"Get a Horse!"

People fascinate (and too often infuriate) me for a wide range of reasons, one of which being the vehemence with which so many resist the idea of change and the total acceptance of it once it has arrived. I started this particular blog a couple days ago, then when time came (today) to post it, I realized it needed to be in two parts: material changes and societal changes So let’s start with the material, which seem to be faster to come along and generally with less resistance than social changes.

Humans have a general historical suspicion and distrust of technology. The knee jerk reaction to anything new is either “it’ll never work” or “well, I’d never use it.” The first automobiles were greeted with catcalls of: “Get a horse!” Orville and Wilbur’s idea of a flying machine was generally denounced with the firm general conviction that “It’ll never fly.”

Yet we have experienced, in a just a little over a hundred years, a sea change in how technology has totally and forever changed our lives.

I do not think my immediate family…my mom, my dad, and me…had an indoor bathroom until I was approaching puberty. I know we didn’t on the little house on Loves Court in Loves Park; I’m sure there wasn’t room for it in the 14 foot long trailer in which we lived in Gary, Indiana, where I broke my leg and was in a body cast for a month or so during the heat of summer, and I know we did not have air conditioning. We did not have an indoor bathroom until we’d been living on Blackhawk Ave. for some time. I seem to recall a hand pump for water in the kitchen, and I definitely remember a hand-pumped kerosene stove in the trailer.

Impossible to believe now, but few of us had even heard of television before 1945, and in 1949 people would stand outside appliance store windows to watch the bulky sets with the blurry black and white photos. Radio was our primary source of entertainment, and we usually went to the movies once a week until I was a teenager: then I’d go once a week with my family, and every Saturday afternoon on my own with, as stated before, my “allowance” of $1.25: 50 cents for the movie, a quarter for a chocolate ice cream soda, 20 cents for two tall bags of Manly Popcorn, and 30 cents for the bus to and from.

Mail was delivered twice a day, for three cents a stamp. Electric refrigerators and washing machines were in very few homes prior to the 1940s. On ice-delivery day, you’d put a card in your front window with a little an arrow pointing to the amount of ice you wanted, and it would be brought in an open truck with a heavy tarp in the back covering the ice, and all the neighbor kids would run up to it on warm summer days and take little chips of ice to suck on.

It’s impossible to totally separate technological change from societal change, since technology is a river on which society floats.

The past was not all nostalgia and warm snugglies. Now-eradicated or easily treated diseases cut down tens of thousands, and for improvements in medicine alone we should give thanks. But with change also comes a degree of loss. The more technology takes us out of ourselves comes a loss of innocence, of security, of a sense of physical, emotional, and geological closeness with friends and family.
Like it or not, change is constant and we are carried along with it willingly or no. All we can do is remember what was and use it as an anchor or a guidepost to what is to come.

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Oh, the Nobility!

While modesty should forbid my endlessly singing my own praises, as you probably have noticed, it does not. It struck me this morning how truly noble and brave I am. I was for whatever reason going over a litany of my woes, prompted yet again by being in a restaurant and watching people eat. Biiiiggg bite. Chew, chew, chew…look of concentrated pleasure…swallow absolutely effortlessly without a nanosecond of thought…another Biiiiggg bite…repeat. And I am tempted to walk over to them and slap them silly, yelling: Appreciate it, you twit! But I don’t. No, basking in the gentle glow of the halo over my head, I merely open my mouth less than the equivalent of two fingers width to take a tiny mouse-bite, chew, chew, chew waiting for the correct amount of saliva to form to notify my throat that it is time to swallow; finally realizing that I have no saliva and therefore cannot let my throat know it should swallow, taking a sip of water/coffee/milk and swallowing. This has been going on for five years now…you’d think it would stop coming as a surprise to realize I not only can’t do what I used to do or what just about everyone else does, but that I will never be able to eat normally again.

(Here…have a Kleenex. Wipe your eyes. Blow your nose.)

I go to morning coffee with my friend Gary, who orders a large breakfast sandwich and a stick pastry made largely of filo dough. I order a stick pastry and coffee. By the time Gary has pushed his empty plate aside and gotten a second cup of coffee I have finished perhaps half of my pastry and as many sips of coffee as were necessary to wash down the mouse-bites.

(Can I borrow the box of Kleenex a moment?)

I cannot whistle. I cannot stick my tongue far enough out of my mouth to lick my lips. I have little or no control over my mouth. My lips are constantly pursed as if in prissy disapproval. When I open my mouth to talk, I have to be very careful that the whatever-the-liquid-is-that-forms-in-the-front-of-my-mouth does not pour out making me appear to be in contention for the Village Idiot award. I am considering getting a bib, because I can’t go through a “meal” without having the front of my shirt covered with crumbs, drops of coffee, or various droplets of one sort or another.

And as I finished that last paragraph, I was overcome with shame. To call anyone, even myself, a Village Idiot is insulting and demeaning to those people at whom the charge is directed. They don’t intend to be the way they are; they have no control over it. They certainly didn’t choose it. Nor did I, of course

And I would really like to think…the danger of self-delusion ever present…that one of the reasons I am constantly bombarding you with my bitchings and moanings and “poor me”s is to remind both of us just how precious even the smallest things in life are. We…both you and me…really give very little thought to just how lucky we are to be experiencing this speck in time we call life. It isn’t always easy, and in fact can be incredibly hard for some, but it is still an astonishing gift, given only once and for a very short time. The very least we can do is appreciate it and try not to squander it.

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A Pile of Rocks

Well, what do you know? Here I am heading off on another rant-and-rave on one of my favorite topics: email spam. I’d really like to know how this spam thing works. Obviously it is something of a franchise program, for if you’ll note, you’ll get five or ten with exactly the same heading (usually with two or three egregious misspellings).

I swear, these idiots truly must think everyone is dumber than a pile of rocks. Unfortunately, since they wouldn’t keep doing it if it weren’t paying off for them, they may be right.

My current favorite is “Earn $5,000 to $10,000 at home every month. GUARANTEED!” Well, I admit I was just the teeniest bit skeptical until I saw the word GUARANTEED which, of course, like mommy kissing a boo-boo, removed all my doubts and made it all better. How can I possibly doubt the veracity of anyone willing to GUARANTEE me $5,000 to $10,000 a month? I do tend to find my eyes misting over a bit, though, thinking of the nobility of these wonderfully generous people.

I am also impressed by the recent, though now largely vanished, announcement that major motion picture companies are offering top dollar (I like that phrase almost as much as “big money” or “piled high”) looking for movie extras in my area. Of course they are. I can imagine how very very difficult it must be to find someone willing to be paid money to stand around in a crowd scene for a movie, and they are shooting movies in my neighborhood nearly every day. (Well, they did do the latest Batman in Chicago, and I missed my chance on that one, but I suspect several people in Pence, Wisconsin, might possibly have gotten the same offer. Pence is obviously the new Hollywood.)

You have no idea how very, very much I want to respond to these ads with the same positive, evangelical-fervor as they were sent. (Oh, yes! Please!! Please tell me how I can earn $5,000 to $10,000 every month from my own home! I am sure I am the only person in the whole world who realizes the wonderousness and sincerity of such a wonderful offer. And that you GUARANTEE it makes it even more precious to me. In anticipation of my first monthly check, I have placed an order for a new Cadillac. My second check will go toward the downpayment on a new condo. Please send me my money right away.)

One I just got rather frightens me, though. It tells me I can lose 20 pounds overnight. At that rate, I would totally disappear in a week!

The problem with responding to any of these offers with a suggestion that they wrap their offer around a stick of dynamite and put it in any one of their choice of bodily orifices will only result in your finding yourself with 189,999 brand new and equally fascinating offers. I one time made the mistake of requesting mortgage loan information from an on-line pop-up ad (far, far higher class than mere spam, and therefore to be trusted implicitly). By the next day I had received 273 similar offers from 273 different companies. How ever they knew I’d responded to that one, I have no idea. Really. I don’t. No. Do you?

But I do fondly remember a product from the years before spam was king. It was an ad ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to kill any bug or insect. It cost $20.00 but it lived up to its promise. When you sent in your $20.00 you received a small box which proved to contain two small blocks of wood, labeled “A” and “B”, and an instruction sheet which said: “Place insect on block A. Strike with block B. Repeat if necessary.” I love truth in advertising.

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Pond Scum

I am often bemused by the fact that for all my Pollyannish attitudes and gushing pronouncements on just how wonderful people are, I in fact very often consider vast numbers of people pond scum, whose membership in the human race should be terminated.

A week or so ago, I watched the questionably-titled "America's Got Talent"—an indication of both the sorry state of television and my desperation to watch it regardless. The audience had obviously been transported bodily from a “bread and circuses” event in 1st century Rome, glorying in their negative power. They hated everyone, talented or not. The last contestant (for some very strange reason I do not understand, the last contestant is always by far the most talented. Sheer coincidence, I'm sure) was a singer whose vocal cords had been smashed in an accident eleven years ago, and who had been unable to even speak for several years.

Granted, the quality of the “talent” that preceded him had set the mob in a justifiably foul mood, but they took it several steps beyond foul. The minute he walked on stage, the boos started, and drowned him out as he started to sing. He has a great voice, but they didn't give a shit: they wanted blood. And then, probably on cue from some unseen prompter, the boos turned to cheers and at the end of this number everyone was standing and cheering and doing that uniquely human "What? Us? No! We always thought he was great" turnaround that always follows the success of something everyone was sure would fail. Pond scum, every one of them.

E-mail spammers are pond scum, pure and simple. Those who prey on the trusting, the naive, and the elderly, are so far beneath contempt that applying the term “pond scum” to them could be considered a compliment.

TV evangelists who shamelessly bilk those desperate for reassurance and something to believe in by pleading for money to do “God’s work”—which somehow always coincidentally seems to include making the preacher very, very rich—are pond scum.

Politicians and talk show pundits who ruthlessly use bigotry, intolerance, and the boundless ignorance of those who never take the time to think for themselves to promote their own ends are pond scum.

People so pathetically insecure that the only way they can feel superior to others is through cruelty, embarrassment, and insensitivity are pond scum.

And thee and me, my friends, ride pristine in our neat little boats upon a vast, smooth, and algae-green sea.

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The Demons Within

I try not to think of it, but there are times when I frighten myself realizing how precariously I can balance between my self delusion of being St. Francis of Assisi and the awareness of my potential to be Vlad the Impaler. I abhor violence in all forms, especially that performed on one living creature by another. I am vehemently, rabidly against the death penalty. Yet even as I rale against it, I know full well that, were someone to harm someone I love, and I had a gun in my hand, I would not hesitate for the blinking of an eye to use it. Not just use it, but do so with icy deliberation, starting with both knees, working up to the groin, then, when I am quite sure the perpetrator fully appreciates the fact that he probably should not have done what he did, one between the eyes. And I would still have a couple bullets left just in case the first four hadn’t done the job.

Man is, after all, a predatory animal. He could not have survived without using violence to get what he wanted. But it seems that 5,000 years of painful struggle to become something better than what we are has, regrettably, done little or nothing to tame our violent instincts.

I am unalterably opposed to the death sentence…not only because far too many innocent people have been put to death by our overly zealous criminal “justice” system, especially in enlightened states like Texas. Once having executed someone, a state’s “Ooops, sorry about that” doesn’t quite cut it. Even for the guilty, being put to death does little. Other than the momentary terror of receiving a fatal injection, once they are dead, their punishment is over. Far, far better…and in the long run, much more fitting…to lock the criminal away for the rest of his life, so that every morning he may wake with the memory of what he has done and the knowledge of where he is, how he got there, and what his future holds.

I tend to be a believer in the old “an eye for an eye” principle when it comes to violence. One of my first acts when I am declared emperor will be to order that any act of deliberate violence performed by one person on another (or on a helpless animal—and no, we will not get into the subject of vegetarianism just now) will have the exact same violence performed on him/her. A slap in the face will get you a slap on the face; shoot someone between the eyes so you can steal their new pair of tennis shoes and you will be shot between the eyes. Simple.

As to my own tendency to violence, I am always aware that it is there, lurking somewhere in the dark corners of my mind. I am prone to being plunged into a fury when things do not go the way I have every reason to suspect that they should. I usually manage to turn the fury inward, but I have been known to throw, smash, and jump up and down on things. The one time I directed my anger and frustration at another human being was when I first lived in Chicago and was involved in an absolutely disastrous relationship. At one point, I threw him into a wall and broke his arm. Not my proudest moment.

That our culture, sadly, is increasingly enured to violence should not come as any great surprise to anyone who has read a newspaper or watched a television news program. It’s hardly surprising that children assume, from everything they see and hear, that violence is a perfectly logical way to settle any dispute or conflict. The concept of the consequences of violence is totally ignored.
So that’s what I think about violence. And you damned well better agree with me, if you know what’s good for you.

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Omaha

I have just realized, after starting and dropping at least half a dozen projects, that I am having a lazy day. I do not like lazy days. They frighten me. From somewhere within me, in the long, long subway tunnel of my mind where each day is like the evenly-spaced lights that line the tunnel and come leaping out of the unknowable future to rush forward, flash past, and recede, becoming smaller and smaller until they can no longer be seen, comes a feather-soft breeze. And in that breeze is ghost-voice whisper saying: “time is passing. Do not waste even a second of it.”

Time and life, and our passage through both, lend themselves to an infinite number of analogies, similies, and metaphors, and I hope you’ll excuse me if I use a couple of them here.

First, time is like pouring mercury into cupped hands. It cannot be grasped, and runs, unstoppable, through our fingers. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Time and life are inseparably linked, and they combine for less than a nanosecond’s nanosecond to form a microscopically small island in the sea of infinity. It is all we have ever had or will ever have of existence, and to waste a moment of it is to lose something that can never be regained.

Second, each of us is in a very small boat of life, drifting down the stream of time. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that once having started the journey, it’s not possible to turn around and head back upstream. It is a glorious outing, but it seems that with very few exceptions, everyone is so preoccupied with the passing scenery that they are oblivious to the growing roar of the waterfall ahead. I’ve heard it almost from the moment I got in the boat.

Thirdly, life can be likened to being on a train. Man is the only animal aware of either time or the future, and it is probably a blessing for the cows and pigs riding the train to the stockyards that they are not aware of either. But then, neither are most of the humans aboard, sitting in rear-facing seats in the train’s passenger cars. They are aware of the passage of time, and they know where they have been and where they are now, yet amazingly few seem to pay much attention to where they are headed. I think of one of Carl Sandberg’s Chicago Poems, “Limited”, in which he describes riding a train.

All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes....I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: "Omaha."

But, on thinking it over, I realize that if we were too concerned with worrying about what lies ahead, we may well never get much done. And I also am fully aware that too often in my life, the pleasure of some experience has been tarnished by the fact that even as I am enjoying it, I am aware that it must end. And since we are powerless to avoid the waterfall, perhaps it is best that we are not aware that we are sweeping toward it.

Our folklore is full of cautionary tales of which we are largely dismissive. Remember the Grasshopper and the Ant? It is unfortunate but probably unavoidable, given the complexities of life, that there are far more grasshoppers in the world than ants.

Well, I’ll worry about all this tomorrow...in Omaha.

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Beliefs

Each of us, from birth, acquires a set of beliefs upon which we base our lives, our attitudes and our actions. There are two basic types of belief: those we format ourselves, from our own experience, and those which are simply handed us. (“This is the way it is, kid.” “Oh. Okay.”) Many of our beliefs are fed us from infancy in the form of the regurgitated beliefs of our parents, not unlike birds feed their young. If our parents and our relatives believe something, we tend to believe it as well. It avoids a lot of pressure from our immediate peers, and saves us an awful lot of that pesky “thinking” stuff.

Many of my personal beliefs, not surprisingly, tend to differ considerably from the norm. I was never one for believing what I was told simply because I was told to believe it. Despite frequent evidence to the contrary, I consider logic to be the single most important factor in any belief. I am constantly in receipt of emails whose sole purpose seems to be to defy and utterly destroy logic. That people spew out this raw sewage is disheartening enough…that other people not only actually accept it as gospel and pass it on to others is mind-boggling.

One belief lies at the very core of my being, and it has to do, paradoxically, with beliefs: you have the inalienable right to believe whatever you wish to believe. You do not have the right to impose your beliefs on me. I find it bitterly ironic that so very many people who demand the right to their beliefs also demand that everyone else share them. I may not share your belief. I may on occasion think your belief is antithical to mine. But I would never dream of insisting you abandon it solely because I don’t agree with it.

I hold strong personal beliefs about religion. 1) I despise the unmitigated gall of proselytizers who show up at your door to show you the “way to the truth”...you obviously being far too stupid to find it yourself. If I wish someone’s counsel on the subject, I shall ask for it, thank you. 2) If there is a Hell, the Lava Level is reserved for those who presume to speak for God. I sometimes regret being an agnostic if for no other reason than that I would truly love to see Reverent Phelps and his loathsome ilk suffer eternally the agony they have caused others. 3) When someone tells me they are “born again” I am tempted to suggest that if they’d done it right the first time, they could have saved themselves the trouble. 4) More wars, misery, and human suffering can be attributed to organized religion than to any other cause. 5) While I would truly like to believe in God and Heaven…and freely admit to having called upon Him from time to time…logic overwhelms desire, and I cannot. I can and do hope, but I cannot truly believe.

As to an afterlife, I simply cannot believe in one. I believe, and have stated several times before, that when we die, we simply re-enter the nothingness from which we emerged. We weren’t aware of anything before we were born, and we’ll not be aware of anything after we die. There is nothing the least bit frightening about this concept, and it encourages me to appreciate the preciousness of every minute of life while I have it.

I continue to believe in the basic goodness of humanity, despite mountain ranges of evidence to the contrary. It is the relatively few sick, perverted, evil creatures among us whose only link to humanity is genetic who cast their pall on the rest of us. I believe we hear so much about the bad things in the world simply because they are the exception, not the rule.

Conversely, I hold those who merely accept whatever they’re told, who never question anything, to be second class humans. Ignorance can be cured. Stupidity cannot.

Well, enough for the moment. Oh, and did you know that the Jews control the world and everything in it? They get their power from eating Christian babies. I heard that somewhere, so it must be true.

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Why? (Part MLX)

I know, I’ve asked this question before…several times, but why are there so many things in life that I simply cannot understand? It’s not as though I don’t try. I really, really do. But when I heard the news…and the very fact that it was “news” utterly dumbfounded me…that Brad and Angelina (no last names needed, we ALL know who Brad and Angelina are. We worship them. Their every move is followed with gape-jawed awe) had had twins, and that the first photos of the babies are expected to fetch $11 million, my tenuous attachment to reality was tested yet again.

Please, please, someone, explain to me why I…why anyone not a personal friend or family member of these people… should care? Please tell me how, in a world with 6-plus billion people, the arrival of two more should send so many people into paroxysms of awe, wonder, joy, delight, and enthusiasm. Mary Jackson, of Tupelo, Mississippi, gave birth to twins at exactly the same time as Angelina. If pictures of Angelina’s kids are worth $11 million, shouldn’t Mary be able to expect, say, $6 million for hers? Where are the Second Coming, stop-the-presses headlines on little Oscar and Suzanne Jackson, or any of the other 600,000 children born within 25 minutes of Brad and Angelina’s latest ode to heterosexuality?

I like Brad. I do. I think he is extremely sexy. So is Matt Damon. And Ben Afflek. And several dozen other male movie stars. But then, so are about 200 guys I pass on the street every day, and I haven’t a clue as to who they are.

I find it truly sad that our culture is so absorbed in the trivial, the superficial, and the meaninglessness, and the inordinate amount of time we spend in things which have no real impact on our lives. Are our own lives so utterly devoid of purpose, meaning, and pleasure that we must spend millions of dollars stripping the newsstands of “Celebrity” publications (printed, I suspect, on recycled toilet paper) to try to squeeze a drop of vicarious…whatever…from the belches, \burps and insipid romances of people we have never met and will never meet? It is, truly, to weep.

Somehow, I place the fact that Mario Lopez (hot as he is) has broken up with his latest girlfriend somewhat below the fact that wars rage across the globe; disease and starvation are rampant, and natural disasters claim millions of lives each year. Call me silly, but it’s just the way I am.

I constantly talk about my refusal to face reality. That doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s there. But I substitute my ego for reality. I turn everything toward myself and my personal existence in an effort to improve myself. There are so very many things to do, so many serious real personal issues to consider, and so very little time in which to do it, that if something does not directly involve my day-to-day existence, my health, my income, my own friends and family, or my future, I simply don’t have the time to bother with it.

Living vicariously through total strangers who are prettier or richer or more successful than we—have you noticed that superior intelligence so seldom enters into these pantings-after?—as so frighteningly many people appear to do, does keep them from facing reality, but to what positive end? Do they channel their incomprehensible and totally pointless envy and adulation into making their own lives, or those of people around them, better? Need I even have asked the question?

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The Boggled Mind

I was wondering this morning just how many words I have written over the course of my lifetime (yes, it’s that kind of day). Equally important, I wondered how many more words will I have time to write. Life is, after all, but a microscopically tiny island in the sea of eternity.

A quick bit of figuring indicates I’ve written about 152,430 words in this blog alone, (240 entries averaging 635 words each), plus well over a million in my already published books (15 total at an average of 77,000 words each), another 250,000 words sitting in books waiting to be published. And then there are 60-odd years of letters and almost 20 years of copious emails and.....

To have written so many words might imply a vast knowledge of a great many things, but if you’ve been following the bouncing ball of these blogs, you know that’s not true. My knowledge may be broad, but it is also very shallow.

I am constantly awed and humbled by the fact that there are so many things I do not know; so many things that cannot be known. How many grains of sand on earth? How many stars in the sky? Why can we not be better than we are? My mind is easily boggled (“For I am the King of Boggledom”) and I spend a great deal of time in the confusion of wanting to know something I do not and cannot know.

While I do not know why you are reading these words, I’m infinitely grateful that you are. And unjustifiably vain as I am, I suspect that you recognize that beneath the veneer of one person’s egoism (mine, in this case) lies a mirror in which you can discern a reflection of yourself.

Physical touch is the most direct means of communication between any two people, but in lieu of that, words create the bonds which connect each of us to the other. Regardless of how many billions of people there are in the world, words directly link only two: the speaker/writer and the listener/reader. So as far as I am concerned, you are the only other person in the world I can hope to connect with, and who can prove or disprove that I have done so. My mind sends thoughts to my fingers, which convert them to words on a computer screen or piece of paper, which are nothing until your eyes see them and convey them to your brain, which in turn forms the link between us. Only you can determine if I’m successful or not.

John Donne said “No man is an island”, but I tend to disagree. We are all islands in this vast sea of time and space, and it is only the links we establish, largely through words, with other islands which give us the sense, comfort, and security of not being alone.

So I stand on my own little island of “Me”on the periphery of your awareness,dressed in my now-tattered Pagliacci clown suit, jumping up and down and waving my arms to get your attention out there on the island of "You",and sending out a steady stream of words in the form of thoughts and impressions and ideas you might pick up and look at.

For the bottom line of all this is that words create a link between “You” and the “Me” and the result is an “Us.” And as long as there is an “Us,” we are not alone.

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Dangling Wires

I sometimes think of my head as a large, unfinished attic with two windows through which I look out at the world. When it came to the wiring of the attic, however, the electrician(s) must have been in a hurry to move on to a more important job. Rather than neatly color-coding each wire and making sure that each went from point A directly to point B, they apparently left hundreds of exposed live electric wires just dangling from the ceiling, so that when the breeze of thought stirs them, they brush against one another randomly, effectively short circuiting any attempt at linear thinking.

The breeze that comes with music must be especially strong, since it almost always sends me off in random and totally unrelated (on the surface, at any rate) directions.

Yesterday I heard music from one of the great documentary TV series of the early 50s, Victory at Sea, composed by Richard Rogers, and when the main theme came along, I was instantly transported to August of 1953 and to Broadway’s Majestic Theater. It was my first trip to New York, and the first Broadway show I ever saw…Rogers and Hammerstein’s Me and Juliet. The one hit song from that show was “No Other Love”, which was taken note for note from the Victory at Sea main theme.

But once a short-circuit has begun, it tends to set off a string of other sparkings, as this one did. Another song from Me and Juliet was “Keep it Gay” (a song by the same title was used in the more recent Mel Brooks movie, The Producers). I was 19 years old, gay, and in New York on my own for the very first time. Not knowing exactly where to go to find other gays, I went down to Washington Square in the Village, and remember standing in front of the New York Public Library whistling “Keep it Gay,” in hopes that someone might get the message. No one did, alas.

So now we’re short-circuiting on New York/gay memories, and sparking to 1960 when my mom and I went to New York…her first time. I’ve probably mentioned these two memories before, since I tend to repeat my favorite stories. Anyway, we saw The Sound of Music the night Oscar Hammerstein died, and all of Broadway dimmed its lights in tribute.

For some unknown reason, whenever I was with my mom and unable to do anything about it, I would find myself being cruised by guys I’d have given anything to be able to respond to. I remember we were at the top of the Empire State Building and a really nice looking young man took an interest in me. Utterly frustrating, but I couldn’t very well say: “Wait here, Mom, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

When it comes to my writing, my mind’s odd wiring has taught me never to try to plot things out too far in advance. I’ve become rather adept, I hope, at making use of these little electrical “pffffffftzzzzzzzzzz” reactions in my writing. (Well, this blog is a perfect example, obviously.) The best I can do is, when I start a book, to do a stick-figure drawing of the plot, and perhaps, at the very beginning, point to a spot on the horizon and say “let’s try to end up over there.” Writers who can and do draw intricate treasure maps of their books before they ever start writing (“three paces due north from this specific event, turn SSE and go exactly six paces to something else specific,” etc.) is fine for them, but I cannot comprehend how they do it, or why they would want to tie themselves down so securely. Part of the fun of writing, for me, is never knowing what comes next. It’s all up to the dangling wires.

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Minds and Computers

I’ve long ago given up trying to figure out either my mind or the computer. People seem to be comparing them all the time, and I guess I have to agree. Both seem to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, both can deny you access to information you know you have and want and need at any time, and my wanting them to do anything else is like opening the door to a jetliner at 40,000 feet and stepping out without a parachute.

My computer, which I really do work to extremes, will frequently, suddenly, and for absolutely no reason I can see, decide to slow down. I will try to go from one place to another on the net (or even within the computer itself) and the screen I want to leave will just sit there, staring back at me, expressionless but obviously uncomprehending or uncaring—or, as I strongly suspect, a combination of both. Very infrequently, it will simply lock up tighter than a drum, making it impossible for me to do anything at all, other than manually turn the tower off and switch it back on again.

The other day, I clicked on a photo to move it from one part of the page to the other, dragged it halfway to where I wanted it, let my finger off the mouse for an instant, and it disappeared. Vanished, never to be seen again. It did not go back to where it was in the first place, it did not go into my overflowing “Wastebasket”, though that particular feature of my computer is so full of assorted junk I probably wouldn’t be able to find the photo even if it was there. And my mind works exactly the same way: I have an idea that I wish to make use of in another context, and somewhere in between, the idea vanishes, as does, usually, the thought I was trying to relate it to.

Though I must say, in defense of the computer, that were it as completely as unpredictable as my mind, it would be totally unuseable. You’re familiar with those annoying Pop-Up ads that just appear when you’re doing something and you have to take the time and effort to click on the little “x” in the pop-up window to get rid of them? Well, my mind is one continual pop-up window. I’m trying to think of how to describe, let’s say, a piece of furniture (don’t ask me why I might want to be describing a piece of furniture…just go with me here, okay?). The instant I start I think of a chair my mom hat that her cat totally destroyed by peeing in it. Or I am writing a note to a friend telling him/her about something that happened today while I was walking to the grocery store and here comes a pop-up alerting me to the fact that the parking garage behind the store used to be a tennis court when I first lived in Chicago. A fascinating bit of trivia, but having nothing whatever to do with the grocery store or my walking to it today.

That I am able to fan and swat my way through these swarms of mental pop-ups is, I’m sure, admirable, but it is also infinitely frustrating.

Obviously, the makers of computers had to have designed them using the brain as some sort of model, and increasingly obvious, too, is the fact that more and more people rely more heavily on the computer for things the brain should do for itself. I refer you once again to E.M. Forster’s classic 1909 short (12,000 word) story, “The Machine Stops”, which you can find on Google. (That was a classic example of one of my mental pop-ups, and only goes to prove I am not only not the first person in the world to relate computers and the mind, but I’m 99 years behind E.M. Forster.)

Better late than never, I guess.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Little Things

I’m pretty good at dealing with the big things in life: cancer, the death of loved ones (though not quite so well with aging), but it is the little things…the endless, niggling minor frustrations and irritations which mean absolutely nothing in the overall scheme of things…which drive me to utter distraction. The big things I understand I have no control over, but the little things, the things that can happen to anyone but seem only to happen to me; the things that, if they do happen to other people are dispatched with casual ease, are what get to me and infuriate me with my inability or incompetence to deal with.

It was very hot last night. I have been sleeping on my sleeper sofa for the past week due to my bed being overrun by the bedbugs which have been infesting my building. The exterminators have been in no fewer than six times. Count ‘em…six. And each time they come, I am required to remove all the pictures from my walls (still not sure why, but mine is not to reason why), empty out all my drawers, remove everything from night stands, bookshelves, closets, etc. Where I am to put these mountains of materials in a very very small apartment is not their concern. Every single item of clothing, every piece of bedding must be laundered. And so I do.

And they come. And they spray, and then I replace all the pictures on the walls, put everything back in the drawers and on the shelves and in the closets and remake the bed (including replacing the full-mattress, zippered antimicrobial and antibacterial mattress cover (ever tried to do that by yourself? Pure joy, I can assure you.). And then two weeks later they come back, and I must remove all the pictures from the walls, empty out all my drawers, remove everything from night stands,…get the idea? And then two weeks later they come back.

Oh, and then they tell me I am “not prepared.” Jeesus!!

On their last visit, I asked the man doing the spraying if I had it all right this time and he said yes. I then left the apartment (a requirement) for four hours, taking my cat down to my friend Gary’s apartment for safekeeping. When I returned, I noticed that the only thing in the entire apartment the exterminators had touched was the bed.

That night, confident that all was finally over, I juggled and struggled to get the zippered full-mattress cover back on, made the bed with freshly laundered sheets, and went to bed. I awoke two hours later with itching, and got up to find three bedbugs strolling casually over my sheets.

I am told the problem lies with my wooden captain’s bed, which I purchased (around $500 without mattress) shortly before I moved to Chicago. Because it is wood and has lots of detail work which afford lots of joints for bedbugs to crawl between and breed, no matter how thoroughly or how often they spray, the eggs survive to hatch anew.I have been told I will probably have to get rid of the bed. Oh, sure. No problem at all. What’s $500. And of course the mattress will have to go, too. Another, what?, $300 or so? And then because bedbugs can get in carpets, I’ll have to throw out my living room rug, also new when I moved in.

Okay, I know full well that all this is hardly on the level of genocide in Darfur, or global warming, or the oil crisis or the delightful Whitman’s sampler of new wars our beloved leaders are eager to open up. My bitching and moaning and feeling terribly put upon is laughable. Unfortunately, I”m not laughing.

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Bubbly Creek

Where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River stand four large, regal-looking towers, two on each bank, flanking the lift bridge. Only one or two of them houses the mechanism that raises and lowers the bridge, but the builders thought four would look better and more impressive. So there are four. The bridge is so delicately balanced that it only takes the equivalent of a 1950s Volkswagon engine to lift and lower it.

One of them is now the Chicago Bridge Museum, which I had never even known existed, and to which, had it not been for my friend Gary, I would probably never have given a second thought.

Chicago has more lift bridges than any city in the country, and the Chicago River is, I believe, the only river in the world that flows backward. How it came to do so is a fascinating (to me) story.

Chicago was born where two slow-moving streams, the North Branch and the South Branch joined to form the Main Stem, linking the branches to Lake Michigan. The surrounding territory was largely inhospitable marshland and bogs which the city’s growth slowly consumed. The Chicago River served as the city’s sewer and until only recently was one of the most polluted bodies of water in America if not the world. Because the sewage flowed down the North Branch and up the South Branch and into the Main Stem, all the sewage, garbage, and general debris of the city flowed freely into Lake Michigan, which was and is the city’s main source of drinking water. A water pump station was built out in the lake beyond the area of main pollution, but the pollution produced by the city’s growth soon overtook it and another station was built further out, which in turn was soon overtaken.

It was decided to dig a canal connecting the South Branch to the Des Plaines river, therefore routing the growing city’s garbage and sewage from Lake Michigan and sending it down stream to the Mississippi, St. Louis and beyond. Only because the land sloped to the west was this possible, but once the canal was opened, the river reversed its flow.

All the growing city’s industrial waste and garbage could then happily be tossed into the Chicago River and let the people downstream on the Mississippi worry about it.

As the city continued to grow, the gigantic Chicago Stockyards were constructed along another stream feeding into the South Branch, called “Bubbly Creek”…a lovely name conjuring up images of forest and glens and clear artesian water bubbling up from the earth. Unfortunately, that image would be wrong. Bubbly Creek received its name from the fact that the tens of thousands of cattle carcasses and general offal from the slaughter houses were dumped into it, and their rotting at the bottom of the creek created methane gas which bubbled to the surface.

During the great Chicago fire, a large stretch of the South Branch, including Bubbly Creek, actually caught fire.

Throughout most of its history, Chicago was known not for its beauty but for its stench. One prominent New York businessman arrived in Chicago by train, stepped onto the platform, took one whiff of the air, got back on the train and never returned. And even today, after years of devoted and concentrated effort to restore the river’s purity, swimming in and fishing from the river are discouraged.

And there you have it. As I said, fascinating. You must come and visit some day, and take a boat cruise up the river. It’s a really beautiful way to see the city. And you don’t have to hold your nose anymore.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.