other cool stuff about that too, like seeing Lincoln Center from the pit and watching Dad warm up for the show. One by one musicians would wander in to tune, toot or pluck their instruments into shape while the audience awaited the conductor.
You know where this is going, right?
The house is packed and silent: Dad is the first musician in the pit; he assembles his bassoon, arranges the evening’s sheet music and plays the first five or six bars of “Smoke”. People said they could hear the audience roar all the way from the fountain.
Everyone knew who put my Dad up to this and Roderick and I were pelted with admiration like rose petals on matadors in the musician’s lounge that night.
.

Quill

2007-10-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, if you’re unfortunate enough to live through a couple of lifetimes of the usual pitfalls, you’ll come across a decent soul who sees whatever the hell it was in you that you never saw yourself. I’ve been around without the chemicals long enough to realize the guilt of having two of those: It’s heartwarming and it sucks, that’s all.

One has found me opportunity and the other is attempting to find me work. As a writer. People think of me as a writer. I can’t reconcile my humility when I hear them say so, but to me it is a glamour that no Hollywood Star will ever know upon red carpet or otherwise.

The embrace of all this kneads in me like flower and yeast, rising.

Ecological responsibility, Red Goshawks and the 19 plastic box cutters that conquered the most powerful army ever to exist

2007-08-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

I’m one of those environmentally conscious people who bicycles instead of driving, separates all his recyclables, boycotts products made by large corporations known to commit atrocities against mother earth and eats as low on the food chain as possible in order to conserve this small blue planet we live upon. I was a member of the international retired Olympic relay swim team that swam the Mac G3 hard drive under the US coast guard’s radar and into Cuba from Mexico in order to revise the sugar refinement technology of that socialist country.
But you know what…I’m not doing any of that crap anymore. What is the sense in it all? Mere perpetuation of the planet, the people who will continue to mess it up and the other detritus that was here before us? I simply can’t see the value in that. Am I to leave my ’67 Ford F10 in the garage just so some smiling infant can grow up to guzzle the petroleum I’ve conserved for her? Or maybe I should forego using antibiotics when I’ve some disease just so that particular strain won’t become more virulent and compromise the teeny bit of life remaining in some octogenarian who pillaged the women of the French countryside during WWI. It’s all idiotic.
And don’t think you’re some particular breed of intellect because you’ve read that idiot Sartre and you think I’m just regurgitating his drunken blather. Because you and I both know that if he was around today he’d be writing editorials for Harpers, spending $37 for a loaf of whole wheat stone pulped peasant bread from Dean and Deluca’s and mail ordering 12 year old boys from Laos .
But you know what? All kidding aside, starting this very minute I’m living it up. I’ve got the frikin’ truck idling in the driveway right now just so the AC will be nice and chilly when I step into it. I made out holiday cards bestowing lavish donations to the NRA in the name of all my friends. I’m going into town tonight to buy 15 bags of heroin and a rig, and I’m going to teach myself how to use it without any assistance. I’m itchin to make an omelet out of a California Condor egg. And if I live long enough I’m going to vote for that Mitt guy.
So cheers to all the amputated limbs we’ll be leaving behind in Iraq and then Iran, how’do’you’do to the Andean herders who’ve shed their skins under the ozone hole and pleased to meet you to the silos of multi-headed nuclear and nerve gas infused missiles of Omaha and Nebraska.
If anyone needs me I’ll be out in my ’47 Hataras harpooning bottlenose dolphins with incendiary harpoon tips.

Global Warming Melted the Snowcaps so Now We Can See the Mountaintops More Clearly

2007-07-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

Many years ago a boy grew up among a dusty Pueblo in New Mexico crooked between a gas station, a small market and a five-and-dime. The boy had sun kissed cheeks and felt nothing between his heels and the earth his family worked and lived upon. Together on Sundays they walked eight miles to church, holding hands, breathing the day and feeling their Sabbath clothing. The boy walking next to his father, the man’s passion for faith flowing down through his hand and into his son’s. As the boy knew crops rose to the sun, that night came after day he also knew he would become a preacher.

Far from the Pueblo his cracked and dated valise held all but his faith. He felt the big city, overlooked vice and embraced the people and their ways. He preached in a small storefront, was offered morning hours on a local radio station. Soon, all the other girls and boys who felt the earth of their Pueblos while growing up listened to the boy and remembered their churches and helped fill the city with kindnesses.

In much the same way a small Belgian farmer’s son worked and learned alongside his father. Their family tilled the land, and the father had a small tractor repair behind the house were he offered honest maintenance to the machines of the community. That boy knew also, as a stone falls to earth or an object in motion will come to rest, that he would grow to be an engineer.

As both boys grew the world became smaller and the possibilities of all we could accomplish as one emerged. And through this truer spirit of freedom, ingenuity and thought the boy from the Pueblo preached to his fellows. He taught and listened, and understood that he had been granted by them their leadership. But others to far away who never felt the earth and only knew cold cities became afraid.

Our Belgian mechanist embraced his fathers tenacity and craft, and was renowned for solving difficult technical problems. His disciplined mind addressed only it’s task, as was the way of a good scientist. Three of these tasks, however, led to the design of firearms. And these were drawn and produced to operate with the reliability and precision of a tractor repaired in a farmhouse shed by a man who knew that a family’s well-being relied on its operation.

In Los Angeles the boy held forth hope and led the children of Pueblos to embrace, forgive and accomplish all that God had put in their hearts. He asked them to glimpse a far-off vision of where their faith and patience and labor could take them. A thirst grew for this simple, natural spirit and the boy would travel about to quench it and lead the hands of people to that of God’s.

One other boy grew up. He had lived with many families. He spoke of no father. He gave no thought to his future which one day led him to the back seat of a Plymouth, across from a small, seedy hotel, with a Belgian rifle designed by John Browning in his lap.

The hopes of the Pueblos and the purity of a father's son spilled that day on the hotel’s cement balcony, dried, and disappeared from the earth. Today small boys in Pueblos wear Chinese shoes and watch television. Belgian fields are tilled, plowed, sown and reaped by maintenance free machines manned by computers. And father’s hands hold bars now, not children.

Every year that April fourth passes silently we fail all three.

Green Coconut Milk with Gin

2007-06-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

You kind of have to know how young city mothers pat their children’s buts in admonition to understand, but I saw exactly that one day long ago in Christianstedt. I was walking back, in early morning I guess, still drunk probably but those soursops called to me. I had my own swagger then and had no doubt about its affect, but as I walked the curb ahead there was a mother with her daughter stepping hand in hand. A man, a Rastafarian, passed us on horseback saddleless as slow as Conquistador upon smoldering city. Hair down to his trousers, slouching to the clop clop clop of hooves.
With mischievous sincerity the little girl spoke upward…. “Mommy, when I grow up I want to marry a Rastafarian”.
I hope she has.

Thanks For Lunch

2007-04-08T15:32:00.000-07:00

The unusually large expanse of porcelain inherent in the design of an indoor swimming pool obscures ordinary sounds, but when a fist fight breaks out the scuffling rings with Wagnerian intensity, so I was not the first to run over to assert civility. Just as I grabbed one guy from behind though his assailant went for a roundhouse and landed it square on my jaw. Turning back I realized the errant swinger was my brother whom I hadn’t seen for upward of ten years. That we both found our way to a semi-private club’s Olympic swimming pool in the outskirts of the Hamptons is an entirely different matter.

Whilst the punch’s bruise darkened he and I decided to have lunch and catch up, as we had many mutual friends in days gone by. We were both reminded of long forgotten triumphs and tales, and of course the delights of this place’s roast beef sandwiches with their vigorous horseradish sauce.

The story of another lunch involving a Vodka family reunion of sorts came to mind, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share that with you.

My brother Roderick was attending Julliard at the time, and had already become quite bored with the sampling of notes and bars he had come across. My mother, who by then was living in Purchase, had decided to lunch with my brother in an attempt no doubt to cheer him up. As usual my brother astounded all involved, this time by suggesting that they meet at the then newly renovated Plaza Hotel.

They spoke and ate, and by the time my brother leaned back in his chair to digest neither truffle nor trite had been spared, and several bottles of botyrized wine lay in carnage. Smiling, my brother received the check and continued the conversation which I understand never ran toward the subject of expense.

After an appropriate amount of time had lapsed Roderick excused himself to see to a matter at the front desk. There, a studious young lady in an impeccably pressed uniform inquired as to how she could help, whereupon he asked for a sheet of hotel stationary. While discretely writing the three words on such he requested that it be placed in the box of a Mr. Southington. Noting my brothers own well-heeled appearance the clerk assumed Roderick had meant Mr. Wellington and said so, placing the note in the box meant for room 617. My brother, of course, took the opportunity to note the number.

Returning to the table he thanked my mother for her indulgence, forged Mr. Wellington’s signature and room number on the check, and draped my mother’s stoal over her shoulders. On the way out my mother, who apparently had just sacrificed her annual pilgrimage to Bermuda in order to cover tuition, made it known that she had glanced at the twelve-hundred dollar check and her look betrayed something less than glee.

It seems that my brother chose to wait until the pair was five or six steps outside the hotel before disclosing his subterfuge, and it was then that they took to fleeing through the streets of Manhattan like turn of the century pickle thieves starving in a market.

Laughing at both incidents a sharp pain hit where the blow had landed as Roderick picked up the tab. And while he winked at my faux protestation I remembered that he had become a high-profile contractor to the DOD, and let’s just say the founder of “Wellington Aerospace”.

Wag

2006-11-16T23:03:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about terrorists, and the ideology that leads them to their behavior. If you get past the horrific damage, lost lives, pain and human suffering, it all just seems to be a comic and counterproductive way of going about things. I mean, how in the world do these people think that they are going to accomplish anything? Do they see Tony Blair saying Gee, that was all rather much, best we leave old Ireland to them and be done with it. Or the Knesset saying Wow, I always knew it happened, but right here in Morty’s falafel stand? Hand over the occupied territories and let’s get back to the sheckles.

They all seem to me to be a bunch of whiney spoiled kids holding their breath because Mom won’t serve them bologna sandwiches for lunch. Which is bad enough. But the part that really irks me is the lack of ingenuity. Instead of hunkering down and arriving at some enlightened way to illustrate their cause, these people just engage in the basest part of human nature. The innovative thinking that really gets the job done, like Gandhi’s Passive Resistance or Winston Churchill’s thundering overtures, is really where it’s at. Crashing airplanes into Metropolitan areas just tends to piss people off.

Now for a lesson in international relations and crises resolution, my Uncle Dick would be the guy to turn to. He was the sort who could have had an enormous effect on grander situations, had he chosen to take them up. But of course he just stuck to aluminum.

I remember once when I was about 13 or 14 we went off to look at an old car he was interested in buying. We went down this long unpaved driveway and came up on the rig and it’s owner, and before I could get out of the car my uncle had the guy knee deep in it. The part of the conversation I heard went something like this: “Ya know, you look a heck of a lot like this guy Timothy I was in the war with (my uncle was never in any war), heck of a guy that Tim was, could drink a fish out’ a water, hey, we found this great local beer on the way up, how ‘bout havin’ one (sound of two beers opening halfway through this sentence) anyway…. (here the guy actually chimes in that he has been mistaken for Timothy before) hey, I noticed ya’ got an old post and beam barn, ‘been thinkin’ about building one of those (you’d have to go through a box of nails before you could get my uncle to hammer one in unbent)…mind if I have a look”. ‘Next thing you know the two of them are jostling towards the barn like they’d been best friends from birth. Anyway, about 20 minutes later when he came back to find me sitting in the car with my second beer crotched, he tosses me the keys and tells me to follow him home. Never once bothering to discern whether I’d driven before, of course. Needless to say, if he paid half of what the car was worth, it was probably the worst deal he’d ever made.

Uncle Dick would tell anyone who asked that he was a purchasing agent for American Can, and that that was why he spent most of his professional life traveling. I think a microscopic evaluation of that claim would yield archeological remnants of fact, but nothing substantial enough to tuck into a shirt pocket. There was just something shady about the way he said it. That a large manufacturing concern would send someone like my uncle all over the world in search of good deals on equipment and raw materials was no great surprise. But everyone knew he was capable of coming back from two months in Siberia with a deep full body tan. And once, when I was there and he had just returned from the home office, I was surprised to see him dapper in a grey suit, and not surprised at all to see, upon closer inspection, that his tie revealed the tiny words “F… Y..” almost disappearing into pattern.

The other shady thing about my uncle was that he was always in the middle of rebuilding antique cars, but they were never getting rebuilt. But without exception their radios were always in stellar condition, and each served as the perfect place to sit listening, drinking and hiding from Aunt Joy. Oh yeah, that’s the other thing: he wasn’t my uncle. Everyone in my family referred to him and his wife as Uncle Dick and Aunt Joy, but they were related neither through name, birth or proximity to anyone I knew. An explanation was never offered nor solicited.

The thing you have to understand about my uncle, the part that makes this all OK, is that the guy was just so damn likable. There wasn’t a bar, ball game or board room that he couldn’t find a friend in. I’m pretty sure that if you put him in a Pygmy convention he’d shrink two feet for the occasion. So even though I’m pretty sure he only spoke English, I know his attitude translated just as well throughout his travels.

Anyway, one of the reasons my brother and I liked Uncle Dick so much was his genuine caring. Once, when we were quite young, he brought back this beautiful Geisha doll from Japan and told us the story of how he came across it. We knew the glass encased icon wasn’t the only load he was giving us, but none the less we sat riveted to the oration. Here’s how events unfolded:

Apparently he was in Japan purchasing aluminum. Now, I just want to reiterate here that in my adult life, especially upon reflection, I’ve come to understand that purchasing aluminum, like so many other explanations offered by my Uncle Dick, was most probably a metaphor. What the hell he was really doing in Japan, or wherever he was, was probably pretty damn far from purchasing aluminum. Refitting cargo ships with secret holds or Midget Formula One Interspecies Nude Racing would probably be a lot closer to home. Anyway, his story places him in Japan. In a bar, of course.

My Uncle goes on to explain the meanderings of his inebriated mind and how he came to befriend this fella who wanted to take a real American cowboy home to meet the family. You have to remember, I was only a kid when I first heard this story, so we’re talking early 1950’s or thereabouts, so the world had not gotten as small as it is today. And my uncle was describing the intricacies of Japanese culture as he saw it, with a fascination akin to discovering a herd of wild elephants playing pinochle in a downpour with lavender umbrellas held aloft betwixt jewel encrusted mandibles .

As a gesture of kindness, out of sheer curiosity or perhaps just pure lapse in judgment, these people had invited my uncle to spend his stay in their home, which must have delighted him, always eager for adventure and emersion. I wonder, though, what their school age children must have thought the following days as this bleary eyed Westerner came stumbling into their home without his trousers as they were heading off for breakfast and school.

Apparently one evening during this week the family was gathered in the living room, sharing their history and photos with my uncle. Suddenly the room turned somber, and the wife emerges from a closet with a cherished vase. According to its lore, it had been passed from generation to generation for untold centuries, and they wished to honor my uncle by showing it to him.

I’m not sure if the thing was an exceptional beauty, or if my uncle just felt obligated by the occasion to say so, but I guess the family was struck by his compliment…because they insisted that he pack it up and take it home with him. By no stretch of the imagination an idiot, Uncle Dick immediately surmised there was something afoul in Denmark. None the less the family had the pleasure of watching their treasured vase leave the home for the first time in the stewardship of a man who’d already proven himself to have a rather tenuous relationship with sobriety and thus gravity.

In the office the next day he takes a moment to call the “American Embassy” for advice, and is referred to a Shinto priest accustomed to deciphering these situations for drooling Americans. Just after he hangs up the phone it rings, and I guess the whopper-of-a-lifetime deal in terms of aluminum purchasing is on the other end. Some motorcycle concern had overextended itself, and needed the capital, and had a fleet at harbor waiting to be redirected. So my uncle and his vase were the only place for them to turn, and that meant, of course, very favorable conditions for negotiation.

The priest was at 1pm, and the aluminum laden motorcycle makers were at 3, and between them stood the bustling city of Osaka. The news of this sort of tonnage changing hands would reach home almost immediately, and that meant the trip would be over the same day. So making the deal worked for his professional interesests and against his personal one, that being, of course, his finding a way to return the vase without insulting his hosts. And squeezing in some drinking as well, of course.

************************************************

Apparently there was a directory, a manual of sorts that had been established in the era of the Marshall plan. It wasn’t an official U.S. government document of course, but it may as well have been. Anyway, my Uncle carried a copy of it in his vest pocket like a bulletproof bible, and therein lay the addresses of every American owned or themed drinking establishment in the European and Pacific theatres. So that’s how he spotted the sign for Lefty’s.

Inside there was a one-armed man smoking a cigarette with one hand and pouring drinks with the other. He was tall, had sandy blonde hair and was about to become my Uncle’s best friend.

As my Uncle ordered a fourth double-scotch his cab driver stumbled in through the doorway. He was stumbling for two reasons, the first of which being that he was carrying a large, beautiful Japanese doll encased in glass. And the second being that my Uncle took it upon himself to share a bottle he had tucked away for emergencies while the two sped across town. Tapping him on the shoulder the cabby inquired as to weather they would be staying much longer, and intoned in a delightfully respectful way that even a most understanding judge would strip him of his license for ingesting a quarter of the liquor he had drank already. An instant before the cabby hit the deck my Uncle rescued the doll from the fall, and as he did Lefty, with a mischievous grin, offered a lavish compliment upon the doll. Looking around my Uncle noticed that the place was surrounded by the things, and realized that the bartender must have acquired some secret way of coming about his collection. Suddenly remembering the last time a lavish compliment had changed hands, he was struck by a bellwether idea.

Turning to replace the bottle of Laphroaig on his top shelf the bartender smiled a bit, having realized that my Uncle was wise to his play on local custom. But as he faced the bar again he found only a 100 dollar bill fluttering to the place were my uncle had sat.

Returning to the Dirosaki residence my Uncle detected an absence of warmth, though the scene was surprisingly well-composed. Removing his shoes to join the family in the sitting room, he was a site composed of three things: a tall Westerner and two large objects tucked under each arm. Under one was a delicately wrapped and packaged family heirloom, while under the other rested the doll.

Assuming a campfire composure, my Uncle began ranting on and on about the figurine. He wondered over its finery, remarked on its lifelike complexion, expressed disbelief at its otherworldly expression and, most importantly, dwelled for portions of an hour on his own fine taste and discerning sensibility. He did not neglect to mention that it was meant as a present for his nephews, and how they cherished the exotic gifts he never failed to lavish on them. Finally, worn to the bone by this and the accumulation of six days of indescribably eccentric behavior, the father broke down and offered my Uncle a compliment on the doll. And that, of course, is how my Uncle achieved the Got’cha: the doll for the vase, an even trade.

Now, that story is not based in fact, it would be more accurately said to be based in what my Uncle Dick considered to be fact. That being equal parts of reality, whiskey, hallucinogenic drugs and whatever indigenous substances he could find growing outside his hotel. But that’s just the thing, he was vivacious enough to be allowed to define his environs. As their card was translated for us we came to realize that even the Dirosakis knew this.

There was an air about my uncle which added to his demeanor, his way of casually assuming that everyone in his vicinity was as drunk as he was, or at least should be. Imagine, he could turn something like that into an endearing quality? And of all the people I know who worked in NY, he is the one lost to the towers. That is the one day, among all days, that he chose to be where he claimed to be. I am sometimes overwhelmed by how senselessly so much was cast to those plumes.

But when I look at the demure smile on the face of that Japanese doll standing in the foyer, I know there’s more. Maybe he saved a life that day…or maybe he had something to do with the plot. But nah, if he was going to go through the trouble of toppling two buildings he’d have at least had the ingenuity to find a way to leave them standing.

Pitch

2006-03-12T14:51:00.000-08:00

In New York and far from my home, friends and family, I think I may have eaten 150 meals in a row alone. I can still hear the sound of silverware on a plate announcing my solitude as I cut and ate. The streets and traffic patterns were strange to me, like the food and almost everything else I encountered. But the language, uhg, that was the worst. Every word and sentence came to me like stirring setting cement with a twig; all my concentration poured into ancient primary school recollections of English grammar just to get a pack of cigarettes, ask directions. By the time I got home in the evening the honking horns and police sirens themselves seemed derived from another galaxy. Through my loneliness an unexpected ring of the phone or a knock on the door would tense me into sobriety.

One of the calls I got was from my landlord. She was back home and held this apartment as sort of a vacation retreat or perhaps a souvenir from earlier days. She was bright and sweet, and I think knew I enjoyed a reprieve from the language. But this time she was different. She wasn’t just sad or even frantic, but seemed to me to be most certainly crazed. I heard it in her voice right out, as if she was speaking as much to herself as to me. There was a lingering base cord as she referred to a gun. A gun! Something far less ordinary in my parts. Then she spoke of her daughter in the past tense.

The young couple was visiting the beach for a weekend and had decided on a moonlit stroll. The perpetrators descended in pack. The boyfriend was pistol-whipped and held from behind, forced to watch as his beau was savagely abused and raped for hours. Afterwards, stabbed and bleeding, they had suffered difficulty in finding help on the abandoned causeway. In these few hours the girl’s sanity was lost, and soon afterward his suicide compounded all.

Of the few interactions I’d been engaged in for weeks, months, this was what I had to take back to my humming lights, footfalls in an odd apartment shelved with strange illegible books and grotesquely bloated television and refrigerator.

As sensitive as I am I was left in a daze. I drank. The next day I went out to shop and buy paint. I remember flying through the air spinning on a horizontal axis, looking back to see the totaled car, feeling my bones gnash as I was loaded onto the stretcher.

I remember a tone of depravity which had soiled my being, passing from those words to me like a greasy handshake. I guess that day there was a dark voice also, the one that told me I was crossing safely, the one that wanted to wear white.

Desponsate

2005-12-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

My circuitous fumblings, by 1997, somehow led me to the door of Stan Riskin. As his gofer I was the assistant to the assistant producer of a television show called Win Ben Stein’s Money. It was a demanding job, heaped a’ plenty with humiliation, but I shouldered it unbegrudgingly.

A lot of my time was spent dealing with automobile or mistress crises, both of which were allotted equal priority by my superiors. Even though I promised myself I would never bear a callous L.A. regard, I did sometimes think of oil changes and overdoses as simple matters of fluids in rotation. There were flashes of Hollywood glamour and celebrity of course, but only ankles and hems from my janitorial perspective.

One morning as I passed down the hallway I heard my name screamed from one of the offices: “Ling, get your bitch ass East coast superiority complex in here". There was a couple of Network suits smirking, I’m not really sure why they used to call me Ling. Anyway, probably another dead prostitute caught in the pool filter or some such calamity.

It seemed that Stein had just found out about this guy over in China, another economics guru with a TV show, and he wanted to meet him; “You did know Stein was an Economics professor at Stamford Ling, didn’t you?” And when I intoned with a smattering of his record in service of the Nixon administration “if class is over professor LING, mind if we get back to the BOOB TUBE that pays our bills?”.

To be honest, the story was kind of touching. This fella apparently had followed a Chinese version of the route Stein had taken to TV fame. As a professor of Economics at Tsinghua University he had been remembered and cast by a former student searching to fill a droll, academic movie role. From there his memorable performance had led to a career in the entertainment industry. Stein, being a Nixon Republican, was like the rest of his ilk perpetually eager to celebrate all things Chinese and was naturally interested in all this.

Since I am Asian and we all look alike, we must all speak the same language. So I was routed from amongst the field of blond, blue eyed excrement lickers to research this guys Beijing contacts. I knew that a friend across town would have an entertainment directory from The People’s Republic, but I decided to have a bite before setting out, something that was always a bit of a challenge on my salary.

The only decent refrigerator in the building was located in the writer’s lounge, it even had an ice and water dispenser built into its door. The suits, with their usual hubris, commandeered the space inside for whatever diet food was en vogue that week. The writers, detesting both the suits and their hubris, spent the day casually and defiantly snacking from these. Swooping in, I descended upon a plump and juicy radicchio and romaine salad in a clear plastic container, and relished it knowing one of my more successful counterparts would probably be blamed for its disappearance. There was a bland, kind of earthy sourness to it which concerned me, but then I remembered that sometimes mushroom garnishes can do that.

The directory itself kind of takes on the dimensions of a steamer trunk after you’ve lugged it a few blocks, but I had such a nice visit with Yansong that the feeling carried part of the burden. As I rounded the corner beyond which my Vega was parked, I noticed a man on the opposite sidewalk flying a kite. Then suddenly I had the strangest feeling, like the mooring lines of worry and concern that seem to be the undercurrent of everyday life snapped between the dock and an ocean liner, and there was some sort of new freedom afoot. Then, just a few metres from reaching the car I was enveloped by the strong smell of bubblegum, and realized that I must have stepped in some. Looking back I could see that each step was trailed by ribbons of it, and as I walked on it got deeper and stronger and sweeter as I luxuriated in the rich pink goo. The sun sparkled on my shoulders, and the clouds and sky rung together like a wet finger grazing the rim of a fine crystal goblet. Taking a moment to drink all this in, I sat on a stoop to watch a flock of zithers in rubber tree underpants….? Then it hit me: You’re stoned out of your gourd.

In school I used to trip really well, but I guess this time they had to take me to the hospital. Anyway, when I woke up I had a shoe-box apartment in Astoria and I was commuting to the garment district to write sell sheets. It’s just miserable work, and I’ve not the slightest how I got here. But every time I come across a strange salad I take a few bites hoping it will get me back.

Conduit

2005-10-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Steps in learning to shave with a straight razor:

Lather face and stand trembling before mirror for 45 minutes

Begin shaving as per advice

Experience onset of woozy feeling at site of river of blood

Wake up on bathroom floor and repeat process

For the past two weeks I have looked like someone put a set of fake eyeballs in a package of supermarket ground beef. When I asked my pharmacist if he would recommend anything to coagulate razor knicks everyone in line behind me and behind the counter broke out in laughter. Still, on the few bare patches of visible skin I have an unusually close, clean feeling shave.

It takes a village to raise a village idiot

2005-09-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I finally got around to sitting down with The Times after a brief hiatus, but 15 minutes or so into it I was so overwhelmed by the urge to ralph in my hat that I had to put the paper down. I honestly don’t know what’s going on in this country, but I’ll tell you this: we are a bunch of thumb-twiddling morons for letting this weasel of a president walk all over every single thing we hold dear. And you know what? We deserve it. Here’s why:

If you are stupid enough to listen to a president endlessly whine about the importance of sacrificing civil liberties in the name of Homeland Security, then sit idly by while your homeland becomes awash in insecurity, you deserve bush.

If you are a woman who can not see that the glimmer in that Robert weasel’s eye comes from knowing that rusty coat hangers will be jammed into your privates, you deserve bush.

If you are a working man to dim to see that governmental coddling has corporations yanking out your pension, health insurance and Social Security and stuffing you and your putrid family values down the gaping, coal mining rectum of 19th century poverty, you deserve bush.

Don’t get me wrong though. If you’re a billionaire, I’m talkin’ $1 Billion, then you belong behind bush, ‘cause he’s all about you. But be positive you’re in that class first, ‘cause takin’ 999 Million to that party is like showin’ up for church wearin’ nothing but your incontinent grandpappy’s underwear.

But even all that is not the biggest part of the problem. What w has really managed to do is convince ordinary people that they’re also on the receiving end of the corporate bazooka that’s blasting cash up the wazoos of everyone in Greenwich and Dallas. Give a middle manager 20 or 30 grand in artificially inflated holdings and all of a sudden he thinks he’s hobnobbing. That combines so delectably with the truly nefarious part of w’s scheme: that he and his buddies really don’t give a damn about capitalism, the market or even democracy. To them those notions are just a means to an end, their way of preserving their British Landed Aristocratic Plebe Squelching in a “Democratic” society. They think they’re superior, and in order to preserve their heritage they’ve got to convince us to install them into power. And we simply can not lunge at the chance to scatter our life savings over the cobblestones of American labor to soften the footfall of their jackboot fast enough. Doesn’t all this make sense? Where do you think w would be right now if he hadn’t been born into one of the most powerful families in North America? I’m guessing something along the lines of third shift driver at Jed’s A to Z All Night Chicken BarBQ and Towing.

But hey, what do I know. I’m just a bloggin’ rabble-rouser with a two bit education and 80 proof breath. Maybe you put bush there yourself and you’re happy to see him stay. And even if I’m right, what do you have to loose? Just your home, uterus and livelihood, that’s all.

Shirts

2005-09-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Brooks Brothers Blue is the new Brown

Cringe

2005-08-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

I am an American and a Patriot of The United States of America. When disaster strikes, this is what I expect from us, the greatest country in the world:
1) The Cavalry: Army, Navy, Airforce and Marines landing on the shores of desperation to save the day and to prove to the world how decisively AMERCIANS deal with adversity.
2) A president who offers answers, not questions
3) American Uniforms wet with the tears of appreciative refugees.
Unfortunately, the people of New Orleans have suffered an absence of all that is AMERICAN.
I am afraid for them and ashamed of us.

Tufts

2005-08-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed living in Treefield Connecticut. I had a premonition that some day my time there would come to an end, so I drank it all in.

Even though the cottage I lived in was a dinky little affair, I took the time to spruce it up and make it homey and appealing. Luckily, a very good friend stuck by me while I did the painting, flooring and detail work. When it was completed I really had something for myself. Far away from the nearest home, I was well nestled in a gentle wilderness.

The guy who owned the estate I was intended to mind came only very infrequently. In essence, I had 35 gorgeously wooded acres to myself. There was of course the main house, but I liked to pretend that it wasn’t there, so I went in only to check the pipes once in a while and to do my wash.

In summer evenings the tiniest beings would fill the air with deafening sound, calling to their mates and serenading me only when I cared to listen. Just outside my door deer would chomp on cheekfulls of shrubbery, fawns by their side in the latest in spotted infant wear. Alone, I would sit nude in a lawn chair or dangling my feet poolside, listening to the padding of hooves and paws curiously noting my scent.

One of the daughters left a large pink float, and I would drift along skyward with a bottle of vodka in hand, the stars pirouetting as my whimsical craft sounded a hollow gnash scraping along the cement work.

There were multitudes of animals everywhere, and I took special pains to drive slowly to avoid hurting them. But I did see one thing on my way home from a friend’s that nauseated me to the point where I could no longer stand the thought of causing an animal to suffer, and I had to stop eating meat.

I don’t want to share the hideous jarring I felt when I came upon the scene, so I’m not going to describe it. I’m just going to make a point of reminding myself, after three years of vegetarian adherence, that each piece of meat I now consume needs to be measured against the memory of those lost treasures.

Eventually I had to leave my cottage and the animals I shared the woods with. I wonder sometimes if they miss me, or just the apples I left behind.

I think that if every New Englander could see the splendor that our glass paneled monstrosities displace, we’d live more respectful, compact lives.

Conditions

2005-07-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

I told him the truth, what I really thought, the first thing that came to mind; which I guess, in retrospect, was the absolute wrong thing to do. I mean, the walk had taken an hour, and though time had elapsed before we cracked through, our conversation had hit a very nice stride. As we made our way through the snow I noticed how his hair and clothes were neat yet somehow unkempt, and thought that that was the product of his being blind, living without a mirror. So the impression kind of followed us into the warmth of the restaurant. I would be late for class or work, can’t remember which. When I asked him the time he produced on his wrist a brail chronograph, with a flip up lid and pirouetting mechanism which described the days passing. That’s when I said “that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen”. He turned and walked away, never having seen the thing himself I guess.

That storm was almost a year before last night’s, and 900 miles South of Stowe. Now, on the lift, I could see rain had mixed with the snow. Below my clacking skis rested the remains of a mountainside turned to ice overnight. The groomers must have slaved through the darkness, running machines over the trails to crush up the shiny surface and render it gravelly corn. In the process all my moguls and landmarks were wiped from the face of the landscape, my hints and reminders into the glades long gone. That was the kind of winter I was having though, disorientation the order of the day.

It wasn’t the ice that left me reeling , I think it was the solitude and loss. It may have been a whole year we were together, yes it must have been so. I had been casual and flippant, inviting the idea of parting into our bed, letting it feast on our trust like a Tartar to veal. I saw nothing but the day beyond, glared unknowingly through both her sorrow and mine.

Jumping the lift wind blew hair in my face, took me back to the blind in Richmond. This very same guy I had seen on many a day, striding with confidence and cane through the vast city streets. Why was he fumbling? When I offered a hand I was grappled in the way blind people do, shunning the palm and clamping my limb just below pit. Before we spoke I realized the reason, saw the snow kept his cane from feeling the curb.

Dropping from the lift towards the tip of a mountain. Getting off the ride well before everyone else. Landing in a clearing alone amongst sloping forest. I skated to get away.

Après ski five hours fifteen shots and one nursing student later I return to my cot. Half asleep I shuffle down the familiar hallway to the bathroom, fall a full flight down the stairs of my new home.

It’s the precipitation. I’m just not together anymore.

Caliper

2005-06-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Oh what a glorious shimmering day, a bicycle ride, coffee with friends, a jaunt out to a Thimble Island. My plans
resplendent with mirth. ‘Threw my bike in the hallway, leapt to the apartment, then still shower dripping answered the phone.

I don’t know why, but when I’m dressing, especially in a hurry, I like company. I don’t care what; I’ll turn on some nice music, talk with a roommate across the hall or flip through a magazine. But an hour ago I turned on the TV, and that’s when it punched through the fabric of my day and gashed right through my being.

It’s funny how a body is made. A tree branch, a raccoon, a person all assembled so much like all else, with a frame supporting the gross structural weight along with the integral systems contributing to a whole. But us animate things are so different than, say, buildings. We start as tiny bits which seemingly emerge from within themselves, so that even though a rib is perfectly encased in musculature, one never had to be fit inside the other. So I guess, when you ponder, it’s no great mystery that a lurking thirst could be found inside there as well.

I don’t know why, but someone must have made the decision to broadcast the movie just then. It always leaves me dumb, from the moment I hear the music. I just went and closed the blinds, then the curtains over them, and with the lights off poured drink after drink and sat. I don’t care who wrote or directed this one, so intensely personal the thrust behind it seems. To me it has always been so much more than just a film. It somehow manages to heap my long frozen tears into its glow.

Always I realize it is me. And I think then that my arms could never open wide enough to hold such a woman. When suddenly I remember the truly sad part of it all; no such woman exists. She was a sprite. But that’s OK, ‘cause I’m only a cheap Puck.

All Stars

2005-06-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

Downtown there was a bomb scare; pantsuits and ties on the sidewalk. I took the time to mull about, let the small things hit me like raindrops. Hasidim negotiating on Blackberries, plain-clothesmen addressing one another as commander, an unusually attractive woman festooned with chestnut curls in a wheel chair. I luxuriated in hundreds of socially guarded vignettes, like I used to when I smoked pot. My steps fell easily.

Rrrrgrrrhrrgrrr

2005-06-15T05:58:00.000-07:00

There’s only a few things in this life that hurl my furor into a vortex uncontrolled by man or nature, and almost all of those things can only be done by my wife; specifically when she does them to push my buttons. She knows well and good that I am going to blow my top. That’s how women are. If you are a man, not yet married, and the notion of marriage ever emerges even in casual conversation, RUN.

There are times when there is just not enough cubic miles of atmosphere to fill my lungs so I can yell loud enough. This is especially true at the track when I’m rooting for Todd. Todd Vodka, as almost all of you have figured out, is the horse I trained, know as a friend and race. His place in history as “The Wet Track Underdog of All Time” is well deserved, and not only because of his masters affiliation. I won’t go into detail here, but he was born a quarter-hoof, a bastard just like me. Think of the poetic justice.

A few days ago, after a particularly exuberant revelry in celebration of a win, the barbarous shrew that sometimes possesses my wife started nosing around my laptop. Invading my privacy, in case I’ve neglected to clarify, is a transgression which turns me into a thing which ware wolves would cower from. So what does she turn up? Not only the fact that there is a blogger out there operating under the name of our horse, but also that this individual seems eager to boast of crimes which she has always suspected I myself am guilty of. Coincidence? She thought not.

Now this is the part of the story that split my tectonic plates: She went into my laptop and deleted 17 of my future posts from the annals of time and history; forever. Then she came to the dinner table and said “you wanna’ be a dirty old fart sitting around trumpeting the excesses of your youth, go ahead”. And she harrumphed.

Before I go any further let me just say that my wife is the woman of dreams. We met in a glorious spring and fell together easily. To this day we are, in our seventies, a couple which people stop to watch; our love is that whimsical and glorious. The day we married I wore clouds, sonnets and laughter like an expertly tailored suit in a light breeze. But right now, I’m not sure if I’m stepping out for a breath of fresh air or headed to the shed for my hatchet.

I know this: I am going to torture her ruthlessly, and she will turn her indignation against me and make me feel like a criminal for defending my inclination to enjoy life. She destroyed 17 stories that I slaved for days on end to write, and the world should penalize me with the wrath of Medusa for her doing so. That’s how women think. All of them.

Something deep within has compelled me to share thoughts of my Senior year at Chaote. Stale memories of a certain Claire Lemsoll and her fascination with the results of a procedure I underwent at an early age in accordance with my religion have come to mind. I wonder if the poor dear ever adjusted to life in Paris. You know what?, I think I’ll put this aside and call her right now. But first I have to throw a pair of gardening shears in the pond.

Crypt

2005-06-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes celebrities are edgy about their fame because they have not yet learned to deal with all the attendant attention. Others have had trying experiences with unprovoked intrusions into their personal lives. Still others, like many ordinary people, are just edgy by nature. But Patty Hearst, now there’s a woman who has all the reason in the world to be edgy. And that is exactly what was going through my brother’s mind when he took a seat on the train next to her on the way into Manhattan.

If you’re not a fan of Orson Wells or media Moguls of yore, you may not know who Patty is. She’s the billionaire heiress to a fortune amassed by the man who sculpted the news over half a century. Her Daddy’s mere pocket money built castles and shrines to himself that would weaken the knees of Egyptian kings. As the only child of the doting “Citizen Kane”, a man who immortalized himself in Xanadu, Americas most extravagant mausoleum, no earthly sum would be spared in satisfying her every whim. Yet poise and etiquette were equally imparted, so that by her early teens she was quite the debutante-to-be.

Just one year later, though, the world would gaze on another cherished symbol of Ms. Hearst’s personal brand of aristocracy: a photograph of her holding a loaded fully automatic assault weapon to the head of a bank guard as The Symbianeese Liberation Army made off with the loot. Somehow it seems that after the radical group snatched her up for ransom, she caught the Stockholm Syndrome ball and carried it deep into the end zone. It must have been a transformation which astonished even her captives.

Anyway, Dad somehow managed to extract her from all that glamour and reconditioned her brain, but of course he had to have most of her new friends assassinated in the process. And needless to say they were a pretty nasty and vindictive bunch. So yet again Patty knew she was destined to spend the rest of her life in the company of men who carry large caliber automatic weapons. Only this time they were body guards. So the guy in dark shades sitting one seat back and one over was probably fresh from the jungles of El Salvador or Peru.

Several times during the train ride my brother turned halfway towards her, placing his fingertips upon his chin in an inquisitive manner. Intermittently he would crinkle his brow and raise a finger, only to surrender his point. Patty visibly squirmed as he appeared to spend the hour summoning the notion of where he knew her from.

As the train pulled into Grand Central Station my brother just turned and asked, in the most casual of ways, “so, does that mean that Xanadu will be the last stop for you too”?

Apparently she laughed. Very hard. Because my brother never told me this story. Years later he just handed me a folded over copy of Interview where it was recounted, and said “you know this guy”.

Lid

2005-05-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

It seems like much longer, but to tell you the truth all this has only been going on for a year or so. And when people hear about it they’re always awestruck by the Hollywood notion, but it is really much more of a life style thing when it comes down to it.

Believe it or not, there truly is a flourishing community of “concisountious fugitives” experiencing fulfilling lives on the lamb. We share a network of resources which aid in obtaining identities, employment, housing and other necessities difficult to come by in our situation. The one thing we all have in common is our adamant repulsion to instruments of destruction. We are a collection of non-violent criminals, and any mention of weaponry by one of our number leads to immediate excommunication.

I am told that membership begins and ends in the same way, and having gone through the process of joining I believe it. You see, I thought I was going to get away with my crime and slip back into anonymity. That’s the dream I guess. And I had it for a few days before it all blew up in my face. The minute my name and photo hit the news I leaned with all my might on the panic button, but in those same moments saviors appeared like camouflaged natives emerging from shrubbery.

I had been on TV a few times before, and people did occasionally ask for my autograph, so you can imagine how freaked out I was. When I saw three squad cars coming down my peaceful lane I practically flung myself out the kitchen window and down the alleyway. An hour later, as I was riding the elevator up to Jenn’s apartment, the guy standing next to me casually says “ I wonder if they caught that Battlebots guy yet”, and when I turned to quickly he put out his hand in a reassuring gesture. Then he said “don’t panic, just listen to me carefully. They are waiting for you at Jennifer’s, I have a way out. I am not a cop. Do exactly as I say”. It was like some scene from “Brazil”, he used Jenn’s last name.

Now I’m a pretty average guy, which is the most radical thing I ever dreamed I’d become. I still hold my convictions, but I think I’ve done my part to further the cause. I’m about a million miles away from the walking dungeons-and-dragons pimple farm I used to be. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. I did kind of get a kick out of the slice of fame I received for my gadgetry, and it’s kind of sad to be denied claim to your best performance.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Most people who watched Battlebots on Comedy Central know me as the creator of The Excruciator, a sledge-hammer and buzz saw wielding remote control robot renowned for conquering its robot opponents on the show. But there was a few things the average viewer didn’t know: Non- builders paid me a huge wad to design and assemble their own competitors and teach them the skills necessary to operate them. And, more importantly, I secretly had Jenn hooked up to a remote in the stands, and from there she messed with other people’s controls on their own radio frequencies. In other words, I controlled the whole she-bang.

Well, I had one more secret not even Jenn knew about. Most of the money I got was used for a project I had been brewing for quite some time. I created a team of robots, 22 of them in all, constructed from steel, driven by high amperage motors and painted to look like porcelain. They each weighed 327 pounds and had hydraulic flippers on three sides camouflaged to fit into their benign appearance. They were controlled by a single cell phone frequency which had only one binary command: on. When the switch was thrown on these babies a fear inspiring growl blasted out of them as they went through a sequence of jumps with their flippers. The first jump was only a millimeter, but even that one landed and earsplitting thud as 327 pounds of metal crashed back down and the alternators roared as they geared up for the next, slightly higher jump. By the end of the first sequence, which took eight minutes, they launched themselves 11 feet in the air.

Inside my workshop they were unbearably loud, but in the tiled bathrooms of the Jacobs Javitts Center, where the Republican National Convention was being held, they were deafening. Within eight minutes of activation, plenty of time for everyone to flee, there was a 327 pound high voltage toilet bowl shaped robot bouncing off the ceiling in every bathroom at the convention. If you look carefully at the tapes of news coverage of the second night of the convention around 9:37 pm, you’ll see every TV correspondent put a finger to his ear-piece, pause while listening intently, then give the camera a deer-in-the-headlights glare as his tiny brain tries to comprehend what he just heard.

Anyway, that’s the romantic version of all I did to earn my place here. But to tell you the truth, for me the most remarkable fact is this: One can risk life and liberty to convey an important message and proclaim democracy triumphant. But it is folly to underestimate the extent to which every news outlet is controlled by large, conservative corporate entities, and to overlook the coordination they employ in sanctioning “worthy” events. This is the ultra-right in its vast and scariest form, summoning all available might against an army of toilets. Unfortunately though, even the censorship of it all was known only to me.

Do yourself a favor and rent the original TODAY

2005-05-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

They are making a movie out of the historic film, and frankly I think they should be neutored for doing so. If you want to see the most inspirational documentary ever made, make a point of sitting down with "Dog Town and Z boys" before the dirtbags in Hollywood suck the magic out of the era.
P.S. I'm looking around for a good deal on a board with thrusters and medium rocker, and a stick with street wheels.

“Dead By Wednesday”

2005-04-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

The other day while driving the turnpike I noticed a billboard which left me reeling in contemplation. I reflected on my neighborhood, the people I’ve been blessed to know and the place I’ve come to be. For the most part I felt myself whirling towards a conclusion, that joy comes from the summation of smaller delights, is composed in part from the pleasure of routine.

Father Bernard came to mind, a man whom I’ve met only days ago but through who’s work I’ve known almost since arriving here. I thought of bumping into an impromptu gathering of stoop side neighbors on my way back from an interview, and how, across a conversation not to be interrupted, one of the upstairs rugby players gave me an inquisitive nod, let me know he was anticipating my news. I realized how the priest’s garden, which I had frequently walked far out of my way to traverse, was an expression, a cheer to his life, and also a subtle nod.

Yesterday evening, in my neighborhood less than a mile from the sign, an entire city park leapt with Japanese cherry blossoms. Pinkly tinged downy ivory wafting to the sky, a heavenly guild of sweetness falling into me. Under a canopy of this I felt the cascading beauty bring me to tears, enjoyed the mysterious sorrow of weeping.

These repercussions are realer than mortar-fire, louder than youth. The tectonic weight of their message lands home a volume greater than earlier rhythms. They soften molding and unsharable desperations hollering to come across. And they do, in a way, orchestrate a lingering base cord of empathy as the words follow me into dream.

I remembered my teens, my years spent carving unnoticed words into the flesh of my immortality, screaming at mammoth unhearing ears. And I felt what the kid must have when he climbed the scaffolding, probably in the middle of the night, 40 or 50 feet closer to the stars, hatefully gripping the can as he spray-painted the words.

Murano Butterfly

2005-04-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

They make you wait, they always do; in their offices, on the phone or having lunch they like to feel powerful, to nonchalantly toss off an apology and excuse, thank you for your patience now let’s get down to business. I don’t mind it at all anymore. I expect it and let them do so. But it is interesting to find that even in this new industry the game still plays out the same old way. Nonetheless, while I was sitting in the waiting room I noticed that my fingernails and cuticles were deeply stained with grease.

A lot of times, when you walk into a motorcycle shop, you’ll see row after row of very fast Japanese bikes with aggressive looking lines and brightly colored paint-job hair do’s. They are nervous racehorses at the gate waiting for you to twist their throttle so they can pounce into tunnel-vision high performance action. All the brands are, for the most part, identical, with minuscule variations in suspension, fuel delivery or styling from one to the other. And then as you walk through the shop, if it is a good shop, there stands in the back a steed. These are the Italian motorcycles, Bimoto and Ducati. They stand in back because they are dear to the shop, and also to a prospective owner.

While I sat in the waiting room I reviewed the arduous task of adjusting the valves on my new friends Ducati, and as I did so I saw the receptionist interpreting my look of pain and frustration as impatience.

The valves on a ducati are an excellent example of just how bizerk Italians are about grace and performance; you see, on any other gasoline engine in the world the valves are driven by a lobe which pushes one down into the cylinder head, then a spring pushes it back up. When the spring returns the valve to its seat there is a small, I’m talkin’ miniscule immeasurable, bounce. Well, for the Italians that’s not good enough. They’ve go the lobe to open the valve, but then they have an entirely separate and maniacally elaborate scheme to both close the valve AND hold it exactly in place. And this is just one aspect of their engine. So one goes about adjusting the delicate valves betwixt and befuddled by a menagerie of parts, and they must be brought into perfect adjustment. But every time you adjust one, the others change their orientation, so back you go. And there are eight of them. This brand of fanaticism is present in every detail of the design of a Ducati. They are beautiful creatures and are the handiwork of dedicated craftsmen devoted to the specie's embodiment.

The pone on the secretary rang, and I was escorted into a comfortable office. “Come in have a seat, so sorry, Cynthia get this man a latté, business, you know how it is, so and so tells me you can write, dialogue even. I don’t see any credentials here, where ‘ya been…?” He takes me for the whole ride. I produce some samples and he demonstrates his familiarity with them, he’s done some research and he’s not afraid to compromise himself by letting me know so. We talk, about work and also money. We take it slow at first.

Sometimes, when I first dismount a Japanese motorcycle, I tremble. They are savage machines eager to hurl you faster than you dare. A touch of your right hand will unleash gargantuan power in the heaviest of turns, sending the thing right out from under you. Their brakes are so efficient that they can flip the bike at almost any speed. An Italian motorcycle, by comparison and otherwise, delivers performance; which is to say that it doesn’t just dump it on the rider. It thrills you with sumptuous power and narrates twisty turny roads. On the freeway at well over a buck and a half it’s nothing more than a pet hummingbird in your pocket.

It’s not a wonder that most people don’t even know about these motorcycles, even if they are riders. They are two or three times more expensive than their Japanese counterparts, and when they sit at idle their complex mechanizations make them sound like a tin box of rocks rolling downhill. But that’s not really it; the reason they sit at the back of the shop is because most people, almost everyone, simply is not capable of discerning the difference.

So yes, since it seems to be important to you I will admit that though the business card said otherwise, the man you met at 2:30 was Todd Vodka. My spelling is bad, my grammar is worse, and my punctuation is horrific. But I am hard-core in the market for a brand new Ducati 999. Are you?

Revolutions

2005-04-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Today there was spring, glorious heat and jubilation. I felt it in my veins like a wolf waking to the setting sun. I felt love and passion, but even more so today I felt daring. In the dewy morning air I tossed open my garage door and flung the cover from my motorcycle. I knew budding crocuses had reached it too as I mounted and kicked to hear it start up first try after a long, cold winter. As it warmed to life I crouched by the door to have a smoke, gazing as listless breezes experimented with newly opened windows and portals.

Then, when the revs lowered to operating idle, I whole-shotted out of the damp garage, power-slided in the street, then twisted my right hand to unleash the wind. Fuck the garage door.

After straightening turns at the reservoir for an hour I arrived at Albert’s long driveway. Etiquette be gone, I jammed my thumb on the horn button to see him dashing through the door, wiggling his jacket on with one arm while finishing his breakfast from the other. I smiled as his garage door was flung in my own fashion, and backed my SR500e onto its center stand. With both bikes aspirating we could hardly hear his wife at all.

Moments later all our senses were immersed in the season, saturated in speed and liberation like dreaming cheetahs after forbidden gazelles. Deep into forests then towns, blowing through traffic, sometimes stretching our legs on The Merrit.

I knew that in the quiet of that evening I would, as always, promise to never risk myself like that again. But the visceral joy-ride of it all, pulling into Café 101 to see your buddy sharing the smile, slamming your hand into his, regaling strangers with the end of winter you discovered upon the land. Those, also, are seasons; inside myself.

Things Must Be Done

2005-01-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

At the end of this street and overlooked by my bedroom window there is a gas station which closed about five years ago. The two brothers who own it, Sal and Al, are among the most cheerful and likable people I’ve met in my life. If you walk over to their garage they greet you with warmth, and look deeply into your eyes.

Because a large factory down the street went out of business there are no longer many people who need gas to commute to the area. But long ago Sal and Al’s place thrived, and they speak with charmed enthusiasm of the days when the neighborhood bustled with shops and strollers. They are not bitter, there is youthfulness in the way they describe the metamorphosis. I have never once heard them bemoan the changing times.

This is a lazy day insulated by a foot and a half of snow. The low sunlight from my window lofts a paisley curl on the far wall, heat and comfort visibly rising from the baseboard register . As I sit in my wool upholstered chair reading Willa Cather, the sounds of Sal and Al’s plow truck nestle into my blanket. Back and forth the little red Willy’s Jeep goes with its yellow plow. Wordlessly shoulder to shoulder, Al holds the coffee while Sal drives.

In 45 minutes there will not be a flake of snow on their lot. I know this from experience. Also I know that there will be no other vehicles there for quite a long time: or maybe someone will make a U-turn if they’ve passed my street in error. None the less the brothers come here from their nearby suburb every morning at 8:30 sharp. They happily fill children’s bicycle tires with air, read the paper in their Oldsmobile, walk down to visit the elderly. They are addressed by those living here as men vigorously employed.

Besides Mrs. Cather and a formidable role in the demise of two Vegan corn-dogs, I’ve accomplished otherwise naught. My thoughts are sluggish from wee hours spent drunkenly wading through snowdrifts from bar to bar: the two rugby players upstairs joining me as I dove to catch moving car bumpers for a free ride. I insulted a good friend, and drank the median annual income of a household in Central America. This evening when I lay to rest the dishes will do so also, in the sink then as they are now.

It’s dark enough now for sparks to fly from the plow, and I wave to the men behind my Tungsten-yellow window. Tomorrow, just like every other Monday morning, they will visit the barber around the corner.

So for me, the lessons have always been slow to impart themselves. But just now I think I learned this: There is no inherent meaning in anything except that which we place there.

Flexing Charlie Brown Muscles

2005-01-13T17:20:00.000-08:00

When I first moved into this small city I was the only one who didn’t know everyone. No matter where I went people where greeting one another, exclaiming surprise and proclaiming their friendship with joy and merriment. In the supermarket people hugged, at the Post Office smiles and news, getting a slice or picking up toothpaste reunions, rendezvous and surprises.

And black people, don’t even get me started on that. I was certain there was some kind of secret joyous conspiracy where every person of color would laugh, reunite or exchange a handshake simultaneously in each and every corner of the berg for hours on end every day. It seemed that I never saw a black person walk a straight line for the necessity of having to veer to this side for an embrace, that for a handshake, over there for a friendly toss of the index finger in acknowledgement.

I had no idea how anything was getting done. By the time one opened his eyes from the euphoria of recollection, there was another waiting just across the isle. And there I stood. Just me. Not a soul did I know. I mean, there was my room mate, a nice Canadian fella with impeccable manners, but should I try to compensate for all this joviality I seemed to be missing out on by overenthusiastically welcoming him home, he had to call his parents just to regain his bearings.

Last night and many, many months later I ate with neighbors. And there I found a soul quenching exchange filled with earnestness, good food and challenging insight. Words like friendship and camaraderie are but scanty threads of ideas which don’t even weave into appropriate description. When I came home another friend had left a message inquiring as to whether I’d be interested in watching a movie he rented, and as I walked down the street towards his house my good friend and Landlord Larry (a black guy) pulled over to share a few ideas.

It took a long time to sink in, but it happened before I knocked on Will’s door:

I’m a resident now. I Belong.

The Eye

2004-12-22T19:45:00.000-08:00

I have always been a very strong swimmer. I felt comfortable in water well over my head from the time I first found myself afloat, and the story goes that my parents, upon taking me to the beach and having turned their attention to set down a blanket, witnessed me sprinting at full gate towards the waves.

By contrast, I’ve only been confident as a writer since I grasped how to spell, many years after learning to speak and then read. I did always feel comfortable writing though, despite the fact that I was discouraged to do so by many around me. I am the product of a turbulent family life, my time having been spent battening hatches and waiting out torrents.

Once, while in my teens and surfing a pretty large storm, I got myself into a bit of a predicament which required me to take an enormous leap of faith contrary to instinct. I was looking backwards towards the incoming sets while straddling a large board that held me high in the water, and as I realized that I was behind the break I turned to discover that the wind was blowing me off-shore. Quickly. As the gale intensified I saw my familiar landmarks diminish, and knew surfing had ceased for the day and the work of survival was in order.

From where I sat in the water I knew and felt two divergent paths before me: One was to remain with the board and perceived safety and drift far out to sea. The other was to unstrap the leash and swim. The moment I stripped the Velcro from my ankle the decision was iron: the wind took the board and flipped it into the horizon. I turned and faced a strong perpendicular undercurrent for about 45 minutes, side stroking for bearing then crawling hard-fought sets at a time. When I reached the break I body surfed one in, and lay frozen onshore whittling the experience into a manageable form.

So I found myself on protected terrain yet far from home, awash in a storm though gathered against it. As once again I am there today, having cut all ties to my former employ, and commencing a career solely as a writer. From this day forward all roofs and morsels allotted by exchange to this being will be earned by craft.

Spider Attack

2004-12-08T05:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was ecstatic to learn that I had an unexpected day to myself. Immediately I rose, showered and gathered my things in order to enjoy a splendid day out and about. Before leaving the house I stepped into the kitchen to wrap and store a bunt cake I had nibbled on the previous evening, when I noticed a small spider web on the ceiling in the corner of the room. I took a chair from the kitchen table and, stepping from it to the counter made my way past the sink towards the web. Unfortunately my dish rack was in the way, so I had to hold on to the windowsill over the sink with my left hand as I stretched with my right towards the web. Just about when I had reached the corner I felt my balance askew, and taking a quick step I found the weight of my body forcing my large and second toe deep into the toaster. With a shout I whipped the device around, feebly trying to use the edge of the counter to dislodge my digits from the device. In this process the switch somehow became activated.

Now, in a fit of urgency, I attempted to stand precariously on one foot while leaning over to fling the toaster from the other, but as I did so the windowpane I was leaning on gave way and I had to twist in mid air to avoid thumping my jugular on the shattered edge. That jerking motion, of course, jarred the sinks faucet lever which sent water directly into the toaster’s other toast-slice receptacle. The toaster’s 500 amps jerked my body in a backwards-arching motion, sending me clear through the window and hurtling through the crisp fall air.

As I landed on the down-stairs neighbor’s patio furniture the sound frightened her cat, who became entangled in the toaster cord which had snapped off at the socket as I plummeted. The more it struggled to free itself the more it became entwined, and soon I found myself being clawed and bitten by the poor confused animal. While simultaneously extracting my mangled extremities from the patio furniture and attempting to pry Snickers from my face I noticed the neighbor stepping outside her door with a broom in one hand and the phone in the other.

The officer she summoned had very little trouble shackling me, as I had already turned face down to ward off the broom-handle blows to my midsection, and to tell you the truth I felt a rush of relief as he tossed me headfirst into the back of his squadcar. Snickers though, quite to my dismay, was hot on my heels, and the 185 pound German Police dog in the seat with me was fleet in allowing instinct to take precedence.

Handcuffed, I found my lap to be the venue for a life and death struggle between three species. Snouts, claws and teeth raged as the officer frantically attempted to open the door while the scene became invisible behind steamed windows. Before I passed into unconsciousness the car door was opened, and I noticed five other emergency vehicles attending the incident.

At the insistence of my neighbors I will be moving from my apartment shortly, but before I do so I will tell you this: As I tossed my head back to ingest my pain medication in the kitchen this morning I noticed that there are now two spider webs.

Fodder

2004-11-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Over 200 years before I was born, in the town I grew up in, there rested in a crude steeple the church bell residents had cast from sacrificed and worn farming implements. It was rung to keep the time, to remind townspeople of their obligation to God, and to summon them, at a minutes notice, to defend their shoreline and their country from foreign invaders.

The invaders did come as expected. They where fortified with modern artillery and misplaced self-righteousness. They came knowing that they would pour their authority and might throughout the land. But all they did was spill their blood into its soil. These strangers did not understand that the furnaces which cast American church bells where fed by flames of dignity and innovation.

The people of my town responded when the bell was rung, and gather they did into small bands. They fortified their strongholds with the presence of their convictions and stood against these intruders with a kind and intensity of warfare unknown to the world. Though this was only the beginning, these brave downtrodden peasants triumphed over the injustice of foreign invaders who believed that their moral convictions where superior to the very citizens of the town.

The blood of those Minutemen pumps through my veins, and my very fiber will always stand to ensure that the bell of truth rings loud and clear. I am the triumphant invaded, whose ships never sail to foreign shores unprovoked.

Coming In Number One

2004-10-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

Halloween is a holiday which I have always enjoyed. To celebrate something so natural yet converse to our Victorian ethos is too lovely to have ever escaped my imagination. When I was a kid my brother and I eagerly turned calendar pages with savage anticipation, planning candy gathering routes and remarkable costumes. But as I grew older I realized the whole thing had just become an excuse for slightly overweight college girls to don French maid outfits, a Hallmark justification for inebriated fornication, -not that there’s anything wrong with that. So over the years I kind of lost interest in dressing up. But of course there have been exceptions to that, and I’d like to tell you about one of them.

This one particular fall I had commandeered my parent’s garage for projects I had no space of my own for. Inside there was already a blizzard of sculpting media, SR500E parts and whiskey bottles when I set out to make a costume I’d been intending to create for a few years. I cleared out a corner and set to work with a chicken wire frame, reams of old newspaper, flour, water, Elmer’s glue and a case of spraypaint. I worked at least a few hours every night, asking my friend Alex for help with color, and a few others their structural advice. I did all the sewing myself, always having secretly enjoyed that. One evening, about halfway through the project, my father came into the garage after having arrived home from work, and said to me these exact words: “Todd, your mother and I think you’re building something quite obscene here in our garage”. The costume was, after all, a bit ambiguous: a 6 1/2 foot tall paper machet penis with huge felt testicles dragging behind it and 500 yards of black nylon pubic hair at its base. I snickered at the thought of them sneaking around in there together in my absence, commenting in whispers on my impending institutionalization.

At that point I think my mother was driving a silver SEL to which I had attached a roof rack because I was obsessed with this one mogul field at Stowe, knowing full well that nothing I was driving would even come close to making it up to Vermont. On Halloween night around 11pm I set out in that very car to attend a party which my friend Sylvie was throwing, convinced, as well I should have been, that it was going to be dull and tortuous. The 6 1/2 foot tall paper machet penis, though, remained firmly attached to the roof of the automobile, with the testicles hanging over the back and resting on the trunk. Having arrived at the party, if asked about a costume, an inquirer was told that I was having a bit of trouble summoning enthusiasm for the holiday and quickly found the conversation redirected to either the blonde in the corner or money I really didn’t need to borrow. A few hours later everyone set out to a huge bar a few towns over.

Driving down the Boston Post Road that night I had to keep all the windows rolled down, and not only because I was more than just a bit plastered. At every red light and sometimes from the sidewalk people had something to say, and I wanted to hear their reaction to my handiwork. I think part of me wanted to get a DUI just to read how the citydesk at the local paper would handle the police report. It didn’t happen though, and by the time I arrived in the bar’s parking lot I was quite schnokered enough to crawl inside the costume and go about things just as naturally as one in another costume might. The music did kind of stop when I walked in though.

The crowd was in quantity of the flesh-pressing sort, so the 6 1/2 foot tall paper machet penis did kind of get lost in the sea of it. At fist, as I “shafted” up to the bar, I ordered drinks through the hole I’d cut out for my face, but that soon grew tiresome and I discovered an alcove eager to serve as a repository for my unit. And low and behold, on the way back from there who do I discover but the blonde from the party, a numbingly nebulous newbie nanny of the French variety, thoroughly my favorite kind. And I will dare to say that we quickly became well on our way towards a more intimate knowledge of one another, a process which left me fully absentminded of my costume. Then a guy with a microphone draws everyone’s attention towards the stage.

As this fella is announcing a Halloween costume contest I fall back to the work at hand, noticing nonetheless that people are cheering as competitors climb the steps to display their adornments. A few minutes go by, and then I hear these words on the P.A.: If you are a 6 1/2 foot tall paper machet penis, get your ass on up here. Reluctantly I blunder into the costume and ram my way through the crowd and up to the stage. About eight or nine of us go through the rigmarole and fanfare of stepping forward and pirouetting to display our wares, one rather shapely delight catching my attention through the peep hole. And then there’s a drum roll and fourth and then third place is announced, then second, and I’m getting ready to return to the blond when TA DA, I am anointed first place winner and someone hands a hundred dollar bill through the peep hole. It was just then that I did what any rational person in my position would do. I reached up inside the costume and squeezed empty the liter sports bottle of milk attached to the end of it. I can’t remember if the crowd was roaring, but I do remember the subtlety was not lost on the blonde.

BB

2004-10-20T01:06:00.000-07:00

Is part of understanding things understanding that I’ll never understand things?

Did my window’s glaze fail to reflect the love whose love I love to see?

Are the lasting things the last things I’ll ever be?

My Old Dog Really Dug The King

2004-10-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

My friend Stan and I have a sense of adventure, and we’re always up for any sort of activity or behavior that stands out from ordinary experience. Loud arguments, crunchy hippie rhetoric, whacked out conspiracy theories, large-breasted women with damaged emotional mechanisms, we’d soak it all in. Especially when drinking. But we used to sit down and talk too, about our lives and the paths they where taking, the people we knew and worked with, the way we felt about the world we live in.

So this one night seemed to be shaping up like the latter: a quiet night in a nicely appointed Spanish café drinking rioja and munching topas. We where going over some things Dan’s future wife had mentioned to him, trying to figure out exactly what she meant. Just about in the middle of it, this completely screwed down bleary eyed drunken coke freak turns to us and blazes into this wild tale about a dog he found in his neighborhood. He didn’t bother waiting for some kind of indication that we where engaged in the story, he just launched into it. Needless to say, Stan and I where riveted.

Before I recount it for you, I want to preface the story with a little annotation, one which you may interpret as advice if you so desire. Stan and I where sitting in what we like to refer to as The Bleachers. In every bar, and believe me, I’ve been in a few, there is the part of its construction that runs the length of it, and then, at one end, there is the small jaunt that completes its circuit back to the wall forming the bottom part ot the “L” shape. This end part, I have found, is invariably where the weird and wild hang. One can either participate or, as we where doing on this particular evening, spectate from the other side of the 90 degree bend. From there we heard the story just as I will recount it below:

“so that was the first time that animal got me kicked out of an apartment, after only three weeks!!! Three weeks. I just had a weakness for the guy though, abandoned, roughed up, tough as shit. He reminded me of me. Anyway, the second time I decided to keep him in the house, out of trouble. I come home from work and there he is, sitting in the driveway with his mouth open and that ham of a tongue dripping, smiling and waggin’ his tail all happy to see me. He lunged right through the living room bay window and there was glass and splinters all over the shrubs and yard. Like that scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. That landlord just left the news on my answering machine. I fixed the window before we left though.

So I’m sitting in my truck on the way to the new place trying to explain to the dog that we’ve got to behave or they’re going to banish us to an Indian reservation or something, and he’s just busy trying to bite his way through the window or nuzzling his bloody 50 pound muzzle into my face the whole time. So we get there and this time I got a place in a slightly crappier neighborhood with a slightly bigger lawn. And the first thing I did was pick and shovel out a five foot deep hole that I set rebar, cement and a five inch steel pipe into. And this time when I went to work bubba is chained well and good there for the day.

And hell yeah, he’s there when I get home too! Believe that? Of course, there’s a four inch perfect circle worn down into the ground where he dug and strutted around as far as the leash’d let him go. The whole damn area worn down about four inches just like that. And every day when I get home it’s deeper and deeper, until one day I come home and there that dern dog is wagin’ his tail in the driveway with some ratty old pelt in his mouth, dragging behind him on the chain ALL THE CEMENT AND STEEL I’D LAID. Then the screamin’ starts.

The next-door neighbor is out on her stoop wailing away, “my rabbit is gone, Elvis is gone”. The dog and I look at each other then make a bee-line for the door with the cement monstrosity bouncing right behind us, and when we get inside I unhook the leash and he drops that ragged fleece down on the carpet and looks with his grimy, drool encrusted smile all innocent at me. Well, I ain’t no brain surgeon, but I know sure as shit I’m lookin’ at Elvis. It’s not like I didn’t see his hutch right there in the backyard next door.

2 O’clock in the morning I get up, take the mangled, bloodied filthy remains of Elvis and plop him in the sink, wash him with soap and water real good, get him all cleaned up good, then take the hair dryer and fluff him nice all around, undercarriage, high-beams, the works. Then I sneak over next door and place him back in his hutch all curled in the corner. ‘Missed home and went back in ‘is hutch, then dead of natural causes, right?

The screaming from next door that morning was un-fucking believable. Like someone lit the old bitty on fire or something. I mean, I was expecting a reaction, but she sounded completely unhinged. I go running out in my drawers and her eyes come at me wide as moon pies, then she just falls dead weight into my arms. “Elvis, Elvis, Elvis” and she’s shakin’ and going on. So I pretend to survey the situation and then say “he has passed on, I’ll bet he had a good life though” I mean, what the F am I goin’ ta say, right? She goes on and on and on and on and on with me trying to think of every stupid thing I’ve ever heard on TV to console her.

And then she turns to me and says “you don’t understand Mister, Elvis died two days ago, I buried him myself in the yard”.

Interspersed throughout where a few shots of Mescal, but even then Stan and I wouldn’t have put a dime on any two words of that story being true. The funny thing was that he just turned to his drink when he was done. He kind of looked like the kind of guy who may have been a plumber or carpenter five or six years ago, but did really well for himself soon afterwards. He may have made millions selling condos in the Taj Majal, or he could have just been really bummed that his dog had died that day.

cauliflower

2004-09-12T23:35:00.000-07:00

I'm much, much better now, honestly, but when I was in Jr. High School my dick was the boss. Everything was prioritized according to the strict demands and arbitrary intensity of its hunger. I had absolutely no qualms about going to outlandish measures to ensure that I would spend a semester sitting one seat behind and one row over from Jill Tallison, just so I could stare at her ass while people tried feverishly to thump the importance of geometry into my insolent brain. I could tear through a magazine with the speed and precision of a samurai swordsman, extracting even the tiniest bits of delectable female flesh, and the minute I found myself in a dark room, hidden by foliage or obscured by even moderate cloud cover I was workin' the schminky.

Somehow, someone got the idea into their head to take my bizerk obsessions and frustrations and channel them into the bidding of the wrestling team. I immediately saw the wisdom in this wholesome suggestion as soon as my friend informed me that all practices took place simultaneously with the girls gymnastics team. If you lit my eyelashes on fire I wouldn't have turned away from the uneven bars, the floor exercises, THE VAULT............and then some doofus is smooshing my face into the mat.

So I paid attention, learned some moves, and found myself enjoying the sport some (with an Olympic swimming pool's worth of testosterone pulsing through your veines, those muscles tend to develop pretty quickly.) Don't get me wrong, I sucked pretty bad.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about this girl that I was far more infatuated with than almost all the others. She was blond and had a body that made denim and cotton perform in a way that sent train-whistles screaming through my consciousness. PLUS she had a locker right next to mine. PLUUUUS she knew that when she "inadvertently" brushed against me I was left in a tongue wagging stupor for the rest of the day. And she liked that.

So the next thing I know I'm dressed in this ridiculous sing-let getting waved into a match. There's a whistle, then the usual wrong kind of grunting and sweatiness, when something inside me says "Todd, you can take this MF". He reached back when he really shouldn't of, and just as he did I got him by the neck and a leg and got his back on the mat. I'm puttin' all I have into holding him down, and when I turn a bit, there's Marylyn (you know, the one with the locker) in the second row. So I just burn and jam this guy down, and it's over. That's that.

The next day I duck through a utility door to sneak a smoke and there she is. (we both came from messed up families, and we're always the first ones to start smoking) She just turns those bright greens on me and says "you won yesterday, didn't you?" And I beamed and said yes as she went in. I have got to tell you, I was walking on air just to think that she knew and remembered, I felt like the world tuned under my step.

So I went back to study-hall and sat with my friends, and they started giving me crap about smoking as usual, so I say SHUT UP SHUT UP, let me tell you what just happened. And I did and they just loose it laughing. It seemed to be contagious because everyone else started dong so.

Then Rob Loyt goes "Man, right before you pinned that Stuart guy you let one rip that rattled the windows."

My embarrassment became a dirigible enveloping the classroom, all hope for happiness shattered. For only a second though, because there was this brunette sitting in front of me, and........

YMCA

2004-09-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

When my brother and I were little our family would often take trips into the city. Beforehand, though, we would always drop by to visit my father's friend in the Lower West Side. As we rolled through the streets at around 9am, about the hour that the neighborhood's residents are usually departing from local bars, we would see some extremely wild stuff going on. The place was swarming with leather queens, dominitrixi, transvestites and euphoric, virtually nude homosexuals snapping their fingers, yelling across the streets and expressing their affability in no uncertain terms.

Every time we got off the West Side Drive at that exit my mother would quietly hit my dad's leg in retribution for taking the short-cut. In the beginning my brother and I just sat in the back seat slack-jawed. But we caught on pretty soon, and began looking forward to the cast of characters. We wanted to make base-ball style trading cards, there where even a few that we came to see every weekend.

But the biggest kick we got out of the whole scenario was torturing my parents with their Victorian sensibilities. We would ask "Mom, why is that man wearing leather pants without a behind"?, or "if they are trying to kiss, why is one facing the wrong way"? All in very innocent tones.

Once my brother pointed out this monstrous 7 foot tall drag queen and asked "Mom, why is that man wearing make-up and women's clothes", and my mother, in her typical caustic way, just explained "it's laundry day, he had to borrow something to wear".

For some odd reason they found it necessary to take us to a show afterwards. Go figure.

Whirling

2004-09-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

What if every single word you needed to hear where to be spoken to you
All the answers and mysteries solved
That harping lesson you yearn for imparted

Though, each word was to be separated by this:
four hours of droning, the kind you'll hear if you sit there in front of your monitor and listen to the whirling machine
Four hours between each word
And a busy week ahead of you
With bills and work and family and worries

And only four or five arbitrary hours of droning between each word

Would you sit and listen?

Handcuffed to a Chicken

2004-08-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

Intentionally inflicted violence causes a very special kind of sorrow in its victim. There is a pain beyond the physical which leaves you alone and remote. Everything must be internalized. You are reduced to a condition which will always defy explanation and understanding. No matter how far you reach, there will never be another hand to grasp.

I grabbed that along with my lunch-box on my way to school every morning. So I was happy when a group of boys showed some interest in me, and only thrilled to find myself spending early grade school with them. I was struck by how easily they comported themselves, and also afraid of the way they seemed to ignore feelings I think important. But it was fun, very fun to run with some guys, and it was exciting to see how teachers would exchange smiling glances for small infractions. Gathering whirlwinds of self-confidence we where.

One crisp fall day we jostled our way to a lower field during recess. Acorns crunched under foot in air mighty with leafy wetness. I was smiling at something, and then there was this kid. Someone among us had decided that he stood in opposition. I don't remember any significant words being exchanged, but there was suddenly pushing. Memories of playground loneliness fresh in my mind, I enjoyed being a member of this unified force. As the kid backed off a bit one of us taunted him: he evoked the notion that the kid was very different from us, and I saw how the kid's face changed.

I had spoken to this kid several times before joining my new pack. He was introspective and bright, and we had shared opinions in class. When I found a tick on my leg in gym class once, he must have sensed my apprehension when he said "I know, you don't think of it happening to you. But it's just a bug, pinch it off ". I liked him.

So now things have escalated, and pushes progressed to headlocks. Scuffling, red faced determination bearing down. Then spit and blood spatters. The kid was down face up, a knee planted on his chest, and three blows landed crosswise on his cheek. It was just then that his eyes met mine, and I saw in them a yearning to understand, a plea for intervention, a knowledge of a heck of a lot more than I was willing to admit to him or anyone else. All in far less a space of time than it takes to blink an eyelash.

But the most horrific thing, the barbarity of the scene was this: I stood there like a statue as someone just like me poured their soul out. Then a teacher blew her whistle and it was over in a a flash.

Soon afterward the pack and I drifted apart, and I could never become friends with the kid. At the end of that year the school we attended closed for ever, and we all went to others in our respective neighborhoods. Just like the playground whistle, it was over.

If only there was some forebearing. I didn't know that the kid's pleas would issue into my dreams for the rest of my life. That hardly a month would go by when I wouldn't find use for the advise he gave me in gym class. That forever afterwards my arms would hang at my side like meat in a butcher shop.

Swimming With Anvils

2004-08-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

I dread people.
I abhor their foibles
I feel forced to labor under their misconceptions of me
I count seconds while they're talking
I am repelled by their aspirations

Being popular or the life of the party would be a sentence unendurable

There is no measure by which I can express my preference for a wagging dog's tail over the embrace of a stranger

People frequently interrupt my happiest moments to observe that I'm sulking

Chipper hosteses who take me by the hand to "do the rounds" make me feel like Frankenstein in a tuxedo

Oh, and if I have to listen to one more story about your trip to Bolivia with an empty drink in my hand I'm going to eat five pounds of baking soda and take a vinigar enema.

Hooks

2004-08-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

A couple a' people know that among tangible things, there are few that I would rather recieve than a Costa Rican Bahia. I enjoy them to no end. Today, about three weeks after my 74th birthday, I sit on the porch and waft away my last one of these, drinking in the first kiss of fall's breeze. It was on a night just like this, not to many years ago, that Davie came around to asking me about the scar on his leg.

I grew up on The Outer Banks, the luckiest kid alive. I meandered through fishnets, tramped through swamps and aggoged at seafaring tales bellowed in croaking voices. Aeroplanes, shooting stars and baseballs raced through my summer skies, abandoned cottages with creaking boards ready made fortresses replete with lizards and ducklings. Fishing rods just naturally found their way into my hand, and I did just about anything I could to get them bent into a circle.

Since then I have had children, and they in turn have done so as well. When Davie was born to my daughter many things had changed on The Banks, a real hospital where the Coast Guard Cutter Station emergency medical used to stand. When they brought him home about a mile and a half West of here and the surf, I drove over to meet him and visit my kids. Their house is roomy and comfortable, and I always go to the bathroom and fridge first thing. Afterward I stepped over to the bassinet, and Davie and I struck it up right there and then.

As he grew, Davey's forays into scaliness became legendary. He spent his summers with us by the sea. It seemed natural to lend him my rods, and I felt only joy when they bestowed upon him their fortune. My heavy 10 weight fly rod became symphonic in his hands, casting arias into the spray above the ocean. He would never allow it, but I will tell you now that I learned many a thing from watching that young man.

A while back we where invited for a day, on a boat quite nicely appointed. I play pinochle with its Captain, had drank many a time with the crew. My lovely wife baked bread and made sandwiches of land dwelling animals for good luck. The morning was clear and full of promise as we pushed off into the saltiness. Clearing the harbor all settled back for a long ride to the Gulf Stream.

By noon we had each released seven or eight Bonita, casting mackerel patterns on sinking weight-forward line. After lunch, lazy from roast beef and birch beer, we took turns at the stern, watching the fish chase our flies and doing all we could to keep them from lunges. Of course, Davie was the first to see the birds. They where swarming about two miles off our starboard, thick in the air. As we battened our gear the boat lurched into motion.

Underneath the flock was an enormous knot of baitfish. Panicked, they rained on the surface as larger fish attacked from underneath. Poised with one leg over the transom, my grandson was intent on something unseen. Again and again he tossed loops into the air, all the while searching a slightly different direction. Then wwsssshhh, the cast. The fly sank, Davey's eyes electric, slow strip, strip, then wham, the tip of his pole heaved downwards trembling. An expert palm slowing the reel as line shot out to the fish. Far in the distance we saw something that struck us dumb: One of the biggest Wahoo I've seen or heard of dancing on his tail, the monofilament leader a glimmering ray shooting towards us. And all this silhouetted against the deepest ink black squall bearing down fast as fury.

This was a good sized boat, of a design famous for handling the weather. But our fish and this strom where of divergent forces much greater. Every time Davie reeled in, the fish would take line back again. The water become choppier. No one would dare let this one go. We where fastened to the course of the storm as sure as would be a structure on land.

The storm descended upon us like wolves from the forrest. The fish went deep, then a horizontal jot, Davie struggling to keep the rod-tip in place just as the rogue wave hit. His ankles where his head was as he flipped over the transom. MAN OVERBOARD, MAN OVERBOARD. All acted as one now.

The skiff's mighty twin 220hp Evinrudes driving up a wave, then blasting out of the backside screaming as the blades tore free of the water's resistance. Deafening wind careening off the wheelhouse, blowing us further from mark. Men holding men by their collar and belt, pirouetting from rigging in desperate grabs towards the water.

I could see in his eyes that we where separated by our conditions for the first time in our lives: mine standing on a boat destined to return to harbor battered yet sea-worthy, his to succumb to the ocean. Later, in a rare moment, Hurley told me that when I grabbed the God-awful thing, he realized he'd never witnesseed such clarity.

14 vertical feet separated us trough to crest as the boat crashed downward. I jumped upon a starboard gunwale as the vessel careened over, grabbing a stay with my left hand. Through this course of motion I swung with the combined might of man, boat and ocean and landed my mark.

A gaffe is a long sturdy pole with an extremely heavy hook mounted on its end. The purpose of this is to land very large and dangerous game fish as they're reeled boatside. It is swung like a bat so that the point and barb are driven deep into the flesh, affording a hold on the animal.

I left the hospital once in the 15 days it took to get Davie stitched up. Three hours to drop off a case of beer, a fifth of good scotch and a handshake to every man on that boat.

It was that night on the porch that Davie gave me three things I'll never forget: two cigars and an arm thrown over my shoulder.

Jigsaw

2004-07-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

A small sidestreet near my house traverses a train trestle, and while crossing it today I noticed an extraordinary example of natures beauty trapped in its guardrails. It was a butterfly, magenta, tangerine and black, but it was not really traped so to speak. The railing had a grate which stood about eight feet overhead, then curved inwards toward the walkway, to deter people from throwing objects at the train I suppose. This buttetfly, though, seemed determined to head in the direction forbidden by the railing, and everyime it tried to fly over it, the cruvature prevented his doing so. I watched for a minute or so, recalling that some butterflies migrate enormous distances, and guessed that this one's navigational queues where about to be the end of it. So I climbed upon the railing and waved my arms, continuing this until he flew around a small precipice and on his way.

Thus I was late to meet a new acquatance and his friends, not daring to explain why. Erin, I suspect, would have understood, but not knowing his friends I didn't want to risk embarrassing him. Of course, later on, I realized they where a pretty neat bunch, and should have come out with it right away.

Erin seems to be turning into a friend, but an unusual one for me. The other day he and I where with some people we know, and the subject turned to a virtue of femininity which I particularly admire. When Erin didn't participate it was no small surprise, I don't suspect he has a Heisman trophy on his mantlepiece, if you know what I mean. Anyway, as we all tried to awkwardly steer the subject, he just turned and said to everyone "hey, I'm gay, not blind, those things are pretty damn fascinating". He didn't say it to shock anyone, nor did he look around for a response. He was letting us off the hook. Anyway, he's pretty well adjusted, and that's what I think I like about the guy.

Yesterday I heard Erin mention that he was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and it kind of surprised me. I wanted to figure it out. He said that he grew up in the Mid-West, the son of a man who owned a welding company, a guy who frequents Alaska and Africa to haul back trophy heads for his den. There was a lot of pressure to go into the family business. He kind of smirked as he indicated his appearance, fastidious and slender.

So he probably spent the first part of his life taunted not only at school, but also at home. He made no reference to that, but I bet it was a struggle to get through every day. When the time came I'll bet he got the hell out of the Mid-West as fast as he could. And that made me think of his demeanor and how easily he handled the tits situation before. How he came to be so easy to get along with.

I grew up with a John Wayne sort of vision of masculinity. You kind of swagger and shoot your way through life's challenges. I didn't really have a gliplse of the kind of fortitude necessary to grind through the mechanics of a difficult situation. When I think about it, most of the guys I know verge on emotional collapse just from hitting a golf ball poorly.

I have traveled a long way in my life, and I'm beginning to understand that power and strength are two entirely different things.

Il Duce e Morto

2004-07-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

I live on a wonderful steet in the heart of an interesting small city located just inside one of the original Colonies. My neighbors are uncharacteristically friendly, waving and caring for one another, stopping to talk on the street or sit on a stoop. This is an old Italian neighborhood whose homes have undergone many changes, among them the flight of most of the original residents to the suburbs.

Of course, there is always an exception, and in this case that exception's name is Bridget. About 75 years old, she spends most of her time "associating" with the neighbors. Since you probably don't know Bridget, I will explain that when I say associating I mean governing.

Here's how a newcomer like me, a year ago, gets to find out about her: Your walking down the sidewalk obeying all pedestrian rules and city ordinances when you hear a raspy voice HOLLERING "what are you doing on my street"? Believe me, it's not the kind of thing you ignore. So you nervously turn to introduce youself and indicate where you live, but by this time she has you carrying flowerpots off the porch and into the garden. An hour or two later, after all the garden chores are done and you've been properly admonished for not wearing clean clothes, you get to go home.

This has been referred to as The Application Process for living on (.....) Street. Of course, in any other application process you are appealing to a body who supposedly has an intact memory. Here that is not the case, and you must be prepared to undergo four months of scrutiny BEFORE SHE EVEN REMEMBERS WHO YOU ARE. She will let you take her to get bread from her favorite bakery across town, but if you leave that very same car parked on a city street in front of her house longer than the allotted 48 hours, SHE WILL HAVE IT TOWED. When you go to the Mayor's office to explain, his aide will tell you "the car was in front of Bridget's house, you should know better".

About two weeks ago I stopped to sit on her porch and talk. We where laughing about something, I don't remember what. Then she said "I've got this pain in my legs". Bridget, it's nothing, don't worry youself about these things. Go inside and make an appoinment, I'll stay here and watch the cats. Maybe you'll get the good-looking doctor again and he'll want you to take off your clothes. She gave me a look for that, then went inside.

I know she didn't call the doctor, so there was little surprise when the ambulance came screaming down the street that night. I can only imagine what she put those poor paramedics through. The next day I heard they where going to keep her for a while, so I resolved to water the garden, have it ship-shape for her return. I was looking forward to hearing her complain that I was driving up her water bill.

The bad news came yesterday, and it just frikin' hit me.

People say "well, at least she didn't suffer". I say screw that, I miss her.

Overheard

2004-07-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

I heard it once a Loooooong long time ago. Tellin' the truth through the ever lovin' land with chords 'come right out a the bowles themselves. They werent people talkin' and they sure wasn't no musical instruments in the background, somethin' knowed we never none of us knew. But sure enough the words rung prooooo-found.
All'd struck me dumb silent that day, heard a man talking 'bout what sounds had reached the land, saw from the crevice of the lay'a things the thing under some bricks: Old GE tubeless, older'n dirts Dad. Wasn't plugged into a damn thing but air an Muddy Waters.
Haven't set foot in'a house with a light socket since, 'kinda wishin' it that way is all.

The Dark Force Rears Its Head in Transportation Design

2004-06-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

One day, not long ago, I found myself sitting on a lakeside dock enjoying the sun and sounds. Gulls carelessly lofted about while waves lapped at the pilings, and a Black Lab fixed his intensity on a tennis ball when a kid bawked a throw. Not far in the distance a bunch of guys raced around on vintage jet skis.

After a while one of the Jet Skis sputtered to the dock, and its owner hauled it up and threw open the engine compartment. I walked over, curious about its workings, and began talking with the guy. He seemed pretty nice, so I held a ratchet while a bolt in an awkward spot was adjusted, and he gave me a bit of an overview about the motor. Afterward he snapped the lid on and kicked the thing back into the water. Then "go ahead", and he noddod over to it.

When asked, he told me it was just like a bike, you have to give it some gas and get going before you stand up. So I pitched my shirt and dove in, real excited to get on a personal watercraft for the first time. I pointed it away from shore, laid down on top and gunned the throttle. Just then I felt a strange tingling around my ankles.

With a jet Ski you can't have a propeller like a boat, because rotating blades would tend to sever the limbs of riders. So you have an inboard motor that drives a sort of aqua jet. Water is sucked into the front of the thing, then shot out the back, which is how it is propelled.

Well, I was lying with my upper chest onboard, the rest of me behind the craft. The tingling sensation I felt when I hit the gas was that powerful jet blasting my testicles down to my ankles, oscillating them from one to the other like frantic pinballs. I don't have to describe the pain to anyone accessorized with a set of these, but as an illustration of the force applied, just imagine that my trunks almost hit the kid playing with his dog.

As I hobbled back to the dock the Chaplain-esque quality of the scene was not lost on the few who witnessed it, and their laughter was only compounded by my having to walk butt-ass naked to get my shorts.

Let me tell you this friend: I will never again get on a jet ski for any reason at any price. They are satanic devices designed by scorned women and frustrated lesbians.

The last thing a bug thought before the windshield of my high-powered luxury sedan with full auto and leather slammed into him at a buck twenty

2004-06-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

Things often strike me like swinging mirrors in a forest. Hanging images come to pass, reflecting familiar shapes with itinerant cues, wafting meaning first before recognition slowly resonates inward. They glance off staler reality, momentarily defying gravity.

I come to know things as they should be, wish to be at their very best. I aspire towards charity, see nothing in competition and greed. Simple sensibilities hover over my everyday, I contemplate matters and weigh the time they consume separating me from my childhood. I go about things with ease, and am sometimes horrified by my dismissals.

It may be a life in reverse that I live, going inward toward birth, but still these things which surround me seem to be without direction. Others in their tidy ways seem oddly stunned by aversion from thought or feeling and introspection. I’m not any better.

Otis' Wildlife Adventure

2004-06-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

You know how they say that dogs look like their owners? Well, this is what my neighbor looks like: He’s a big guy with broad shoulders, not the type you’d be unhappy to find on your side. But he’s also a professional guy, with a very friendly demeanor and perpetual smile. He may have been an ass kicker in High School, but only by virtue of his imposing size and a propensity for laughs. If he was, there’s virtually no sign of that now.

Otis does not appear to be as genteel a package. Adopted from the city shelter, this dog spent most of his life as an unofficial resident at the University’s equestrian complex. Oddly enough, he shares many features common to the breed which serves as the school’s mascot. With an adopted dog like that, one never really knows its complete history, but when you look at Otis you can speculate that there was a particular event which led from happy existence in bucolic horse setting to bars in the city pound. Needless to say, after five weeks Otis and Tim are still getting to know each other.

Here’s a little illustration of Otis’ delicate sensibilities: I like dogs, so anyone who comes over to my place with one gets the run of the place. Tim and his sidekick come over one night to watch a DVD, and as usual the dog has to sniff out the place. But with Otis there’s not just the occasional tipping over of things and dog toe-nails on hardwood. It sounds more like furniture in an enormous clothes dryer. In the middle of "Really Big Fish" we hear something that sounds like a water main break, and it turns out to be Otis practically sucking my plumbing inside-out getting a drink of water from the toilet.

About a week ago my friend and I are sitting on the stoop and along comes Tim and Otis, and they seem to be making a bee-line for the house. Very curious. We say hello and get an enthusiastic response, exchange a tidbit of neighborhood gossip, and then we hear him say "you’ve gotta hear what just happened". This is the part of the story where my friend and I almost sprain our diaphragms laughing.

Tim goes on to say: "So we’re walking past a bunch of kids on our way to the park and one of them says "mister, your dog looks mean, is it ok if I pet him", and a minute later they’re all cooing over him and pulling his tail and that sort of thing. As we leave I wave goodbye and begin to pass a row of houses with brick stairways and sidewalls enclosing them. Just out the most extreme portion of my peripheral vision I see a squirrel sitting in one of these blind entranceways on the first step. Well, apparently Otis saw the same thing. He just casually turns his head and CHWOOOMP, he’s got pretty much the whole squirrel in his mouth. You can see its legs frantically pumping as if trying to hop out of the situation. Then Otis changes his grip and starts yanking it from side to side, tail slashing through the air in a blur of fur. Blood is spattering all over the sidewalk and a demonic groan is coming from the pink foam around Otis’ mouth. Things have gone well beyond a P.G. rating. While Otis is going at it I’m hauling on the leash, but blind instinct is apparently pulling harder. Finally he gets the message, lets go and gives me a look like ‘sorry, but you know how it is’ type of thing.

So that’s pretty much the end of my walk. I turn to pass the kids, and they’re standing there agog, eyes wide as saucers. You could tell that if a twig snapped they would all break out screaming at the top of their lungs".

Tales of animal suffering make my heart pang, but we just lost it when we heard this story of natural predation.

Poor Tim had a countenance like the neighborhood was on his heels with torch and pitchfork. And all he ever did was try to help a poor City Pound dog have a better life.

Grazing Policies (More of The Deer Chronicle)

2004-06-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly, some of the residents of my former enclave put aside their copies of "Heavily Medicated Affluent Housewife" and "The Joys of Corporate Sodomy" long enough to browse my letters. Even more surprising, though, was their reaction. One woman in particular was outraged that someone could attack hunters so blatantly.

Most offensive of all, though, was the paper's evisceration of my letter. You would think that people in the business of purveying news through the written word would have a bit of respect for the language. But alas, they stalked through my submission casually lobbing comas, paragraph breaks and all kinds of bizurk punctuation throughout.
After reading the printed version of my letter I tossed and turned for a bit, weighing my options, and then I ……

A) Internalized my anger and fantasized about my opponents getting painful, unsightly hangnails
B) Joined a Holistic Healing Through Crystals and Patchouli therapy group
or
C) Wrote another damn letter

If you guessed C you where correct. I like to write Letters to the Editor. I do it at the drop of a hat. If you left me in a room with nothing but a pen, a piece of paper and a large-breasted swimsuit model, one hour and forty-five minutes later I’d be writing a Letter to the Editor.

So here’s the letter. Beyond this, the deer were on their own.

To the Editors:
I would like to thank you, the editors of The Ridgefield News, for applying your convoluted notions of journalism to my Letter to the Editor. Without recourse did I gaze as my submission lie writhing in agony, having been dissected into three garbled heaps of sentences. Humbled was I to find that you diverted time from 11 glaring, felonious transgressions against the English language on your front page in order to proportion valuable resources towards littering my sentences with redundant commas.
That aside, I would like to draw your attention to (name withheld)’s Letter to the Editor in last week’s edition, and remind her that my article opposed "extermination teams", not hunters, which I neither mentioned nor referred to. As for "armed, beer-guzzling, camouflaged yahoos", I can not be held responsible if the phrase evokes a reactionary blow against your sensibilities.

Todd Vodka
Resident
Copywriter
Crayon Wielding Bard and Jackbooted Philanthropist

Dust

2004-06-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

A part of my heart, tad of my countenance, something of my soul. That which is all a little of me. It precipitates the snow of time's storm, raining its passing on all I know. Books and souvenirs sit quietly collecting while I idle by. The disheveling of it my only being.

Deer Saga Continues

2004-06-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

The deer situation continued to escalate to the point where people where seething with opinion. Horrifically, the one put forth most seriously was the notion of employing a company from upper New England who specializes in ambushing animals with firearms. After carefully reviewing this option, I decided that it was not in the best interest of all involved. So I sent this little note to the paper along with a basket of fresh baked cookies:

To the Editors:
The discovery that I was dead wrong about Ridgefielder’s attitudes toward deer left me wiggling in the throes of ecstasy.
Alas, you do not propose to sit idly by and content with complaint. Ridgefielders are people of action, and we’re not about to let a simple matter like the annihilation of natural predators explain away our deer overpopulation problem.
Sure, humanity has encroached on deer habitat to such and extent that their numbers fluctuate with the velocity of nuclear oscillation. But there’s a couple a’ people with Lyme disease, damn it, and if that means deploying armed, beer-guzzling, camouflaged yahoos with silencers and night vision goggles, we’re up to the challenge. After all, this world is so devoid of discharging armaments that an act of violence is almost justifiable in itself.

Todd Vodka
Resident
Copywriter
Philosophically Delusional Malcontent and
Nose-Picking Subversive Pinko

Two things here: The editors of the paper saw fit to butcher the letter with what they deemed "corrections", lumping all sorts of awkward punctuation upon it in what can only be seen as a vile attempt to justify their salaries. And finally, I do not bake cookies for people affiliated with publications which advocate violence.

Bedford

2004-06-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

Even when I was little I didn’t understand where everyone was scurrying off to. There seemed to be a secret club, rituals and rites learned from primordial time that was understood by all. Girls with their little outfits, boys joining teams and forming circles, all accompanied by voluminous amounts of mind numbing dialogue. Everyone was engrossed.
As I grew up the subject matter changed but the dialogue remained the same. Cars, homes, degrees, spilling coffee in the car surrounded by traffic on an otherwise beautiful sunny morning.
I like people, I just don’t understand any of them.
You know the sound a swing makes, the metal on metal sound? Yeeeeek Haaaaaw Yeeeeek. I can hear that solitary swing from a cold fall playground day telling me then that some day it would be different.
So, what, they make swings out of plastic now, right?

A hand

2004-05-31T23:49:00.000-07:00

If you find a blog that has not received a comment, I would encourage you to drop a note. I remember how that first communication felt, and feel privileged to do the same for others.

My blog has no links. If you are the first person to provide an initial comment on 100 sites, I will link to yours. Of course, I would like to stipulate that your site not have any offensive content.

Turf

2004-05-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

There are some in life who, when presented with strife and controversy, rarely take the time to defend their position, even when doing so is clearly in their best interest. I found this to be especially true of the deer residing in Ridgefield, CT.

The people of the town seemed to be infuriated by what they saw as one of natures preposterous woes: fawns and bucks feeding upon their landscaping, or bending their bright shiny auto fenders in suicidal road crossings. They where in no mood to lie down and take it while these savage ruminants gnoshed on their rhododendrons, and they had put forth some extremely militant solutions to the problem.

The animals themselves appeared unable to marshal an opinion on the matter, and though I am not a confrontational person, I took it upon myself to defend them in the local paper.

To the Editors:
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself as a new resident, compliment the citizens on a lovely town and chastise each and every one of you for your ignorance.
That a person could live here and find deer to be an imposition is simply comedy at its highest level. Us, with our rancid, pollution spewing homes, sitting upon porches while taking in breathtaking woodland and resplendent scenery, all the while cursing to Hades a few deer eking out a meager sustenance while risking their necks to cross hazardous roads. Up in arms shall we be at the temerity of velvet horned, satin coated animals for treading across our pristine vistas.
Let us free ourselves of this tyranny, fire up the cement mixers and pave the whole town, assassinating wildlife as we go along.
In closing, I would like to state that I look forward to meeting all of you, and eagerly await the myriad of subjects you will in the future find to complain about.

Todd Vodka
Resident
Copywriter
Irreverent Rabble-Rouser and Deer Smooching Hippie Whacko

Simmer message to taste

2004-05-24T05:02:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I wanted to accomplish two things: To get rid of an old saucepan I have, and find a way to publicize my blog. Here’s how I combined the two.

First I hung signs and posters all over town. They were attached to message boards outdoors, taped to street signs, affixed to bicycles and posted in the university’s hallways. Then I put little strips of paper with my blog’s URL on them inside the saucepan, and placed it on a park bench just beyond the back window of my favorite place to enjoy a beverage. Next I went inside, ordered an espresso and sat with a copy of "My Antonia" on the other side of the window. In the course of two hours I must have seen 50 people take the address out of the saucepan and replace the lid. Some of them came in the café after they did. And one of them even asked me what book I was reading.

Here’s what the signs said, in big black letters: Free Pot behind café Coffee

I didn't know that was the last time I'd see the place

2004-05-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

When I was young I was wild in the suburbs. I camped under the stars, lived out of a backpack, overnighted in parks or empty lots. In the daytime I was at the beach, in the deafening wash of salt and sun I walked and swam from jetty to jetty. ‘Had conversations and more with smiling dilettantes and curvy young ladies. By 5:00pm I sauntered into The Clam House for either bartending or valet duty, slathered with salt under a clean yet wrinkled shirt.
In the evening there was money in my pocket which glided in eager procession to the top of some bar. Maybe a new waitress would accompany the smoke and music and evening abandon. Sometimes I woke in hovels or mansions and cared not which. I somehow knew it was lost time that was being spent.
Yesterday, many years later, I went fishing by the Mill Pond. The Clam House has long since been closed, but the building remained shimmering in moonlight. It stood as a wink to the past. This time, though, when I looked over, it had been razed. The hot anvil that seared through me would not tear free. My treasured rod clunked to the ground.

A bit

2004-05-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

My apartment has a lovely patio, which I like to refer to as my lanai, in the Hawaiian fashion. My attempts to resist the usual trappings of bachelor life have led me to put planters out there with flowers and vegetables in them. I have been enjoying my tea there in the morning.

Once as I was walking out a sparrow fled from under the awnings. I knew she was watching, so I didn’t peek around for a nest until finishing my tea. When I was done I looked, and there was none.

A few mornings later as I was sipping I noticed a smudge, not bigger than a fingernail, but somehow attached to a pebble. Something inside me plead for deeper examination, and when I looked closer I saw the tiniest egg, broken open, with an embryo in the beginning stages. I was horrified, and surprised to hear myself say aloud "I’m sorry".

I was with a good friend last night, the evening after the discovery. We unloaded some wood from his father’s truck, had a drink in my kitchen and ate dinner. We spoke, about important things as well as not. But the notion of the egg did not cross my mind then, and I did not bring it up. The impact this discovery had upon me seemed to have no place in my conversation, no ability to declare. Somehow, afterwards,that made me feel a bit like the egg.