Summer reading adventure chapter four: first attempt!

 

So, they legalized certain marijuana edibles in my state, just a nibble around the edges of full legalization. Intrigued by this, I bought a couple of different kinds of edible gummies when I was on vacation, and today, my first day off work since my return home, I'm experimenting.

I'm on drugs!!!!!!

I know what you're thinking: "Hmm. But he seems about the same as ever."

Seems that way to me too.

In the morning just after breakfast I took a 5 milligram gummi of Delta 9 thc. That's the stuff that gets you high. It was a pretty modest dose. It also had a lot of cbd oil (also derived from hemp but not psychoactive) which can somewhat inhibit the brain's uptake of thc. After two hours nothing had happened. Then I felt a susurration of pleasant heaviness. I would describe myself as barely high and kinda cozy. Also my back didn't hurt, which it usually does, partly because I think I was a little bit less tense than I usually am. Was it like I remembered being high was, back in my smoking youth? No, it was as much like being gently toasted on a medium to large glass of wine as any of that, but it was very nice.

Anyway, all of this didn't last too long, maybe a couple hours where I could really say I felt it.

So a bit less than an hour ago I took another brand of 5 mg gummi, this one without, as far as I can tell, any cbd in it.

I am so high!!!

No, just kidding. I am really not sure if I could write anything here if I were really high. 

I'm figuring since the first gummi took a couple hours to have an effect I have a bit more time to go here to see if anything much kicks in. Once upon a time Grape and I took dangerous amounts of Peyote in a beautiful natural area for bats in a bit of canyon near Grape's parents' house. We gave up after a couple hours that it would ever have any effect, and then we went bowling.

At which point we went out of our minds. 

It was a little intense and a something of a waste, washing us up in our respective parent's homes later in the evening to let us just burn it all off.  Grape did see a sepulchral figure on the side of the road while my brother drove us through some canyons before that though.

It is now exactly an hour since I took the second gummi. 

I will say this: It isn't much like in those Hunter S. Thompson novels, I mean memoirs, where he sees giant lizard people gulping down cocktails in lurid Las Vegas bars.

"Wait," You say. "While we wait for the giant lizard people to kick in, and for you to be unable to write, why don't you give us the fourth part of your summer reading adventure where you talk about the books you read, or the ones you skimmed and tossed aside on your vacation. We so enjoyed, for instance, your discussion of the book Wilding!"

"Great idea." I reply. "But I might get high at any moment so I'm leery of starting in on it." I pause, thinking. "You seem to be doing an increasing amount of heavy lifting on this blogpost though. Do you think maybe you could write part four of my posts about my vacation reading? You're very good with words!"

"Really? Thank you!" You say, blushing slightly at the unexpected compliment. "I could try. Let me consult my notes."

There is a long pause. 

You don't realize that you are on the air. 

And we are just waiting for your response.

I gesticulate to get your attention:

KFHJH ANPW498QICVPY489UF4CJQ!!!!!!!!

"Oh. Sorry." You say. "I didn't realize that this all happened in real time." You look down at some papers. "Can I get back to you tomorrow?"

"Absolutely." I say positively. 

It turns out that I am pretty sure this is a long enough blog post as is.

Ladies of the Canyon

After the initial enthusiasm of starting my series of The Hundred Greatest Albums, with each album individually being the single greatest album ever made, I tailed off for a bit. I am surprised now to find that it has been a month and a half since my last one. But during most of that time I have known that my next album was going to be this: Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon.

It's just that there was a lot to say.

Somewhere around the turn into the 1980's I was convinced of the abiding glory of all things and culture of the 1960's. One of the small benefits of this was that the used and slightly scratched albums of this era thickly populated the discount bins of the local record stores.

I was a teen of very little money, so this was an important detail. And Oz Records, on Topanga Canyon Blvd, had a bin of used records for ten cents each. 

Ten cents was cheap even back then. I could afford 10 cent records! I mean, not that I didn't still have to think about it. Dimes didn't grow on trees. Even now the little things aren't exactly for the taking.

But when I came upon a copy of Ladies of the Canyon for ten cents I didn't actually have to think about it very much. Mainly I just had to wonder if somehow it was in there by mistake.

I guess it wasn't since no one stopped me from buying it.

Now a question I have for myself is, how did I know that this was a special treasure that I was lucky to find? After all, it was my first Joni Mitchell album. What reference made me aware that this was an unbelievable find?

Through the murky shadows of time I can discern no clear answers. All I know is I excitedly took home my freakishly cheap treasure, hoping the scratches weren't too bad. I put it on the stereo, and listened. 

Destiny? Is all art destiny?

Though it was strange. Not like I would have thought it would be back then.

Her voice was so... soprano. Like a line held way up high. It wasn't like folk really, or pop, or rock. It was kind of old and modern. Even now it seems unique, belonging to nothing else, individual, like art is supposed to be.

The songs were so... understandable.

Even though they were kind of complex.

And because the voice was so high it didn't seem like they'd be so... tuneful. But wonderfully they were, I don't know, something past catchy, something, all, you know, up in your heart, cutting through everything else.

And every single song seemed to take you to another world and let you live a moment in another place.

At first these songs were like stories, or still lifes, but then they were all... feelings. Ecological disaster as a metaphor for lost love. Dreams of a better world, but almost like an elegy already, even as its dreamed and pined for. Something about what art is supposed to be but maybe is and maybe isn't. 

There's mostly piano in this album, and a spareness in how it's put together that feels like it's thought up idly, on the spot. But it's paired with immaculate, intricate, and wildly original vocals and phrasing that makes one realize that these are mastercrafted songs, woven with every thread accounted for, a work of absolute resounding genius.

Lately I, and at my house, we, have seen a few interviews with Joni Mitchell, and they are not really exactly pleasant, perhaps a bit painful to watch. There's something that's a little bitter, or hard. Something almost self-important but focused on all the wrong things. I'd rather throw those away if I can. Maybe, I hope, she, in her ambition for it, is at her worst talking about her work. Or maybe there is a terrible wedge between art and the people who make it. Maybe every great success pays a price. 

Maybe magic never belongs to us anyway.

Maybe Joni Mitchell taught me half of everything I know about that.




Willy

Where the books are

Working, as I do, when I'm feeling up to it, at a library, my attention is frequently grabbed by the surprise of these books lying all over the place. I suppose books in a library shouldn't exactly surprise me, but they do. Books never really seem like they have anything to do with the real world, which perhaps is why I find them so appealing. Fundamentally they hardly even exist in this plane, being something more like doors into their own private and very idiosyncratic realities. I mean, they're things, books, and their covers are physically suggestive, but the only real way to get anything useful out of them is to sit staring quietly at them for hours and hours. And a lot of the time even that doesn't work.

So I was marveling at a whole cart of these books when a rather clever title caught my eye: Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan. This might be a great book. I don't know. I haven't read it, though I might take a look at it later. I just investigated enough of it to find out that it's a humorous memoir about an introvert who is feeling pretty sad and so decides to try living as a gregarious extrovert for a year. This places it squarely in two successful current mini genres. One of these genres is Introvert Books, kicked into genredom by the mega bestseller Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. The other genre is The Sort of but not Necessarily Silly Artificial Personal Quest Memoir. This one is probably best represented by The Year of Living Biblically. One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

As I said I haven't read  Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan, and I don't have anything against it other than the flash of irritated jealousy I have towards anyone whose humorous personal insights, written into essay form, have been collected into a genuine book, that actual people appear to buy and read. And I suppose I'm a bit cautious at the start about its suggested rejection of introversion. But I'm willing to take my spear of envy and my wariness with the grains of salt they deserve. Nevertheless I wanted to say that right in the moment of my jealous disdain I had an idea for a book of my own that I thought I'd like to write:

Extrovert! The Journey of a Pretend Extrovert Who Gives it All Up for a Year to Stay at Home Eating a Variety of Barbecue Flavored Potato Chips. 











 

Tar

Forget the daffodils. Who cares about the budding trees and the dance of warm weather. Green is lovely, but I have seen it before. Yes it's beautiful out, but that only heralds something greater: 

The smell of tar is in the air!

Oh tar! Beautiful beautiful tar. I know the trucks are out on the streets today to patch up all the holes in the road, all the great craters and pits gouged in the streets by a mighty Winter full of bitter cold and deep ice. But all that's just an excuse. It is merely a way to bring to us citizens the glorious odor of hot tar.

At least that's how it feels to me.

I love the smell of tar.

Why, you might wonder, do I love the smell of tar?

I don't know, but I assume that it has to do with saber tooth tigers and mastodons.

As a wee child of four I was very, very into the Pleistocene Epoch. And if you were a four-year-old fan of the Pleistocene Epoch living in the Los Angeles area, and you had anything going on at all, you made your way over to The La Brea Tar Pits.

I had just a tiny bit going on so I made my way over to The La Brea Tar Pits. There full sized statues of Mastodons struggled for their fictional lives at the edge of a pool of tar. One of them screamed and thrust his tusks in the air as the tar sucked him down. There were also statues to view of Saber-toothed Tigers, in slightly less trying circumstances, and a wide variety of genuine animal remains and reconstructed skeletons. The La Brea Tar Pits were a death trap for Pleistocene Epoch Megafauna, maybe. The reasons for the great collection of remains has become less clear. Nevertheless there were a lot of remains there in The La Brea Tar Pits. And I loved them. And it all smelled of tar. 

Tar, tar, tar! Which is the smell of glorious monsters, and magic, and of ancient history! And it is also the smell of road crews making repairs on the River Road. And then too it is the smell of my heart, burning, pining, melting with a nostalgia so deep I barely know what it is.

Purple balloon

On rare, special occasions when I was in Elementary School, the teacher would bring in a film projector. Oh heaven! And we would sit in the dark and watch a film. Because rolls of film were valuable and precious commodities in those days, with no alternatives, there were only 11 films to go around in our school. So those are what we watched, over and over. And of those eleven films the one, for reasons forever lost to the mists of time, that we watched most of all was The Red Balloon.

I could look it up in two seconds on my computer, maybe even watch it in full, and learn many interesting, surprising things about this loosely remembered movie, but this isn't that kind of post. So instead I'll tell you what I remember it as:

The Red Balloon is a French film about a curiously sentient red helium balloon that follows a boy around Paris. It was either a boring movie in which nothing much ever happens, or a quietly enchanting film about everyday magic and the delicacy of love. I can't remember which.

Today I saw a purple balloon.

I looked out the window from my roost high above the city, and there it was, level with me in the air, floating down the Wintry street. 

Since I first watched The Red Balloon, in let's say 1972, I have seen thousands of loose helium balloons. I have seen them rising into the sky. I have seen them floating en masse along with the wind, and I have seen them trapped in the large atrium of my library, long ago escaped and now dipping and bobbing out of reach with gentle aimlessness in our quiet atmosphere. But this purple balloon, in all that time since The Red Balloon, was the first balloon I had seen with a sense of purpose. It was the first balloon acting on its own volition. It was the first balloon anything like the red balloon.

Except it was purple.

At a steady 75 feet above the street the purple balloon made its way towards The Mississippi River. Its path was straight and pure. Its pace did not alter. I, like any rational person, most of the time revert to not believing in magic, and so I expected the purple balloon to hit the turbulent air currents of the river gorge and to be wildly tossed about.

But no.

The balloon continued its steady, purposeful way up the bridge, as unaffected in its journey as any car down below it was in theirs. Then, at the midpoint of the bridge the purple balloon stopped. It rose another 100 feet in the air, and then it headed down The Mississippi River and disappeared from my view.

As I write this I fully assume that balloon is still somewhere on its journey. Please keep an eye out for it. I believe there are many unexplained things in our world. Maybe almost every single thing is so. But ever I live in hope that it is not forever, and one by one everything will be revealed.

The Grape retrospective

Traditionally on clerkmanifesto we celebrate my friend's, Grape's, birthday on this day, October 23rd. I best like to celebrate it with a story from our past. But I've been doing this for a long time, so a lot of the key stories have been covered. Let us review:

1. Grape saves my life.

2. Grape almost kills me.

3. We dissect a rattlesnake.

4. We swim with a hundred sharks.

5. We hide in a tent in the John Muir Wilderness while it never stops raining and eat peanut butter, drink whiskey, and read just enough of Rimbaud's Season in Hell so that we can say we did.

6. We eat far too much Peyote, see a spectral apparition (some of us do), and then sit around alone in the suburbs, all our spirituality thwarted.

I still blame the spectral apparition for that.


Fortunately there are a few stories left to work with, but since I have been writing about golf so much these days I have decided I will tell you about the Summer of Mini-Golf.

It might not be a very good story, but it was a very fun Summer. Maybe mostly because it was during a not very happy time in my life.

I was living at my parents' home, kind of paralyzed there with self hatred and despair, lost, when Grape came back for Summer Vacation from College.

"Let's go miniature golfing." He said.

So we did. Constantly. I think there was a nice course near where he was staying. We golfed. Not only are we very competitive, but we tend to think a lot of games can be improved. In our many hours out on the links (Hah!) we were no longer satisfied with 54 or 108 holes of "normal" mini golf. What about timed holes? What about playing a hole pool style? What about designated paths through the holes that gave them pars that would more suitably be set at 15 or 16. We played speed golf, kick golf, hit the other guy's golf ball golf, and closest to the hole golf. I like to think we got pretty good at it.

Of course the trick with stuff like that is that even though it seems absurd, one has to take it seriously. We quite liked to compete. We quite liked to win. We took it very seriously.

I'm just saying I have not much golfed, but out on those mini golf courses, I learned that all that fresh air can be ennobling, and diverting, and spiritual, and fun. Even if mainly we were running around hooting or lying on our bellies or something.

It might have been another year or two before I found my way out of the dead end I thought I'd be in forever, but I think Grape and all that golfing helped.

Which brings me back to item number one in the list of previous memoirs: Grape saves my life, which I think a wide assortment of these old stories tend to be about, even if just a little. Even the one where he almost killed me (and himself). 

I suppose, at its best, that's what friendship does.

So happy birthday Grape. Thanks for life.

My friend the onion

The years go on by, but some things do not change. And so it is with onions, and me, that is, for me and onions.

Surely I liked onions from an early age as I'm pretty sure they played some part in the favorite food of my childhood; spaghetti and meat sauce. But I doubt I was aware of them, as such, until I was seven. I did not know them until an event of great importance took place in Second Grade. We had a sort of in-class play. The play was Stone Soup. You know the story, where a stone makes a wonderful soup for a hungry village, just with a little help of a small contribution from everyone; a bit of cabbage, some garlic, a carrot, some salted beef, and so on.

I was assigned the onion.

I don't know why it played out like this, but I had an onion in my desk at school for weeks and weeks in the run up to that play, and in its aftermath, as the soup we made was only fictional. Having this onion around to smell and look at was wonderful. I felt an immediate affection for the onion that has never faded. Now I bring onions to work with me. I have a little drawer in the kitchen that I long ago took over for my own. I always keep a couple onions in there. Most days I eat one.

Perhaps you think it not quite right to eat one's friends.

The would be true if you were friends with cats, or people. But I have come onto the Internet today to let you know that if you are friends with onions, it's okay.

Teen program for me

We have a lot of teen programming at my library. And it's fine. It tends towards technology oriented things, like Maker Space, with 3D printers and other cut-rate sophisticated geegaws. And that dovetails well with what I would call its "mainstream nerd" focus, featuring things like board gaming sessions and Cosplay Proms. But I do kind of keep an eye on the programming and outreach, looking for what might be oriented towards the kind of kid I was. These programs that they do have are a little too outgoing and promising to serve the constituency that would have been, well, mine, once upon a time.

And that is why I was thrilled at my library's new teen program. I think it's the sort of thing I might have liked. Finally. And there's not a lot to it. They bring in half a dozen old plush velvet arm chairs and group them loosely, and not all that sociably, about a greater portion of the teen room. They throw large bags of varieties of chips on tables scattered in the area. Then they hand out three bongs and an eighth ounce of pot to pass around. Then they leave you alone for six hours.

It's called Slacker Space.

Grape's birthday keeps coming

As is our tradition here on Clerkmanifesto we celebrate October 23 as the birthday of Grape.

Why do we do this?

Um, because October 23 is Grape's birthday, so then, that would be the time...

No, no, why do we do this?

Oh. the answer to "why" is ever in the blogposts. Here are two answers:

(one)

(two)

And now I offer another. But first I must say that if there are an infinity of October 23rds to come, well then, surely there is an infinity of answers. 

For this birthday: The rattlesnake.

Oh the rattlesnake. Back in the early 1980's there were rattlesnakes. These are warm weather snakes who lay coiled in the day and hunt at night. Peaceable unless surprised, threatened, or hungry, they have a rattle at the end of their tail that they shake when alarmed and two poisoned fangs up at their very front that they will stab into anyone they feel they would prefer to be dead. What a creature, a creature out of a fable! 

I wish there were still rattlesnakes.

In those days Grape and I often drove to the top of Stunt Canyon Road and then took the short boulder-hopping walk to the peak of the wee Mountain there, Stunt Mountain, where one could see the Pacific Ocean and The San Fernando Valley both, great hills of chaparral rolling away heedlessly, improbable houses dotting the hillsides dangerously, and skies smeared with dry white clouds by day and strange gouts of shooting stars at night. What did we do there? Well, we went there and that was enough. It is hard to work out how such young men could be so sensible. It was not native to us.

One day driving down from the peak we saw a snake coiled in the road. We pulled off to the side. We debated for a very long time as to whether said snake was dead or alive. Then we got a stick.

What was this stick? Neither of us were keen on being bitten by a rattlesnake, and we both of us suffer from Imaginations. So we did not grab a stick, no. We grabbed a branch, fifteen feet long. No, we grabbed an oak tree, and we said hello with it to the snake, to see what the snake wanted to do.

The snake wanted to be in snake heaven forever. 

So we took his body home.

At Grape's house we were out of time for the day. So we found some tupperware, and we put the snake in it in his family garage freezer. And we put notes on it that said something like "You probably don't want to check into what this is or you will be even more worried about your favorite child than you already are."

Yes, I'm afraid Grape was both his parents' favorite child and I say that merely to call it as I see it, nevertheless hoping Rubin, Eli, and Alisa, the siblings of Grape, aren't reading this. And if they are that they have either made peace or know better than me that I am wrong.



It is a hot day on the edge of the Valley. I am at Grape's family house. For some reason a multitude of his Grandparents are visiting, maybe some from Argentina, some from Israel. With the strange judgement of, well, us, we decided this was the correct time to take the snake out of the freezer and cut it apart.

So we did. In the hall bathroom.

I remember so little of this. Like, strangely the dissection was immaculate, bloodless, and easy, despite our total lack of facility and experience with such things. But it must have taken a long time because ever was Grape's mother knocking at the door. "What are you doing in there?" She asked.

I may be making this up, but I think we must have finally answered "Dissecting a rattlesnake."

With an assortment of knives we carefully removed the fangs. One for each of us. I sent my fang to the woman of my dreams. Perhaps this was the exact right thing to do because, after all, my dreams came true. I don't know what Grape did with his fang. What did you do with your fang, Grape?

We skinned the snake and packed that meaty skin away for later. I ended up curing it with salt, nailed to a board, at my house. We would have shared that stiff skin, I am guessing, but our family dog Cashew chewed it all up one day soon after. Yum, salty!

In the end the pressures of people needing the bathroom and the growing smell of warm snake on a hot day led us to wrap things up. We cleaned up, gathered our chosen and still to be worked on parts, and decided to share the rattle. Grape and I share the rattle.

Back and forth it went between us. Or it still does. Grape sent it once in an aluminum can. I made a golden apple for it. It's been in jewel cases and miles of Styrofoam, pill bottles and things I will never remember again. Where is it now?

I don't know. I have this feeling that I might have it somewhere down here in my basement. If so I should send it on to Grape. If not he will probably send it along to me. But really where is it now? The rattle is faded, a ghost.

Now the dream rattle is more real than the original work of nature. Now the rattle is in my heart. It's part of how my heart is made. Aren't we just packed together out of things like this? There's a rattlesnake rattle in my heart.

And that is how we observe Grape's birthday.

Van Nuys

Roaming the Internet for enlightenment  is perhaps a fool's game. But here we are once again. And no discredit to you. I am out here too, seeking the truth, but finding instead wedding parties falling into pools in hilarious ways, finding people falling off of bicycles or having dramatic problems with treadmills rather than finding the visions of understanding I was hoping I'd just sort of stumble on. On the Internet I am vastly more likely to find a cat slipping off a couch while sleeping than I am to find the answer to any important question. In real life the chances are closer to fifty-fifty.

And what is an important question?

Let me tell you about the time I was five or six, living in the Principality of Van Nuys, California. In the three bedroom house of my family there was a crawl space attic I had never been up in and had never seen made use of. But for some reason my father had to take a rare excursion up into it. So up a rickety ladder he went, through a trap door in the ceiling, to disappear into a mysterious area of our house I didn't even know existed up until that time.

We could hear every movement of my father up in the ceiling, and there was something terribly captivating about how this whole man, surely five times my own size, was over our heads in a secret area. Thump, thump, thump. Was he crouched in there, moving about? What was it like? How it creaked and groaned. And then, as he took one more step that we were all monitoring, fascinated, it crashed. The ceiling split open. My father shot down feet first, half way. But the explosive birth was arrested, and my father suddenly stopped part way through, at the waist. The whole of his legs poked out of the ceiling and wiggled comically while chaos broke out through the house.

I do not know what happened next. But it is best to leave him there, half in the attic, calling instructions, and floating comically above us, legs waving about like dangling branches in the wind. I have carried this vision for almost half a century. I am sure there is an answer to an important question in there somewhere. There always is. So I keep looking.

How we almost die

Once, long ago, I almost died. Most of us have had our run ins with death. Life is dangerous. In this long ago time my friend Grape and I half died, not in the sense of injury, but in the sense of a fifty-fifty chance. It could have gone either way, control was gone, on one side lay death and on the other life. But since one can't be half dead I am still all here. 

What if every time a chance at death came our way we died partly, like a cat losing one life out of its nine. It would only be fair though, since we are not cats and have but one life, that each portion would be in relation to what we have left: So if someone is already 50 percent dead, and a truck miraculously swerves to miss them, and it was a fifty-fifty shot, they lose half of the the 50 percent they have left and are now 75 percent dead. This results in them being able to see in the dark and causes their normal body temperature to drop ten degrees colder. On the down side of all this increased percentage of death one eventually sleeps almost all the time and shows no reflection in mirrors and is pale and faded. On the plus side no mere chance of death can kill us. We retain a fraction of life up until we encounter a 100 percent likelihood of death.

Maybe, though, there is no such thing as chance. If I had died that night it would have been 100 percent certain that I would have. Because I didn't I was always going to live without any possibility otherwise. 

Well, either way, here I am. That simple moment in a car, teetering on the brink, out on Stunt Canyon Road, is somehow finding its way to completely inform the great bulk of your reality at this moment. After all, you are reading this. I'm pretty sure you couldn't be here if I were dead.

Of course, Grape may be reading this, but it would be different for him. He was there, driving the car.

When we were still teenagers we would drive into the Santa Monica Mountains. That's what they're called. They're more like hills, but they're really nice hills. And somewhere a canyon road winds its way steeply up near the top of Stunt Peak, which is really just the top of a big hill. But it's a mighty big hill, with a good view. We liked to go there. From where the road ended you could walk up to the top of the highest rocks. You could see ocean and the San Fernando Valley both. It was a holy place. A place of calling. It was somewhere you could politely throw rocks, see snakes, and get stoned.

One day, on the way driving down from that peak Grape took one of those steep canyon curves kind of fast. The back wheels skidded. It was fun! So naturally, following that, at each vicious hairpin turn Grape would go kind of fast. We'd skid. It was very exciting! So Grape went a little faster on each turn, but it was all very steep, and it was kind of hard to control just how fast we were going. So the last time he did it the back wheels skidded and then they kept on skidding. Then the front wheels skidded. Then the whole car just slalomed about on its own, careening down the road. On one side was a rock and dirt embankment, on the other side was something that was for all intents and purposes a cliff. Even now I can see us down there at the bottom of it, the smoking ruin of a burning car, blood, the end of the world. 

We hit the embankment side. But you knew that.

I am not telling this story because I suddenly remembered our harrowing slide. I am telling it because for some reason I recently vividly remembered Grape calling his family from a public phone to report our accident. We modified the story to include a rock in the road. A big rock, well, pretty big. We might also, in the telling, have left out the roller coastery part, feeling it was a more of an optional detail that not everyone would handle as well as they should.

You might be thinking that Grape was not being such a good or responsible driver, but this never even occurred to me. I am merely thankful he somehow, through some measure of driving skill, managed to get us safely mashed into the side of Stunt Hill. 

We still had things to do. And even now, 34 years later, we have not done them all.

Christmas in hell

No, the title of this post aside, I am fine with Christmas, which, due to the tape delay quality of the Internet is over for you even though it began just 47 minutes ago for me. It takes forever to get something published on the Internet. All those committees and processing boards and whatnot. And they're certainly not going to meet on Christmas Day.

So Christmas is perfectly nice for me. I write a blog post, and then I can go to sleep. In the morning I am with my wife for the day. Freezing rain will fall all afternoon and will be a good excuse to stay inside making coffee. I like to think making coffee is enough activity for any one day. And it is, you know, if you take the time to make a proper cappuccino.

Once upon a time I did celebrate Christmas as Christmas. I was young. The night before it my father would pretend to yell out the window "I don't care who you are fat man, get your reindeer off my roof!" This was a funny joke, but he didn't write it. It's an old joke. I can't find the source, but if he had ever really yelled it out the window my heart might be melting to think of him now.

There it was pop, yell it out the window. Just yell it! Who cares what the neighbors think?

My family celebrated Christmas with a reluctant restraint, unable to resist its charms and yet feeling there would be some kind of betrayal in a Jewish family going so far as to have a tree or lights. Stockings hung by the chimney with care were okay. Santa was acceptable, as long as we mock mocked him out the window that night. Not loud enough for him to hear though. Just loud enough to make us think about ourselves "Wouldn't it be great if we really were fun crazy."

My older brother (the slightly more disturbed one) objected to this halfhearted embrace. "Christmas is an American holiday!" He insisted. He may have been slightly joking. Sometimes it was hard to tell in that house. Sometimes it wasn't. Oh man, sometimes no one was joking at all.

Nevertheless this brother, whose "Christmas is an American holiday!" rings in my ears to this day, had a lackluster commitment to Christmas compared to my sister and I. We had a deep hunger, a feeling that because we had no chance in hell of getting what we needed emotionally, perhaps we could at least be materially remunerated, like losers on a gameshow. It only occurs to me now, roughly 40 years later, that it wasn't that my parents weren't generous enough, or good enough gift buyers, it was that what I was looking for never could have made it into a wrapped box.

Pope Francis just called for the faithful to not get caught up in the commercialization of Christmas – “when we are concerned for gifts but cold toward those who are marginalized.” 

Materialism has “taken us hostage this Christmas,” he said. “We have to free ourselves of it!”

 This is such a nice thought. It dovetails with what I've just been saying. But I think it's important to keep in mind that Pope Francis, Il Papa no less, has fallen short of the requisite passion and danger. You can't just talk at the window, Pope Francis. You're Pope. You have to open that fucking window and yell.

Old library story

I have always been very fond of this old library story. I am so fond of it that I suspect that in three plus years of rigorous storytelling here I have already told it at least once to illustrate some trenchant library point. But I'm pretty sure this is a new point today. Which is great because it allows me to tell this story again!

Once upon a time two of my colleagues, now long gone, were working in the weird little back anteroom that the old version of this library used to have. They sat or stood back there, mostly processing book drop returns and materials that came in the delivery.  One of the two workers, let us say the much newer one, was working at a normal, steady, industrious pace. You know, like the one I employ when I feel like it and no one has offended me. The other worker was doing... whatever. And this other worker turns to the newer, industrious worker and says "Hey, slow down. You'll make the rest of us look bad."

I would like to use this story to illustrate the differences in the "olden days" library I used to work in and the "good old days are now" library I currently work in.

First of all, his saying what he did about slowing down was ridiculous no matter how you cut it, and unusual, but it was reflective of its contemporary situation. It spoke to something happening then. It said "We will never, ever get the work done back here, so please don't change the standard of how much work we are expected to get done." 

We have plenty of crappy workers around these days, just as ridiculous as this one, but no one would ever say what this one said. This difference is determined by the fact that now we often get caught up on our work in various areas. The only thing it means if one of our colleagues works harder in our current era is that there is less work for the rest of us to do because of it.

So in the olden days if you worked harder it contributed to a faster pace. Nowadays if you work harder it allows for a slower pace.

I still work my hardest when no one is looking. I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the above story or to the history of my library. I suspect it has something to do with not liking people to be up in my business.

Construction equipment

When I was a very little boy I was immensely fond of construction equipment. The garbage men with their great turnover trucks were an epic weekly event to me, or was it bi-weekly? I feel garbage pick up came more often in the old days. But all things with mighty treads and scoops and joints and plows were a primal satisfaction to me.

When I was six or seven that love faded away and I haven't much thought of it since.




On my morning walks I usually cross the Mississippi River on a four lane road bridge. It might be two lanes instead of four. I can't remember because they have been doing construction on this bridge for so long I've forgotten how it's supposed to go. While I have painstakingly developed a part of me that can say "They must be doing a good job at something very important I do not understand, and it explains all this endless bridge work." there is still another part of me that looks at a bridge that has been half-closed for years, swarmed on by workers and machinery, and yet seems not a whit different from when they started, and is simply irritated. The worst part of the construction is not so much all the closed lanes and rerouting on top of it, but the fact that all passage on the wonderful National Park paths underneath it have been closed and unusable for years now. While I appreciate their caution- after all, two or three bridges upstream from this one the Highway 35 Bridge famously collapsed into the river far below, killing thirteen- I really think if they wanted to they could have left some kind of walking paths open below. After all, these are safely on the shore, usually out of the way from where they are working.

But no, they are closed. So over the bridge I go, day after day. Irritated, but holding it together.

Until, from out of nowhere, some primal child in me stirred. Something sleeping in me for 45 years awoke! And, whoa, look at all this stuff! The bridge is besieged by fabulous machinery, great landworks operations are underway. I walk high over the bridge and giant cranes tower above me, all sitting on platforms floating in the river. Darling, industrious tug boats putt about on the Mississippi ready to move the platforms around, or hold them safely in place. One barge carries some strange bird of a treaded vehicle, with an agile neck surely 20 feet long, dipping deep into the river to scoop up muddy riverbed on some mysterious mission. Perhaps it's to build one of the jettys that extend into the river where more cranes and equipment work from. And the workers are everywhere too on their glamorous jobs, usually yelling work strategy or sports news or literary theory to each other across the railings of the bridge, one standing on the sidewalk where I pass them, the other in a bucket held by some 60 foot tall crane, but sometimes simply strapped to a makeshift wooden structure tacked to the side of the bridge and hanging high and exposed over the water below. And besides all the things working off of floating platforms below there are specialized contraptions plying their trade from the top of the bridge too. One side of the bridge is always closed to all traffic so that large pieces of machinery can crouch over the sidewalk while their ungainly, multi-elbowed arms can bend out over the side of the bridge and do unseen things down below.

It's really quite a gaudy display of strange and oversized, weighty, and powerful implements, and though even the five year old in me wouldn't mind knowing what all they are actually doing, we are nevertheless mightily impressed.

But all good things must one day come to an end. And so when this bridge project ends in 2021 I am prepared. I will go back to looking at the birds and the trees and the quiet river. So soon! I hope I'm ready.

Falling is better than despair

Here is my metaphor: When the walls close in and I keep going down the dark and narrowing tunnel of life until it no longer branches, and I can never now find my way back now, and the way I am on has come to some strange, unalterable end, I stand there, lost and abandoned. I am desolate. I have exhausted myself and worn my virtues to bone. And though all my sins, real and imagined, shed a kind of light, they only reveal that there is no place to go.

So to hell with all my sins. Right there, hopeless, at the end of the tunnel, I abandon all my failings; real ones, made up ones, instilled ones, and even the ones that are secretly virtues.

I make plans. And in my plans I become perfect. I will never fail, or waste a moment, or make a mistake ever again. I will be perfect and committed and energized and pure. It is a simple and glorious solution and everything is wonderful.

And that is how I fall. I do not intend it. It is not part of the plan. Reaching for perfection I fall in that very second.

Let me tell you, despair is better than falling. Terror comes first, and when I hit the ground I am battered and broken and there is no part of me that does not hurt. Lying there hurts most of all so I get up, shaken, trembling. I wipe the blood from my eyes, and I look around. I find that I can now go anywhere, there are no tunnels here, no walls. I can go anywhere, anywhere at all as long as it's up.

So on the gentlest, softest, easiest path I can find, I head that way.

The sweet revenge of laughter

Here's a story of triumph for you. I have made this man I work with laugh before, many times at this point. But I still remember something that someone told me about him twenty years ago. I have worked with this man for nearly all the time I have worked at the library. I even trained a few days with him at the beginning of my career. But for the first year of my employment he worked at a different location than me. The thing I was told, twenty years ago, was by someone who worked with both of us. He related that this man said, about me: "I don't see why everyone thinks he's so funny. I don't think he's so funny."

Soon he moved to my branch. It has been the work of a lifetime's revenge making this man laugh.

I'm not saying the joke is necessarily so funny, for the record.

At my library we have an automated book return. There is a one way drive up depository that feeds through the brick wall of our building onto our fancy system of moving belts and rollers, but if our automated return breaks down we have a big blue bin, ramshackle and past its use by date, that we unlock and use as a back up. This week we got a brand new fancy sign for this beaten up blue book return. It says "Back Up Book Return".

Here is the story I told to the man who two decades ago didn't think I was so funny:

I was out unlocking the blue bin when a car came up to me in reverse, against the one way traffic of the book return lane, and it almost hit me.

"Hey!" I yelled "What are you doing?"

The guy pointed at our bin and said "What? It says back up book return."

Sure, you may not think that's so hilarious, but this man burst into laughter.

Who's not so funny now!






 

A journey down the Namekagon and St Croix Rivers

Somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago, in Wisconsin, I took a solo trip down the Namekagon and St. Croix Rivers in an inflatable canoe. I want to tell you about that journey, but memory is strange, shattered, retreating, and downright squirmy. So instead of just fabricating an account of my long past journey out of a few broken shards and lots of obscuring new clay, I will start by telling you what I have to work with to reconstruct this historical event. First of all I have some general, cold facts. These aren't exactly memories but more like things I can deduce or know must be true. That the trip was in June is almost certainly true, for instance, but I don't really remember that. The 15 to 20 years ago is a process of elimination; it was before the new millennium but not very early in my marriage. That the trip was for three days and two nights is also something that seems to add up and is not a result of specific recollections of each night and day. The more vital second element I have to work with in this reconstruction are actual beating heart memories. I have four of them. That's it. Four memories for the whole tale of my epic, late nineties journey down the Namekagon and St Croix Rivers.  These memories are not fluid, narrative things. They are more like four-dimensional pictures, more like something out of a dream than something out of life. These four-dimensional pictures capture discrete moments in time, but they are also described, informed and illuminated by things that happened before and after them. They are not part of a story but are whole in themselves. Yes I can weave them into a narrative, I can arrange them in historical order, but they all exist in their own right and no longer belong to time.

And so in this nod to a deeper truth I will present the story of my river journey in these four memories, in no particular order, like in Slaughterhouse Five, where our main character, Billy Pilgrim, jumps randomly about in time. I wonder now if perhaps that part of Slaughterhouse Five wasn't more about the nature of memory than of the nature of time, though, of course, they are so closely woven together they might be the same thing.


One.

I was in my lounger-like inflatable canoe or kayak (the terms were interchangeable on my odd little ship) on the wide St. Croix River. The sky was a flat gray, and the water, surely ten times wider than the River I started out on the day before, was dark and strange, like ocean water, something deep and impenetrable. That day I had paddled more miles than I ever imagined I would, easily more than twenty, though my guess at that point was wild and scattered because I had lost count of bridges. I broke camp and began paddling early in the morning, and I went onto the land only as a last resort, to pee. Even that was done reluctantly. At all other times I remained on the water. I ate my lunch in my boat hooked up to overhanging trees. While I was terribly eager to make it as far downstream as possible that day, once it was clear I was getting very far downstream indeed I took breaks from paddling, not just for lunch and snacks, but to read. The kayak, when unsteered, tended to push off into the sidewalls of the teeming jungle of riverbank growth and hang up in a cloud of branches, leaves, and spiderwebs. At this moment I was lightly fending off the shore and reading.

I was reading Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. You will have heard of this book largely because of the glossy TV show. But only fantasy readers would have known of it then. Let's say if the book In the Name of the Wind is familiar to you now you would have known Game of Thrones then. For reasons I can't precisely trace, glowing reviews I would guess, I was so confident that Game of Thrones would be a great book that I brought little else to read. This was a mistake I would never make again. At the moment we're speaking of I had read far into the book and, sitting in my boat, was absorbed in it. I was also unhappy, unhappy on the river, with my predicament, and even in what I was doing at that moment. Somehow all the color of the world had drained out of it. Gray river, gray sky, looming night. I was thinking about how maybe, as darkness fell, I could just stay in my boat on the river. Between paragraphs I pictured how it might be to sleep in my cramped boat. I fended off the shore, I read, and the thought of sleeping in a small boat on a river scared me. I was waiting for that thought to scare me more than the thought of camping on shore. The thought of sleeping on the shore nearly terrified me. I fended off the shore again. I read the book miserably. Another person in the book died, some hope for the future of the narrative died, everyone and everything dies in Game of Thrones. I was just understanding that then, and with it came an epiphany; I hated Game of Thrones. This was a beautiful and powerful revelation. I did not have to read that book. It was an infection with a simple cure. I stopped reading it immediately. Color and happiness filled back into the world. The slate river and its primeval shore became a wild thing of wonder once again. I was terrified but thrilled to be on a river. I owned a river. I knew I would go ashore and camp there and I would live and it would all be okay.


Two.

All there is in this memory is a long slope leading up from the river. It was dirt and grass. There was a small roadside store and a payphone. I left all my array of gear and climbed the bank to the road and the store. The wall of the store was white. I felt strange to be off the river. I had managed to circumvent the pretzel logic of river trip shuttles (drop this off here, drive here, leave car, pack all this here, bike here, paddle down to car, etc. etc.) through the grace of my wife who had driven me to the start of this trip and was picking me up at the end. I had emergency coinage in my waterproof waistbelt. I put the dry coins in the payphone. I called my wife and arranged an early pick up.


Three.

I climbed into my tent. The tent was a burnt orange roomy dome tent that could sleep three. It had been many places with me. The woods were starting to get dark. I had eaten my dinner and have not even a faint guess of what it was. It was my first night of the trip, in the woods, on the edge of the river. Preparing my bedding in the tent I found a tick. I did not take this well. I flung it wildly away from me except, of course, I was in a dome tent. It bounced back. I tried to crush it. This was not easy, ticks are hard and flat by nature, but I eventually managed. I breathed a small breath of relief, but I quickly had a frightening, it turns out immensely accurate thought: where there is one tick, there may be more. I combed my person scrupulously. I found three ticks on me, then a fourth. I removed them and disposed of them, but saying so can never convey my sense of rising horror. At least an hour was spent combing minutely through every surface and thing in my tent (and finding a couple more) to establish a verified tick free environment. As I was doing this the sun outside was sinking. In the light of the dusk I looked at the walls of my tent. It showed, by shadow, that on the outside of my tent, hundreds and hundreds of ticks, an army of ticks, a thousand, slow, hungry ticks, were crawling up the side of the tent.

I did not sleep well.


Four.

My wife had driven me to the river before it was light out. Now with my inflatable kayak fully equipped and myself comfortably seated I was paddling a tiny river in the dawn. Fog curled from the water and hugged the low ground. This was bliss. The land was quiet and hopeful. There were strange areas of raw, torn up earth, beautiful red earth, that I couldn't figure out. Had logging and industry penetrated into these woods, or were there spring floods? The current was almost unnoticeable on the river, but sometimes when one first alights onto a canoe or kayak, before they get a little inured to the delights of it, paddling feels uncommonly powerful. One sticks a blade, an oar, into the perfect flat water and simply pulls it effortlessly forward to propel a whole boat into a graceful glide. And so it was for me then. I was flying through mist. Even in that moment I knew that no part of the whole of the rest of my trip could compare to this. The sun was low and scattered through young leaves and patches of fog. A deer regarded me from the shore, large and calm. It stood on red dirt. It was backed by emerald forest. It never moved in my mind again.

 If I could have stayed there forever, well, I did that too.

Dear Arthur E. Wright Middle School

Dear A.E. Wright Middle School:


I attended your institution for three unremarkable years in the mid seventies. After so many years have gone by I no longer remember a great deal from my time there, and there is nothing about that time at your Middle School either so wonderful or so scarring as to make me want to do excavation of what memories do still keep a shaky hold in the far recesses of my brain.

Nevertheless I do have one small piece of unfinished business to take care of with Arthur E. Wright Middle School. It involves the Bicentennial.

In 1976 we in America celebrated the Bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of the U.S.A. I did not have a great deal of perspective as an 11 year old boy as to exactly how big of a deal it was in the scheme of historical observances, but it seemed to me extremely significant at the time. The U.S. mint printed up special new coins to mark the occasion, and A.E. Wright Middle School held a big Bicentennial Fair. We had booths. We made things that were vaguely colonial. The very nature of our Social Studies classes were altered by this impending event. But the event I remember above all was the balloon release. In the days before the fair every student at A.E. Wright filled out a small postcard with our name and the school address. The card said something along the lines of "If you find this card please put it in a nearby mailbox to send to A.E. Wright Middle School." We then attached each card to its own helium balloon and let it go into the sky.

Then we waited.

And waited.

Some cards came back from as far away as Indio. Is that possible? Not, I mean, is it possible for a helium balloon to have traveled so far, rather, is it possible that I actually remember correctly the name of the town that the farthest venturing balloons made it to? I believe it is. The students whose cards came back from farthest away won a mint set of bicentennial coins. Cool.

I didn't win any coins. 

I have never, actually, won anything notable in my life.  A mint set of bicentennial coins would have been notable. A mint set of bicentennial coins is worth at this point anywhere from 12 to 15 dollars.

My card never came back.

But just the other day it occurred to me, it didn't come then. My card didn't get mailed back in 1976 or 1977, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have come later. I haven't checked in on its status for 38 years. It could have been mailed in from anywhere in the world over those past 38 years. I could still be the contest winner!

Has there been any mail for me since 1977? Also, if the postcard arrived from somewhere further east than Indio, say Chiriaco Summit or, be still my beating heart, all the way in Phoenix, do you still have any bicentennial coin mint sets to give out to your actual contest winner: me?


Thank you for your time and attention to this matter,

Kind regards,




F. Calypso