A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things Lived On

One of our first discoveries on moving out to the country a couple summers ago was that the monopolistic trash-removal company that serves our neighborhood is a pack of chiseling swine. Fifty clams a month they demanded for the privilege of picking up our household trash twice a month and hauling it to the county landfill.

Out of thrift, then, we fired the bandits toot-sweet. We compost our cooking scraps (if you leave out anything with fats or oils in it, the varmints leave it alone), and we recycle glass, paper and cardboard. The price for this simple economy is that about once a month I throw about ten bags of trash into the pickup and make a stop at the landfill on my way to work. Fifteen minutes' work? Worth the candle in anybody's book.

Once a year, however, I deeply -- that's deeply -- regret this decision of ours, and this evening is this year's occasion. As you may have heard (if you're not enduring it yourself), we're undergoing our usual July/August heat-wave, and temperatures broke triple digits today with no relief in sight. Arriving home after work, I parked the truck, intending to load up the overflowing trash to take early tomorrow morning. Wonder Woman donned her dainty rubber gloves to help, and we opened the first of three large rubber cans to begin manhandling its contents into the truck bed.

Putting the full trash-bags into the cans is an interesting illustration of the all-too-human trait of avoidance. You open the top, holding your breath against the resulting olfactory assault, quickly dump the bag in, and just as quickly slam the thing shut, the while thinking, Thank Glub I don't have to deal with that right now! And you go on your way back to your clean, well-lit life, banishing from your mind the dreadful prospect of coping with the accumulated avoidances festering in those noisome cans.

But the piper will be paid, as sure as death and taxes, and when we opened the first can this evening, there the piper was, hand outstretched, demanding the palm be crossed.

I'm not going to try to put you off your feed by describing the sight -- and, more to the point, the smell -- of garbage that's been roasting inside a rubber enclosure for a month of ninety-degree heat. But I could. Oh, man -- I could!

Before beginning, we'd had a moment of indecision. It was dinnertime, the water was boiling for the hot dogs and the tomato salad was ready, but the question was, Which choice was going to be harder on the stomach? Do it before dinner, and risk a loss of appetite? Or do it after eating, and risk the loss of the dinner itself? We chose the former -- perhaps out of that same thrift, I don't know. You hate to lose those Hebrew Nationals -- them's good, if pricey, eatin' -- and if you get too woozy to eat, well, you just put 'em back in the fridge uncooked.

After the hideous chore was done, Wondie came back inside, peremptorily picked up her dinner plate and utensils, put them back in the cupboard and went upstairs to shower -- I imagine she scrubbed real hard. Those little wiggly things will do that to a body. I did manage to choke down a hot dog, on general principles, but with absolutely no enthusiasm for the job.

Out the window I can see the truck now, its miasmatic contents surrounded by a halo of flies, hovering worriedly over the pile of heat-accelerated rot and buzzing the muscidaeical equivalent of "My babies! My babies!" The smell on this still, hot night is horrendous as soon as you leave the front door -- fully twenty yards from the truck -- and it leaves one with a rare but understandable enthusiasm for economic monopoly.

Happy Black Tom Explosion Day!

I have had a recurring dream in which I come to discover the existence of a Beatles album that I'd never heard of before. I'll be yakking along with somebody when they mention, I dunno, "Hungagunga" or something. I stop 'em: Sorry, say what?

Yeah, you know, "Hungagunga," the album that came between "Revolver" and "Sergeant Pepper"? He'll pull out the LP, and bing, there it is: A whole Beatles album that I've never heard of.

I don't know American history to the same nearly autistic extent that I know BeatleTrivia, but I do pride myself on knowing the Broad Outlines. Which is why I feel a mortification not at all dissimilar to the one in my dream, when an enormous gap in my knowledge is suddenly, embarrassingly, revealed to me. I was passing time at Fark this afternoon, and I stumbled across an article that noted that yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Black Tom Explosion -- something that I had never heard of in my life! From the linked article, in Newsday:

The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles.

The Statue of Liberty, less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.

Ground zero itself - a small island called Black Tom - all but disappeared, "as if an atomic bomb fell on it," says historian John Gomez.

It was 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916, when what was then the largest explosion ever in the United States erupted. It destroyed an estimated 2,000 tons of munitions awaiting transfer to ships destined for Britain and ultimately, the World War I battlefields of France.

Evidence pointed to German sabotage, and some historians regard it as the first major terrorist attack on the United States by a foreign party.

"Terrorist attack" is not quite the mot juste here -- "wartime sabotage" would be more accurate -- but let's not quibble over semantics. I lived in New York City (Red Hook, Brooklyn, to be precise) from 1982 to 1987, and had the explosion happened during my time there, it's quite possible my home might have been rained upon by shrapnel from the blast. The Statue of Liberty was badly damaged -- according to Wikipedia, the damage is part of the reason the statue's torch is inaccessible to visitors today.

And yet I'd never heard of the damned thing!

Well, I have now. And so have you.

More info is available at the Wikipedia entry.

There's No Justice

This guy is dead and Charlie Daniels continues to pollute the world with his cow-plod. Is there a better reason to take the pipe?

Via Driftglass.



I believe that's my most excellent buddy Mike Keneally playing slide, but it's hard to tell with all the hair.

In Vino Veritas

(Cross-posted at The American Street)

As a man not entirely unaccustomed to a snort or two, I have to admit to a twinge of sympathy for Mel Gibson. I've never been arrested for anything, I'm glad to say -- despite some deserving efforts on my part -- so I can't credibly speculate about the mental stresses one undergoes when John Law shines a flashlight in one's bleary eyes and intones, in that condescending way they have, "Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?" when one has an undisguisably self-evident snootful.

I imagine the stress is great indeed. Gibson's blood-alcohol level was 0.12%, as reported by TMZ.com (the legal limit in California, where Gibson was arrested Friday, is 0.08%). According to a handy online calculator provided by the University of Oklahoma Campus Police, a 180-pound man would have to drink seven imported beers over a period of two hours to achieve Gibson's Blood Alcohol Count (BAC). (Or six malt liquors, seven glasses of wine, seven Bloody Marys, five vodka gimlets, or four doubles on the rocks -- it's an instructive little toy.)

By his own admission, Gibson is a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon on Friday night. People with his condition are notoriously unable to hold their liquor -- I've known a few, and they're no fun at all to drink with -- or even just be around. They're liable to say and do things they will have to apologize for the next day.

Indeed, Gibson has apologized for raving -- on videotape, apparently -- that Jews "are responsible for all the wars in the world," and for demanding of the arresting deputy, "Are you a Jew?" In his apology he said that he had "said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable."

It is important to establish the context of Gibson's revolting babbling. TMZ.com has published the arresting deputy's report (PDF). It's poorly scanned and difficult to read, but the gist is clear enough. The topic of Judaism and its putative responsibility for world unrest was not brought up by the arresting deputy as he clapped the darbys on his collar; the subject was raised for discussion by Gibson himself. He was not responding to something said to him. He thunk it up all by himself.

No matter what your past history with it, it's highly unlikely that booze will make you raise a point, ex nihilo, as Gibson did, unless the idea was simmering just below the surface, waiting for its moment to appear. The distress of being arrested and publicly humiliated for drunken decisions seems to have been that moment.

My ineluctable conclusion is that Mel Gibson, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, is a demonstrated anti-Semite. In nearly any other case this would simply be sad, an occasion to tut-tut urbanely about hating the sin and not the sinner. But for the author of The Passion of the Christ, all that effort put into convincing the MegaChurched that they were being bussed to theaters to watch a movie that was not conceived in the libel that the Jews killed Christ, has been destroyed beyond repair.

For this, I have no sympathy whatever.

It

Must be something in the water.

Helmut and Kevin have chosen oblique angles to do it, but they both take up the question of sponteneity in music.

Helmut:

Sometimes, in general, you listen to music and feel embarrassed. It's a kind of embarrassment that the musician hasn't hit it, whatever it is, and that you're there to witness the failing at it. This experience is made much worse by earnestness and certainty. I've heard plenty of live music like this - where I felt like bolting out of discomfort with the aural carnage. But you also know that moment when you've really heard it because it hits you hard in the ears, mind, and body.

Kevin:

It's all just pop music, really, and though there are a few pop stars who still attempt more elaborate projects, with mixed results (the aforementioned Joe Jackson comes to mind), your best pop is made by talented people who are not dumbing down their work by making 3-minute pop records (Joe again, most of the time). They instead work within the limitations of the form and come up with something novel, or fun, or new or perhaps even great.

It may be an ephemeral thing, impossible to define, but I don't think it is an accident. It is honesty, openness -- but it is also bloody hard work, discipline. I imagine there's some Zen principle at work here, in that the more you worry at a musical form, the more difficult it becomes, and the key that unlocks the door is Mindful abandonment of Effort.

I've had moments in my musical life (amateur, entirely, pathetically amateur!) when I've had it: Pick up a guitar, and something utterly new and never-before-heard comes flowing out of my fingers. But it's worth noting that those moments always come when I've been playing obsessively for days and weeks on end. Hard work leads to it. It will never come when I've laid the guitar by for a month -- which, I ruefully admit, happens much often than it should. After these hiatuses, I will pick up a guitar and know that it is far, far, far away.

Hey: Helmut takes as his text a record by bluesman Robert Pete Williams. If you like roots music (and if you don't, I don't want to know you), there's an absolutely amazing treasure trove of hundreds of free downloads of everything from '20s piano blues to '30s Calypso waiting for you here. Go stuff it up your iPod. Don't say I don't turn you on to the Good Stuff. Thanks to Employee of the Month for the heads-up.

The Fabulists' Waltz

I may have let it drop a time or two in these premises that I'm a bit in the bag for Thomas Ruggles Pynchon.

I've been rereading 1997's Mason & Dixon, savoring ev'ry rich drop in anticipation of the new novel due out this December, rumored to be titled Against the Day. (If you're pondering a Christmas gift to chuck my way, ponder no longer!)

'Long about halfway through the book I came across this gem, which serves as a raison d'etre for the story, and a defense for the PoMo Twisted History it contains. It is eerily relevant:

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,— who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

Earlier this week after a protracted session with the huge book, I found myself in a melancholy space. My mind wandered a bit, and I fancied myself in a huge, echoing room, with a hand-cranked phonograph in a corner far away, its speaker a great Art-Nouveau jonquil, playing a rather creepy little tootling waltz. Just why the room was empty, whose hand had set down the needle on the Victrola, and whose mind had selected the music is anybody's guess, but I felt compelled to try to reproduce the tinny, reverberant waltz that permeated my daydream.

And so I did. For your pleasure:

The Fabulists' Waltz

A New Groove

My new hero.

Floyd Landis, the winner of this year's Tour de France has osteonecrosis of the hip, the very same miserable little malady that's laid me low for all this time.

Before my operation, I was in Stage Two of the disease, meaning that the ball of my femur hadn't collapsed yet. Floyd's in Stage Four.

In Stage Two, for 24 hours a day it felt like somebody was slamming roofing nails into my hip with a nail gun. I can't even begin to conceive of the pain that Landis overcame, ignored, cycled through. He can't even take the anti-inflammatories I was on to reduce the agony.

A couple weeks ago, Commenter Mike linked to this IHT article about Landis' (to me) insane drivenness that prevented him from submitting to a hip replacement, to preserve his career as a professional cyclist. As I read it I cringed with a combination of sympathy and incredulity that someone would voluntarily endure the agony of osteonecrosis for something as trivial as the ability to push a bicycle faster than everybody else.

The article presents this horripilating picture:

Landis's most useful adaptation, however, came in the form of an idea. It was planted in his head by Kay, who, as fate would have it, suffered osteonecrosis of the shoulder from a college car accident and had gone on to complete six Ironman triathlons. Kay's idea was that it might be possible, through repetition, to wear a useful groove in the bone and cartilage of his damaged joint. "Floyd really liked the groove idea," Kay says. "He never wanted to look at the hip or any X-rays or even talk about the clinical part of things, but he kind of fixated on that idea."

Landis explains: "When the hip does something weird and it hurts, I always imagine that it's cutting a better path in the joint. [GAAAAAA! -- ed.] I'm probably fooling myself, but I may as well imagine something good is happening, since it definitely doesn't help to think that it's getting worse."...

Conversation eventually turned back to the groove theory, specifically to whether this groove might actually exist. Chao, a brisk and cheerful surgeon who trained at Harvard and Northwestern, smiled knowingly and reached for Landis's X-ray. As we leaned in, Chao pointed to a cloudy, half-moon-shaped blur on the rim of the femoral head, just beneath the pelvis. It was 1.5 centimeters long and a centimeter deep; it looked like a tiny pearlescent goblet.

"There's your groove," Chao said, tapping the film with a pen. "It's soft, and the pelvis is pushing down on it. It's a dent." Landis looked at the X-ray intently, faintly pleased at this revelation but distinctly unsurprised.

When I ask him about it later, Landis said: "It was good to see, but it also makes sense to me. There's a lot of friction, a lot of pressure. Logically, that pressure has to go somewhere."

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! My nuts want to creep up into my thoracic cavity, reading that. Landis is due for a new hip very shortly, and I sincerely hope it will relieve his agony. Whether he'll have a viable career as a world-class cyclist remains to be seen, but at least we won't be subjected to the idea of somebody obsessively compelled to exercise a new groove into his destroyed bone.

Pain will do that to you.

(Neddie Update: I walked all the way around the outside of the building in which I work this morning -- brisk, purposeful steps, no rests. Bare trace of a limp. Doesn't sound like much, but it proves to me, I'm damned nearly All the Way Back, baby! Where de wimmin at?)

(Later Edit: Aw, shit. He may have been hopped up. Thanks to Helmut for the heads-up.)

And Sometimes...

...You just have to ROCK.

Really fuckin' hard.

I loved this Johnny Winter song so goddamned much when I was 14. What 14-year-old wouldn't? It ROCKS. Really fuckin' hard. I would piddle around on a little acoustic guitar I had, unable to form so much as a regulation A chord, and dream of the day when I could actually master the riff -- let alone the lead guitar.

Thing about the classic rock guitar riffs: They often sound hard to play, but it's a mortal lock that if you're finding a particular riff difficult to master, you're probably playing it in the wrong inversion or something. Rock guitarists are for the most part really lazy, drunk and stoned bastards, and they have to be able to whip these things out under the most ridiculous conditions -- they're not gonna write something for themselves that's hard to play. They're gonna write something that sounds hard -- but in the same way that physicists subject new theories to the test of elegance and simplicity, a rock riff absolutely must sound hard while being ridiculously untaxing. That's why they put on those stupid rock-and-roll Tortured Suffering Faces while playing them. It's what gets them the Big Blow Job after the gig.

Ahem. Well, enough about that. Mom.

While studying up to record this, I got the riff down pretty cold, but trying to copy Johnny's stunningly deft lead lines, I kept tripping all over my fingers. Those are hard to play -- if you're as familiar with Johnny's version as I am, you'll laugh your ass off when you hear me actually give up in the middle of one phrase in the trading-fours part of the solo -- I just don't have Johnny's chops. So I copied what I could, and the rest in my own flava.

It only took me 30 years to learn it.

Here it is:

Still Alive and Well. (Pops.)

Bass playing's not too shabby either, if I may say so myself. Sorry about the mechanical drums. I don't know any drummers. (Inside Joke.)

Oh, and one admission: I am not now, nor will I ever be, a Great Rock Singer.

An Illusion Created for the Moment

My drive in to work each day takes me through a place called Brambleton, which is one of the seemingly millions of mud-and-Tyvek developments that constitute the Rape of Eastern Loudoun County. At a certain point on the drive, the modest, winding, wooded Ryan Road, which hasn't changed much since about 1945, suddenly opens out -- blannnnnnng! -- and becomes Loudoun County Parkway, a four-lane expressway that blasts its way through the ugliest and loudest suburban development imaginable.

At the very point at which LoCo Parkway begins, is a scene that, for my money, is positive proof that this country is headed straight for the wall with no one at the wheel. One the right side of the road is a shopping mall -- anchor grocery store, Starbucks knockoff, hair salon, what have you. On the left side of the road -- remember, a four-lane divided road where the speed limit is 50 miles an hour -- stands a condo development, what, about 300 units packed together, facing parking lots, the Parkway (now there's a view!), other muddy, denuded bulldozed lots where more of these hideous things are due to go up.

What's even more depressing than the architecture, though, is one simple fact that smacks me in the face every time I pass this way: There is absolutely no way to walk safely from the condo side of the road to the other to go shopping. No overpass, no underpass, not even a zebra-crossing painted on the road.

Even if you wanted to, you couldn't put the kids in a stroller or a bike-trailer and amble over to the Starbucks for a latte and a chinwag with the neighbors.

We've designed ourselves into Hell. A Polis without an Agora.

Joe Bageant drove through Brambleton recently, and had this to say, in another of his powerful and beautiful essays that I could only dream of writing:

...Brambleton is a real place. And today I am passing through it under the slowly arching mid-morning sun, which seems to be the only moving thing today in this development Northern Virginia development. There is not a human or even a car in sight down the long wide streets, just a crystallized silence occasionally nicked by the chirp of an unseen sparrow. My rusted out 18-year-old Toyota truck moving slowly along the streets, with its oxidized paint and a dead air conditioner sticking up from its bed gives all the more impression of some post apocalyptic scene from a not-quite-nameable film. A distinct eeriness pervades the sculpted green landscape and its too-bluish precast artificial stone retaining walls and artlessly placed trees, as though it were a movie set about to be torn down any minute, an illusion created for the moment. And in a way it is. Even something as timeless as a tree becomes a prop in places like Brambleton; they will be landfill in a few years because several feet of top and subsoil were scraped during site preparation. Trees won't ultimately survive in what's left, no matter how much mulch, fertilizer and watering is done. But they look OK now in a place where the average house is six years old, in a planned community with no communal memory, no sense of time's trajectory in which one can sense a future, or a common weal except through changes in real estate prices. CNN Money has called this place, 29 miles west of Washington D.C., one of the best places to live in America.

Joe hits directly some of the themes that I was more obliquely aiming at in this post. It's the same place. "There is a Buddhist principle," says Joe, "to the effect that the dream also dreams the dreamer. And that's what happened with the American Dream, which is why we are all sleepwalking through this escalating nightmare of meaninglessness, unable to shake ourselves awake." (Did I mention Joe's piece is a real cheerer-upper?)

The Great Failure of Poetry

The great failure of nineteenth-century English-language poetry was its near-complete avoidance of the pressing subject of Canadian cheese.

On matters of love, loss, honor and Classical mythology did the Great Poets blather. Your Grecian urns, your Childe Harolds, your country churchyards -- great vats of ink were spilled in their minute and painstaking examination. But did the ins and outs of the Canadian cheese industry ever once provide inspiration for a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Longfellow? I put it to you, sir, that they did not. And frankly, that's their -- and the world's -- loss.

I accuse the chalky pederasts podiatrists pedagogues who chivvied me through my Eng. Lit. classes of a grave omission in my poetical education. For all their paeans to the Romantics and the Classicists, for all their elucidation of the nuts and bolts of spondees, trochees and anapests, never once did they bother to mine the rich vein of laudatory verse about Canadian cheese.

Had they not been so blinkered, so lost in the received wisdom so distressingly common in the Humanities, they might have opened my eyes to the Canadian Cheese Problem -- and to the heroic versifier who burst out of the wintry northern darkness to bring the issue to light.

Ladies and gentlemen, with a baleful glare at those unworthy academics who hid his existence from me for all those years, I give you James McIntyre, the Bard of Canadian Cheese!

According to the rather bloodless Wikipedia entry, McIntyre, locally popular for his tireless boosterism for the Canadian cheese industry, "was called on to speak at every kind of social gathering in Ingersoll [Ontario]." I regularly curse the scientific community for their unaccountable failure to invent a time machine, despite the obvious benefits such a device would accrue us*; absolutely the first use to which I would put one would be to transport myself to a public reading of McIntyre's, to bathe myself in the magnificence of verse such as the following:

Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

We have seen thee, Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees --
Or as the leaves upon the trees --
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled Queen of Cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great World's show at Paris.

Of the youth -- beware of these --
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek; then songs or glees
We could not sing o' Queen of Cheese.

We'rt thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade, even at noon;
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

Now that, kids, is some poetry. Goddammit, "Toronto" is not an easy rhyme, but look how skilfully it's finessed in the hands of a master!

You too can sample the majesty of McIntyre's prosody. Particularly lissome are Dairy Ode, Prophecy of a Ten Ton Cheese, and Oxford Cheese Ode, but read them all, read them all!

Damn, I'm hungry. Gonna see if I can dig up a chunk of Canuck cheddar...

[Lest we be seen to single out the magnificently awful poetry of our Frozen Neighbor to the North, let's also draw attention to Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, whose ineffable skill at bathos very nearly rivals McIntyre's. Enjoy, enjoy! You can thank me later.]

-----
*The benefits this thing accrue us
To see ourselves as others do us!

Friday Fart-Blogging

As regular visitors to the Friendly Confines will no doubt have surmised, I've lately had occasion to frequent the local hospital a bit more than comfort might wish. I've been more than happy to take advantage of the hospital's enlightened policy of free valet parking, tossing my keys to the attendant and either leverambulating in on crutches or simply dragging my osteonecrotic leg behind me into the lobby to the elevators.

One recent afternoon as I was on my way in for yet another appointment, the elevator door opened and its sole occupant, a very dignified, if momentarily distressed, older woman, poured out into the lobby. As she left the elevator, she declaimed, so the assembled waiting crowd could hear clearly, "They're working on the sewers in the basement, oh dear me, dear me...."

She shuffled through the small crowd and ankled her way to the anonymity of the busy lobby. We politely loaded into the elevator, all Alphonse-and-Gaston -- after you, no after you -- and were greeted by the most horrifying miasmatic stench that ever slugged human nostril. I mean, ho-lee Jesus it was awful. Notes of rotting flesh, day-old bile, staphylococcal infection, and sulphurous, rotting eggs. There are human emissions that are relatively benign, reasonably healthy -- not that you'd be forgiven for blasting one out in my car or other confined space -- and then there are the kind that are harbingers that the dealer is absolutely rotting from the inside out, sick, noisome, toxic. This latter form was what now nauseated an entire elevatorful of people.

Now, of course, we had no direct evidence that the poor, sick woman who'd preceded us had laid this particular stinkbomb. But Lordy -- she'd sure acted suspicious. I happened to catch the eye of a fellow victim, and his amused smirk, flared nostrils and mimed choke told everything that needed to be communicated. A small child couldn't suppress a giggle. Some people!

Gratefully arriving at my floor, I hustled off the elevator, once again breathing the relatively benign, antiseptic hospital air, and went about my medical business.

Later, consultation complete, I once again made for the elevator. When it arrived, it was empty -- and the same awful stench assailed me as I boarded! The doors closed behind me, trapping me in a developing social horrorshow. Only then, through my watering eyes, did I spy the small, desktop-published sign that I had missed on my upward trip:

PLEASE FORGIVE ANY UNPLEASANT ODORS
WE ARE WORKING ON THE SEWERS IN THE BASEMENT
WE HOPE TO BE FINISHED SOON!

Well. Isn't this a fine mess.

At this point the only prayer I had of delivery from mortification was to hope against hope that no one was waiting for the elevator on the ground floor. But no. Of course not. A knot of six waited as the doors slid open, expectantly waiting for me to debark. I did so, as quickly as my sore leg allowed, and then started to hustle away from the scene of my humiliation. I heard a woman's voice float out through the closing doors, "Oh my God!" I had an impulse to turn and shout, "Look at the sign! Look at the sign!" but thought better of it.

They'll learn on their way down.

---

It's just now occurred to me that that scene must have played out hundreds of times in that lobby that day. A more perfect illustration of the principle of karma you couldn't hope for.

Little Stupid, Big Stupid

This afternoon I was listening to a podcast of yesterday's Al Franken Show, which featured an hour-long interview with Peter W. Galbraith, son of the revered economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control & Nonproliferation, former US Ambassador to Croatia during the Bosnia conflict, and now author of the new book, The End of Iraq : How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

It's a bit lazy, I think, simply to dismiss the Current Occupant as box-of-rocks dumb. The stumbling, clumsy language, the frat-boy snigger, the nauseating, phony folksiness -- these traits disarm, they disguise, they even excuse the frightful moral defects that the man possesses. One's reminded how Ronald Reagan's lumbering, bovine stupidity was explained away by his apologists as a Management Style: Sure, he's as thick as an oak plank, but he hires the right people, don't you know, lets them do their jobs. Doesn't interfere. Gotta admire a good manager.

So when fresh evidence of the man's appalling intellectual shortcomings comes to light, a kind of conflict is set up in the head. You remember how comedic ridicule of his casual inarticulacy serves to call attention away from the frank evil that he commits: In many minds, the Little Stupid of "I'm the Decider" serves to overshadow the Big Stupid of the occupation of Iraq. It's when Big Stupid and Little Stupid declare themselves simultaneously that it becomes horrifyingly clear just how deep is the shit we're in.

Here's the exchange that triggers this thought:

Franken: I want to get to this story that you tell. Why don't you tell it? It's three Iraqi Americans [visiting the White House in January 2003] -- are they all exiles...?

Galbraith: They are all exiles, and they include Hatam Muqlis [sp?], who's a lawyer from Indianapolis, it includes Kanan Makiya, a terrific guy who wrote one of the very first exposés of the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime, called The Republic of Fear, and Rend Rahim Francke, who later became the first Iraqi ambassador -- or, technically, representative -- to the United States after Saddam was overthrown.

Anyhow, they're gathered in the White House in January of 2003 [...] and Bush has asked them to tell their stories, and they do, and then what begins is a discussion of what is Iraq going to be like after Saddam is overthrown. And they start talking as anybody would, about the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. And it becomes clear to them that Bush has no clue what they're talking about, and eventually he says, at least according to one of them, "Sunnis? Shi'ites? I thought the Iraqis were Muslims."

OK, let's unpack that, as they say. The son of George Herbert Walker Bush -- who encouraged the Shi'ite uprising against Saddam in 1991 following the first Gulf War and who stood idly by as that uprising was brutally crushed by Saddam (a Sunni), resulting in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites, men, women and children as our troops were ordered to stand by within earshot of the slaughter -- was so intellectually disengaged at this crucial turning point in his country's history as to be utterly ignorant of the recent bloody history of a country that he intended to unilaterally invade six weeks thence, unable to discern between -- no, unable to even identify -- two of the three primary religio-ethnic groups that made up that country.

His own father. He couldn't even be bothered to read the newspaper during the presidency of his own goddamned father.

Little Stupid, meet Big Stupid.

Lazy-rich-guy-who-finds-homework-beneath-him, meet Worst President in the History of the United States of America.

Bonfire for the Crutches

This weekend, unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I hobbled my way up into the garden, to see what damage had been inflicted by the Inexorable Forces of Nature during my medically-enforced hiatus from the world. I had not visited my vegetable children since early June, when the surgeon's hacksaw made an ordinarily routine uphill foray an impossibility.

What I saw horrified me: The IF's of N had wreaked utter havoc on the beds. Weeds three feet high and as thick as a rainforest choked the watermelons, the cucumbers lay under a canopy of festering dandelions and clover, the radishes and spring onions were unrecognizable, and I can't even begin to describe what had happened to the herbs without bursting into tears.

Understand: I had worked like a desperate pig in the days preceding the hip-surgery in hopes of avoiding exactly this discovery. On the day of the procedure, there was not a single plant out of place. Between the rigidly disciplined rows of asparagus, strawberries and rhubarb there lay nothing but black soil and a light dressing of bark mulch. That sucker was shipshape. I had expected to see perhaps a little decay, a little entropy, but this -- this....

Something had to be done. Gingerly, carefully, I laid aside my crutches and sat down in the foot-deep grass and began to pull the worst of the damage out of the cucumbers. No. The position was clumsy, unbalanced, untenable. I had to be on my knees. Very tentatively I raised myself to a kneeling position, favoring the healthy leg. Worked for a bit. Yes, this will do.

After an hour's work or so, I realized I had worked my way several feet from where my crutches lay in the grass. I stood up, my plan to hopscotch over and retrieve them. Then a wild-assed thought occurred to me: Try walking!

So I did. Put the bum leg out in front of me, plunked the foot down in the grass, put some weight on it. The heavens did not open, hellfire did not rain down upon me, and my medico's dire warning of cracking and snapping bone, insufficiently healed, completely failed to materialize. And perhaps most wonderfully surprising of all, it didn't hurt. Took a step. Took another. And another.

I continued to live.

I walked all the way to the house. With each step, I could feel all this Bad Craziness, this accumulated misery, this crust of karma that had congealed around my wounded and incapable body sloughing off and wafting away in the wind. Fuck me, I can walk again!

Now, yes, you'll be telling me, but the Doc said you have two more weeks on those things. Aren't you pushing things too fast?

To which I snap my fingers. I had an appointment with the man this morning, and I ruefully confessed that I had begun walking -- against his express orders. To my mild surprise, he was completely and unreservedly encouraging, and told me that if I was walking I was for all intents healed, two weeks early. Lose the crutches, he told me. Challenge the hip now. Do whatever you like -- gently -- as long as it doesn't hurt. Take a walk. Ride a bike. Work in the garden. Go and sin no more, my son, for you are healed.

It's damned nearly impossible to convey how happy this makes me. While I'm no triathlete or mountaineer, I am a fairly active guy, and a month's imprisonment, during which my leisure hours were spent moldering in front of the television or reading, during which the simple act of carrying a small object from one room to another was an ordeal involving logistical planning and contingency strategies, during which I couldn't so much as go shopping or walk the dogs, wore on my nerves and depressed me. There's nothing so enervating, so emasculating, as forced helplessness.

The first thing I do, I hold a bonfire for those goddamned crutches.

---

PS: I'm gonna miss the Handicapped spot in the parking lot, though. That was cool. The temporary sticker's good through September, and I may just still keep those crutches around for the hot days in the Costco parking lot. You, me, lamppost.

---

PPS: In the same spirit, I just shaved off the beard. Miserable, itchy thing.

I Yam What I Yam

In the cafeteria at work this afternoon, I passed a display case in which stood a wholesome selection of Southern delicacies (the Food Theme this week, for some unfathomable reason).

In a warming tray stood a gelatinous light-brown mass, its exposed parts busily developing a darker-brown sugary crust. I wouldn't have given it a second look, but for the sign that stood next to it:

Candid Yams.

The typo gave me a slight giggle, and, with mild indignation at the sad state of proofreading among immigrant cafeteria workers these days, I cast my lunchtime thoughts elsewhere. But as I hobbled away from the case, a small voice stopped me in my tracks.

"Looks like you've put on a little weight, there, Cap'n!"

I shook my head, blinked once or twice, and turned around.

"You gonna go with that beard? Please don't tell me you're gonna go with that beard. You look like Grizzly Adams, fer crissakes."

Flabbergasted, I made my way back to the display case. I bent down to where the voice seemed to be coming from.

"Dude, that shirt! Nineteen-fifty-six baby-puke yellow? What are you, Cosmo Kramer? Can't you afford anything better? Oops, that's right -- you haven't climbed quite as high on the Corporate Ladder as you'd originally envisioned, so you're probably pinching pennies in the wardrobe area. That's all right, there are plenty of other losers whose shoulders you can cry on. There goes one now."

I glanced to my side. A dear friend passed by, carrying a tray of food.

"Tell you a little secret, there, chum: No matter what she says to the contrary, the Little Woman's probably getting a mite sick of going Tourist Class, if you know what I mean. Guys like you lose gals like that. And another thing --"

I pulled myself up to my full height, stiffened my spine, and tried to assume my haughtiest demeanor.

"I'll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself, sir."

"Oh, yeah? Eat me!"

Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say, but you wouldn't know it by me. I don't mind it lukewarm either. Lukewarm and sweet.

A Meditation on Corporate Strategy Development

By Al Swearengen

Greetin's, friend! If you're looking for Ned, he's in Room Four working out a serious case of the writer's block with a ball of dope and the two new girls in from fuckin' Chicago. To judge from the screeching comin' out of there, the fuckin' dam is being breached admirably, and the cocksucker'll be back to his old ways, haranguing the citizenry in the public fuckin' thoroughfare, in a trice.

Before he retired to ease his tribulation and rest his worried mind, he pulled out his magic-lantern contraption and showed me a missive he'd received from something pleased to call itself the fuckin' Lockheed Martin Corporation, which he referred to as "the guns-and-bombs-and-rockets crowd." Cocksuckers were trying to poach his loyalty to his current employers, painting castles in the air, raising hosannahs to the riches and pelf he'd gain by switching fuckin' loyalties. Having once long ago toiled for a Govvie contractor, Ned allowed Lockheed a puking Chinaman's chance of a successful recruitment, laughing till he choked at the thought of once again working in a place where TQM, the last refuge of the charlatan, holds management in thrall.

He called particular attention to the first sentence of the job posting, which he said made him like to eruct boiling bile on the Gem's spotless floor:

Lockheed Martin's vision is to be the world's best systems integrator in aerospace, defense and technology services; to be the company our nation and its allies trust most to integrate their largest, most complex, most important advanced technology systems.

Vision. Lockheed Martin's got a cocksuckin' vision. In my part of space and time, a vision is what you get when you smoke a fuckin' ball of dope and spend a useful day on a mountaintop contemplating your fuckin' man-giblets, but apparently the meaning of the word has mutated a bit since I had it beaten into me at the fuckin' orphanage.

Was there ever a thing so stupefyingly nauseating as a Corporate Vision Statement? Did ever anything reek more of bad faith, of howling fatuity? Was there ever a greater insult to the English fuckin' language?

You're a fuckin' corporation. You make fuckin' money. End of story. How you go about making the fuckin' money, by fair means or foul, by manufacturing (excuse me: "integrating") Weapons (oh, sorry again: "Systems") of Mass Destruction or otherwise grifting the hoopleheads, is between you and your own soul, but to try to convince the Great Unwashed -- and, perhaps more importantly, yourself -- that your motivations are anything but purely fuckin' avaricious is to paint a great cochineal smile on Wu's pig.

That's the great unspoken truth about us, isn't it. We clothe order, routine, law, in the comforting veil of great ideals and beautiful words and Eternal Fuckin' Verities -- but you strip away the fuckin' gilding and gimcrackery and Corporate Vision Statements and you're left with the One True Freedom that is cherished above all others: the freedom of the Few to strip power from the Many. The only question that remains after that is how long the fuckin' Many will stand for it -- and, if experience is any guide, the cocksuckers'll stand it for a very long time indeed.

We mark in passing this day the departure from this life of fuckin' Ken Lay, the George Hearst of his day (you'll want to follow that link if you're interested in my life and times). We note further that Enron's fuckin' Mission Statement read in part, "We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here."

I rest my fuckin' case.

Happy Froth of July!

Philadelphia, 1786

"The New Religion had crested better than twenty years before," the Rev^d Cherrycoke explains, "--by the 'sixties we were well into a Descent, that grew more vertiginous with the days, ever toward some great Trough whose terrible Depth no one knew."

"Or, 'yet knows.'" The intermittently gloomy Ethelmer. As so often, the Rev^d finds himself looking for Tenebrae's reactions to the thoughts of her Cousin the University man. "All respect, Sir, wouldn't the scientifick thing have been to keep note, through the years after, of those claiming rebirth in Christ? To see how they did,-- how long the certainty lasted? To see who was telling the truth, and how much of it?"

"Oh, there were scoundrels about, to be sure," says the Rev^d, "claiming falsely for purposes of Commerce, an Awakening they would not have recogniz'd had it shouted to them by Name. But enough people had shar'd the experience, that Charlatans were easily expos'd. That was the curious thing. So many, having been thro' it together.

"You should have seen this place the time Whitefield came. All Philadelphia, delirious with Psalms. People standing up on Ladders at the church windows, Torch-light bright as Midday. Direct experience of Christ, hitherto the painfully earn'd privilege of Hermits in the desert, was in the Instant, amid the best farmland on Earth, freely being given to a town by Burghers and Churchfolk.-- They need only accept. How could a world have remained right-side-up after days like those? 'Twas the Holy Ghost, conducting its own Settlement of America. George the Third might claim it, but 'twas the Ghost that rul'd, and rules yet, even in Deistic times."

"Say." DePugh considering. "No wonder there was a Revolution."

"Hmph. Some Revolution," remarks Euphrenia.

"Why, Euph!" cries her sister.

"How not?" protests Ethelmer. "Excuse me, Ma'am,-- but as you must appreciate how even your sort of Musick is changing, recall what Plato said in his 'Republick',-- 'When the forms of Musick change, 'tis a promise of civil Disorder.'"

"I believe his Quarrel was with the Dithyrambists," the Rev^d smoothly puts in, "--who were not changing the Forms of Song, he felt, so much as mixing one up with another, or abandoning them altogether, as their madness might dictate."

"Just what I keep listening for, 'Thelmer," Euphrenia nods, "in the songs and hymns of your own American day, yet do I seek in vain after madness, and Rapture,-- hearing but a careful attending to the same Forms, the same Interests, as of old,-- and have you noticed the way that ev'rything, suddenly, has begun to gravitate toward B-flat major? That's a sign of trouble ahead. Marches and Anthems, for Triumphs that have not yet been made real. Already 'tis possible to walk the streets of New-York, passing among Buskers and Mongers, from one street-air to the next, and whistle along, and never have to change Key from B-flat major."

"Ah. And yet... If I may?" The young man seats himself at the Clavier, and arpeggiates a few major chords. "In C, if ye like,-- here is something that the fellows sing at University, when we are off being merry,-- 'To Anacreon in Heaven''s its name,-- I'll spare you the words, lest the Innocence of any Ear in the Room be assaulted." Tenebrae has invented and refin'd a way of rolling her eyes, undetectable to any save her Target, upon whom the effect is said to be devastating. Ethelmer's reaction is not easy to detect, save that he is blinking rapidly, and forgets, for a moment, where Middle C is.

The Air he plays to them would be martial in all but its Tempo, being more of a Minuet,-- thirty-two measures in all,-- which by its end has feet tapping and necks a-sway. "Here, I say, is the New Form in its Essence,-- Four Stanzas,-- sentimentally speaking, a 'Sandwich," with the third eight 'Bars' as the Filling,-- that Phrase," playing it, "ascending like a Sky-Rocket, its appeal to the Emotions primitive as an experienced in the Act of--"

"Cousin?--"

"--of, of, Eating, that's all I was going to say...," hands spread in gawky appeal.

She shakes her Finger at him, tho' as the Rev^d can easily see, in nought but Play.

"And this is the sort of thing you lads are up to," he avuncularly rumbles, "out there over Delaware? Anatomizing your own drinking songs, till you be questioning earthly, nay Heavenly, Powers?

*****

"...South Philadelphia Ballad-singers," Ethelmer has meanwhile been instructing the room, "generally Tenors, who are said, in their Succession, to constitute a Chapter in the secret History of a Musick yet to be, if not the Modal change Plato fear'd, then one he did not foresee."

"Not even he." His mathematickal cousin DePugh is disquieted.

"My point exactly!" cries Ethelmer, who has been edging toward the Spirits, mindful that at some point he shall have to edge past his Cousin Tenebrae. "'Tis ever the sign of Revolutionary times, that Street-Airs become Hymns, and Roist'ring-Songs Anthems,-- just as Plato fear'd,-- hast heard the Negro Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti,-- 'tis there sings your Revolution. These late ten American years were but Slaughter of this sort and that. Now begins your true Inversion of the World."

"Don't know, Coz. Much of your Faith seems invested in the novel Musick,--"

"Where better?" asks young Ethelmer confidently. "Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, the Clamor of the Mills, the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the Drums in the night, why if one wish'd to give it a Name.--"

"Surf Music!" DePugh cries.

"Percussion," Brae, sweet as a Pie.

"Very well to both of ye,-- nonetheless,-- as you, DePugh, shall, one full Moon not too distant, be foung haggling in the Alleys with Caribbean Negroes, over the price of a Guitar upon which to strum this very Musick, so shall you, Miss, be dancing to it, at your Wedding."

--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Jurisprudence, Redux

I have to confess myself a tad frustrated. A sad case of writer's block, no doubt vitiated by the pounds of Vicodin on which I've been chowing down following surgery, has gummed up the creative juices to the point of viscosity. I've got two lovely posts -- an appreciation of unsung Guitar God Peter "Ollie" Halsall (complete with killer primary-source quotes from Andy Partridge) and an Al Swearengen Guest Post on the intellectual vacuity of that most pointless waste of human effort, the Corporate Mission Statement -- festering incomplete, leering and taunting, in my Drafts folder.

All of which goes to explain my gratitude for the email I received from the tireless xtcfan this morning. The message provided a followup to a post that appeared in the Friendly Confines this January, in which I speculated on the stream of consciousness of an Oklahoma judge who stood accused of using a penis-pump on himself and shaving his nutsack while seated on the bench during criminal proceedings.

If this sucker doesn't write itself, then the phrase has no meaning.

When last we visited the distinguished juror, the Formerly Honorable Creek County (OK) District Judge Donald Thompson, he stood accused on four counts of indecent exposure. The Probable Cause Report in the case is a cornucopia of exquisite imagery and thought-provoking euphemism:

Juror Rhonda Blansett's expected testimony will be that during the Vomberg Trial she observed Judge Donald D. Thompson's facial expression changing in conjunction with the air noises [caused by the pump] and the movement of the judge's right arm....

Juror Sharaan Ronish's expected testimony will be that during the Vomberg Trial she heard an air pumping noise... Ms. Ronish will also testify that when she heard the air pumping noise she saw Judge Thompson's right arm tighten and flex repeatedly. Ms. Ronish described the pace of the pumping noise as starting out slow and then becoming more rapid....

Juror Ralph Jones' expected testimony will be that he observed [Thompson] looking down a lot and that he and the other jurors couldn't figure out what he was doing. Mr. Jones thought perhaps the judge was tying fishing lures, or something like that.

Yes. Or something like that. In the gigantic corpus of slang expressions for flogging the bishop, "tying fishing lures" might not be absolutely the most memorable, but perhaps in rural Oklahoma, where fly-fishing is a secular religion, it may carry more resonance.

Now Judge Thompson's trial is under way, and I'm quietly pleased to see that the affair continues to provide details that are both delectable and mortifying. One's sense of propriety and respect for decency are sorely tested by the testimony; I find it shamefully impossible to read the following without blasting a noseful of Mountain Dew all over my keyboard:

Foster further testified that during a 2002 trial, she heard the pump "during the emotional testimony of a murdered toddler's grandfather." She continued: "The grandfather was getting real teary-eyed, and the judge was up there pumping on that pump. It was sickening."

Most interestingly, I never drink Mountain Dew.

CYA

The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

-- From "The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light," a review of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine by Barton Gellman, in the Washington Post

We are not (yet) privileged to know what happened immediately after this demonstration of bovine stupidity and bullying churlishness toward the hired help -- so utterly in keeping with what we already know of Bush's lifelong sense of patrician entitlement and contempt (born of incapacity) for hard mental labor. The mind's eye can't help but conjure up that smirk, that shoulder-shaking little chortle, the abruptly turned back, the quick return to the game of pool that the hapless briefer had so rudely interrupted with his importuning that the President of the United States, deep in the cloudy comfort of his Crawford vacation, actually move himself to fulfill the duties he had been elected appointed to perform.

It's also not particularly difficult to imagine a CIA briefer leaving the scene of his humiliation, vowing to bring down the revoltingly stupid little bully-boy by whatever means presented themselves. Ron Suskind has provided an admirable opportunity.

Bush's pissy insult stands like the pile of puppy-shit on the living-room carpet in which History will rub his stubby little nose for a thousand thousand years. In the fullness of time, "All right. You've covered your ass, now," will be branded on his forehead, and on the forehead of every vizier, camp follower and sycophant that hitched a wagon to his blank, moribund, lightless star.

The Truth Will Out

Pumping gas this morning. The pump opposite mine is being used by a man whose very cute little son, perhaps four years old, is taking the opportunity get into the sorts of things with which four-year-olds have bedeviled their fathers since the Dawn of Time: picking up cigarette butts, groveling in a mud-puddle, investigating the contents of the trash bucket. Dad upbraids the boy when he seems headed for a nice wallow in a pool of oily water: "Hey! Leave that alone!"

I'm leaning on my crutches as I wait for my tank to fill. The boy sees me, is suddenly fascinated by my evident cripplehood. "Hey, Dad!" he enthuses, "That guy's got crutches, just like Grandpa when he hurt his leg!"

"Yes," replies Dad, wishing the topic hadn't come up quite so clearly within earshot of its subject. "Maybe he hurt his leg too, like Grandpa."

"Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he just got a little old..."

From the mouths of babes. I laughed uproariously, and told the kid he was exactly right. I didn't hurt my leg. I just got a little old.

I'd have bought him a Slurpee if that sort of thing were still done. Honesty is a virtue affordable only to the very young -- and, of course, to the very old.

Shake Out Your Shoes

Snakes, Bugs and Spiders Week continues here at Jingo Acres, with the news that the father of one of my son's friends was bitten a few days ago by a Brown Recluse spider.

Common knowledge informs us that the bite of the Brown Recluse is a one-way ticket to horror, devastation, plague and pestilence, with emailed photos circulating of the most lunch-unsettling variety. However, cooler heads inform us that the horrifying necrosis of the skin that the spider's bite is reputed to cause is actually quite rare, and most victims of the little beastie get off with a little red mark that heals without event.

In my son's friend's father's case, he was working in an enclosed area, felt a little tickle on the elbow, and brushed it away without more thought. He sensed a mild stinging that resolved to a whitening of a rather large area on the elbow. He reported to a local clinic, where they diagnosed the spider-bite, put him on oral antibiotics and sent him home. A day or two later, he spiked a fever and the bitten area worsened. I don't know if he's done it yet, but his loved ones were urging him to go to the hospital, where the expected treatment will be intravenous antibiotics.

He is fully expected to live. About the worst he can expect is a nasty scar, but the fact that he's receiving competent treatment will go a long way to preventing even that.

Oh -- and I saw another baby snake in the garage last night, this one unambiguously a Northern Ringneck, a completely harmless -- cute, even -- hunter of "insects, earthworms, small snakes, small lizards, salamanders and frogs. It usually swallows its prey whole, but may also use partial constriction." My kinda guy.

Nineteenth-Century Cool

I have every intention of dying at Jingo Acres.

This thought is not intended as morbid; by it I simply mean that I wish never to move to any other house. I love the place, I love the way it combines hoary rusticity with lovely understated contemporary flair. I love the grounds, I love performing the upkeep on it, I love the garden, the orchard, the breezy screened porch and its wraparound view of a cathedral of green, the songbirds, the butterflies.

So unless something terribly untoward happens, I will cling to the place as long as I can possibly keep it up. If all goes as planned, then, it will never fall to me to have to sell it; with any luck, that task will go to the executors of my estate.

It will not be my problem, then, that the one, single Tragic Flaw of Jingo Acres will appreciably lessen its resale value. For you see, for all its amenties, its wonderfully well designed kitchen, its plantings of native Virginia fauna flora [oy! Vicodin!] in the front beds, its honey-colored bare-wood mouldings and windowframes, its ample closet and attic space -- Jingo Acres lacks central air-conditioning.

In all but the worst heat of the summer, an attic fan, combined with ceiling fans in most of the rooms, cools the house as well as any heat-pump you could wish for. Wisely planted trees shade the southern exposure, keeping the sun's heat off the roof. Only in the last few days of this waning June, as the really hot weeks come on, have we needed to resort to the window-units we keep in reserve.

Last night I sat and watched TV in the den, basking in the coolness of the room. The day had been one of the first truly miserable scorchers of the summer, the sort of weather in which the legendary Washingtonian humidity causes a body to come out in a muck-sweat that never dries. Toenail-fungus weather. Crotch-rot weather. Heat that only an anaerobic microbe could love. I wore only pyjama-pants and a t-shirt, all deliciously loose, air-flowing cotton. Bare feet. A glass of cold wheat-beer, its own sweat soaking the coaster-napkin to the point of disintegration, sat on the table.

I stepped out onto the porch to look at the night before going to bed. The glass door from the cabin was nearly opaque from the hundreds of country moths that battered against it, begging to come in and dash their brains out against the one light left burning inside.

The coolness of the night was a revelation. Yes, it was still humid and muck-sweaty, but the air, now at eleven in the evening, had cooled -- and this coolness was so much more alive than the dry, modern, silent coolness I'd just left. This coolness was alive with night-sounds, night-smells, the redolence of mud and mold and falling dew, with the muted racket of insects and frogs and birds. Breezes stirred the leaves of the walnut over my head, brought wafting in other, more distant night-noises: a dog barking a mile away, a car crunching on the gravel road, an owl far off up the mountain.

This, it struck me, was exactly the coolness that, years ago, was a grateful reward for a day's labor in stifling and relentless heat, in starchy clothing, in dusty fields and smoky forges and deafening manufactories and muddy stockyards and windowless, dark, choking work-spaces. The sort of respite that was longed for during the workday: Lord, please let this day be over. Please, God, bring on the night.

This was what city-people worked so hard for in the days before air conditioning, what laborers strove to earn: just enough scratched-out recompense, just enough extra whipout, to buy a ticket to the mountains, to the breezy beach in July, so as to enjoy the very thing I now consider utterly routine, a birthright: a little bit of coolness at night. In tenements packed to the rafters with workers, mattresses were spread on every fire-escape on every street in every city in the world, entire families in their night-clothes spread-eagled in the humid dark hoping for the blessing of a whisper of a breeze, dreaming, when they could dream, of a day when they could afford surcease from the heat.

Billions of us still operate under this calculus of cool. Billions still long for sundown when the evening zephyrs begin to promise a temporary respite from the daylight's cruelty. Billions still spread bedclothes on rooftops and porches and verandas, to catch a breeze in which to sleep. I have no real wish to join them -- my air-conditioned privilege, my rigidly controlled little 72-degree pleasure-dome, is far too comfortable to give up voluntarily. But here in this box, this tightly sealed, antiseptic ecosystem, I can't help feeling that I've unlearned a hard lesson that my ancestors knew only too well, and for this I am mightily sorry.

That Crawleth Upon the Ground

While bustling about this morning (as much as one can bustle on crutches) I happened to cast a glance at my sandal lying on the floor of the foyer. Lying athwart the shoe was what I first interpreted as a loose shoelace. My interpretation, however, had to be rapidly revised when the shoelace gave a little writhe, and a tiny little forked tongue darted out its front end:



I darted for my camera, which I happened to have handy, and then called the rest of the family to come admire our visitor, which was about the girth of a standard pencil, though about twice as long. It occurred to me that the little beastie looked an awful lot like a tiny little copperhead (a quite venomous local hazard), so I warned the children back, telling them to hold the dogs, and hobbled over to the laptop in the kitchen. It took me no time to determine that our guest was not a copperhead after all, but an infant Eastern Milk Snake, a harmless -- indeed, beneficial -- hunter of small rodents and insects. As I came back into the foyer, I found that Wonder Woman, who is utterly fearless with bugs and spiders, had gently scooped up the serpent, cooing endearments to it the while, and taken it outdoors and deposited it in a shady place in the front beds.

Glad she waited until it was, you know, safe.

Us and Them

I got my dark sunglasses,
I got for good luck my black tooth.
I got my dark sunglasses,
I'm carryin' for good luck my black tooth.
Don't ask me nothin' about nothin',
I just might tell you the truth.
--Bob Dylan, Outlaw Blues

I want to publicly thank The Viscount for two things.

First, to help me through my convalescence he very kindly sent me a copy of John Lennon: Imagine, the 1988 film directed by Andrew Solt. Peace on you, brother.

And second, watching that film just now has presented me the Royal Road to explore something that's been on my mind for some time now. Back in late May, the NRO posted a list of what they were pleased to call "The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time." The list was quite risible, ripping songs quite out of context, taking as literal lines obviously intended ironically, and declaring sentiments expressed in the lyrics conservative on the most laughably absurd pretexts.

This list made me (and quite a few others) guffaw uproariously (and attracted Pete Townshend to come slumming in Lower Left Blogovia, to judge from comments he left with Blue Girl, Tom Watson and Lance Mannion). But it also set my brain a-ponderin': How can the right-wing mind be so utterly unconscious of irony as to lay claim to large swathes of music that is in every detail of its makeup patently, avowedly, and dedicatedly contrary to their world view, and shake their tightly clenched fannies to it?

That's not your music, the mind shrieks. Get your goddamned meathooks off it.

Partly, of course, the violence that's been done to Our Music by corporate cooptation has drained much of its original force. (That this cooptation has been done largely with in cahoots with the original artists is only more depressing.) I remember staring in mute horror at a television screen sometime in the late Eighties as the Beatles' single version of "Revolution" was employed to engender positive feelings toward Nike footwear in my lizard-brain. The daily insults to meaning in the "repurposing" of rock songs in commercials have the cumulative effect of deadening the listener's mind to any sort of passion this music may once have lit. If a sun-splashed Caribbean Cruise spot can be edited to the rhythms of "Lust for Life," Iggy Pop's anthem to kicking heroin, then fuck it. Nothing means anything anymore.

But it once meant something. And that something is what we reflexively spring to defend when NRO stakes its grotesque claim.

And what was that something?

In the Imagine film, we are given a fascinating interchange between Lennon and Yoko (and a claque of admirers) and the liberal-turned-Silent-Majority-spokesman cartoonist Al Capp, at the Lennons' Montreal Bed-In in June of 1969. (Click to watch in a new window.) Both sides are quite obviously intensely aware that they are actors playing to ubiquitous and intrusive cameras in a staged media event, as they present their chosen roles in a set-piece that recapitulates the passionate intensity of the times.

I won't defend Lennon in this clip. He comes off as petulant and defensive, and seems a bit surprised when Capp attempts to score cheap points off vulnerabilities that a more prepared and thick-skinned public figure would have had easy (and funny) ripostes for.

But even less defensible are those cheap shots on Capp's part. Capp made his living not only as a cartoonist at the time but also as a radio commentator and campus speaker railing against the antiwar movement, portraying them as unkempt dangers to suburban workadaddy values, flouters of the eternal verities of home and hearth, hairy and disgusting trolls whose interest was not in ending a war but in the wholesale destruction of a treasured way of life. Watch Capp with this notion in mind, and his motivations become clear: His flaunting of the nude photos from the cover of Two Virgins is not an attempt at exposing some inconsistency in Lennon's antiwar argument, but simply to tar John and Yoko as sexual perverts, and render them thus ipso facto dismissable. (The fact that Capp was charged with the attempted rape of a female student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a year later, with similar allegations from at least four other campuses, makes this innuendo on his part even more nauseating.)

Does any of Capp's scapegoating sound familiar? Let's see how the GLBT folks, undocumented workers, flag-burners -- and, naturally, their defenders, feel about it!

Lennon, in a time when artists and activists reached for the Dada values of shock and black humor in the service of awakening bourgeois apathy -- a time, that is, when levitating the Pentagon and other deliberately insane acts seemed to make perfect sense in a war-hungry country gone mad -- made a conscious decision to play the public Holy Fool to promote an unarguably laudable cause. Whatever you may think of Lennon's public antics at the time (and some of them, let's be honest, were downright embarrassing -- "imagine no possessions" coming from one of the world's richest men!) you can't argue with their sincerity.

But Lennon's Holy Foolery didn't just spring fully formed from his forehead one day in 1968. To play the Holy Fool to inspire human liberation is to embody absolutely the single founding principle of rock-and-roll. To stand in front of an audience with a weird haircut and a loud guitar, wiggle your hips and go WAAAAAAAAH! into a microphone: how does that differ in any material way from trying to levitate the Pentagon? The two acts may differ in quality but they communicate exactly the same message: free yourself! The man who sat in bed in Montreal and allowed himself to be called a pervert by a neanderthal rapist is exactly the same man who, some three years before, stood in front of a screaming crowd of teenyboppers in Shea Stadium playing electric organ with his elbows, laughing to the point of tears at the glorious absurdity of the situation.

(Seriously. Watch it, especially Lennon. Best Beatles Live Performance Ever.)

This, then, is what we rush to defend as our own. This is what they must never be allowed to take away: Rock and roll frees your ass. To attempt to enlist the Holy Fool, the jibbering maniac with the guitar and the haircut, in the service of a cramped and crabbed and ugly ideology shows that you don't understand rock and roll. What's more, you will never understand it.

You might hear the beat, you might tap your toes -- but there is a jagged, bleeding hole in your mind. Go back with Al Capp, where you belong, and equate John and Yoko's Holy-Fool honesty -- their nudity, if you must -- with turpitude. You know you will, in the end. You always do.

Matt's Back!

Matt at The Tattered Coat is back from his scholarly hiatus. While we're thrilled to have his voice back in the mix, he seems to be operating under the insane apprehension that Argentina is going to take the World Cup. We'll indulge his sweet little pipe-dream for the nonce; as they say in Russian-lit circles, it doesn't matter until Pushkin comes to Shovkin.

Enger-land owe John Terry a peerage or something.

The Footie

Spain's taking the whole tortilla.

All that choking talk is pretty old, and the team I watched today taking a 4-0 drubbing to Ukraine was quite capable of administering a whuppin' on Germany, Brazil, or any other powerhouse you care to name. Spain's third goal, on the controversial red-card award in the penalty box, was patent bullshit, but the fourth was as nice a football lesson as you could hope the youngsters to witness.

I'll defend this thesis to the death (or until the Spaniards choke like dogs).

Germany-Poland. Jesus. Two direct shots on goal in one second bounce off the crossbar. Heart attacks in the streets of Danzig. Looks like Poland has (have?) dodged a Howitzer shell, and then in the 90th minute -- boom. I don't know what the streets of Dortmund look like tonight, but it can't be pretty.

Missed the Saudi-Tunisia game (a recuperatin' fella has to nod off, Jimmy-Stewart-style, for a couple hours sometime during the long, hot afternoon of the soul) but I'm sorry I did.

And I get to do it all over again tomorrow: Ecuador-Costa Rica; England- Trindad & Tobago; Sweden-Paraguay. Timed that surgery just right, I did.

It's Over

OK. So there's that done!

Those of you who said the hip surgery would be far worse in the anticipation than in the actual event were absolutely right.

I was given a spinal anesthesia along with the twilight general, and waking up a paraplegic was mighty weird indeed. In the recovery room, soon after the general wore off, I felt around on my lifeless lower half to assess the damage. I was mildly interested to note that the surgeons had left some kind of sponge, or perhaps a bundle of surgical gauze, in my lap. Not until a while later, having fumbled around with it for a bit trying to remove it to throw it away did I realize that it was attached to me -- it was my once-mighty Package.

Sensation did return to it, and the rest of my lower half, an hour later, but having that utterly dead hunk of gristle affixed to my loins was pretty unpleasant.

I'm home now, trussed and iced to the gills, in the bosom of my family, crutches and painkillers at the ready. I do have a dull, persistent ache on my left side, but it's nothing my excellent friend Vicodin and I can't handle. It feels no worse at the moment than a very bad sprain. The surgeon pronounced himself quite pleased with the procedure, saying that it shows every sign of success in the early stages.

So here on the couch will I stay for the next few days. I've hobbled about a bit, testing the limits on my mobility with crutches. I've realized that after six weeks of keeping every tiny bit of weight off my left leg, my right leg is going to become a tower of muscular power. Perhaps I'll rent it out for the World Cup.

My deepest thanks again to everybody who dropped in with words of encouragement. I hope that in a very short time I will be able to get my mind off my body and thinking about other more amusing and instructive stuff that I can share with you.

Right now: Typing hurts. I will stop for now.

A Barrel of Monkeys

Posting is going to get light over the next week or so.

The hip surgery I had been afraid of is scheduled for Monday morning. It approaches with the inexorability of a freight train. Because of this, Medical Science took me off the anti-inflammatory drug that was relieving the swelling in my hip-joint, as it has the side-effect of hampering the coagulation of the blood.

I took my last pill yesterday morning, with the result that the swelling and inflammation returned with a bullet today, rendering me a whimpering puppy by this afternoon. Med. Sci., buttonholed in his office, phoned in a Vicodin scrip for me. Now I sit in an inarticulate, unfocused fog in front of the TV. Narcotics, I've observed before, don't make you stop hurting so much as they make you stop caring that you're hurting, which is really not the same thing at all.

Folks, I don't mind telling you, this one scares me a bit. The last five years have been a run of spectacularly bad medical luck, running the gamut from kidney stones (three lithotripsies and one stent emplacement), to ass cancer (three fistulotomies and one procedure that's so new and experimental I don't even know the name of it) to a pilonidal cyst (one cystectomy -- unnecessary, it later became apparent) to a torn rotator cuff (two arthroscopies). None of them gave me the shrieking fantods as badly as this one has.

I'm always nervous before medical procedures -- who isn't? -- but this one's really pretty horrifying. No sane person would actually volunteer to let someone take what basically amounts to a Black & Decker drill with a sterilized half-inch bit and bung it four inches into their thigh and up into their femoral ball. But that's pretty much what I've done, to try to save my hip-joint. I've had plenty of time to think about it, and I've talked myself into a pretty bad place. I keep fingering the place where the incision will be made, and... Thinking.

Watching back-to-back TiVo'd episodes of House certainly didn't help matters.

Some days back, Wonder Woman roasted a chicken. If usually falls to me to carve the thing, and I began by the usual method of separating the drumstick from the thigh, and then the thigh from whatever passes for a pelvis in a bird. As the tip of my knife found the hip-joint, I gave it a twist to separate the bones. As they came apart with a little snap I'm afraid I freaked a little. Nausea. Sweat. Irrationality. Tears.

A chicken on a roasting-pan. That's what age makes you.

Boy, I'm more fun than a fuckin' narcotized barrel of monkeys, ain't I? I better get myself to bed & settle down for some kaleidoscopic eyelid movies and some Jacob's Ladder-quality nightmares. I'll feel much better in the morning.

Hey! They got Zarqawi!

06/06/06

Holy shit, where'd all the Christians go?

Oh. Never mind. They were just taking a leak.

Slingin' the 'Barb

Mrs Jorgensen poses with the stalk
with which I broke the World Record in 1921.
They don't make rhubarb -- or women --
like that anymore.

From the Winona (Minnesota) Daily News:

LANESBORO, Minn. — There are hundreds of ways to cook rhubarb but only one way to throw it: awkwardly.

“You’ll want a little arch and a straight release,” Jeff Kamm said as Ashley Solsrud stepped to the line, stalk in hand. “Give it all you’ve got.”

Solsrud, of Holmen, Wis., flung the floppy stalk, which stayed aloft for about 10 feet. Line judge Dave Sefton proclaimed it “a solid two” -- about half the distance of the day’s record toss.

"Only one way to throw it: awkwardly..." Pish-tosh! I weep for the lost arts of yesteryear!

In another day, at another time far back in the dusty corridors of dimming memory, I, Hugh Jorgensen, captain of the vaunted Brainerd High School Rhubarb-Tossing Team -- the Fightin' Loons, we were styled -- made strong men tremble and beautiful women swoon with the mighty arcs of my doughty heaves of the stringy stalks of family Polygonaceae, genus Rheus.

Far they flew, and long. Far, too, and wide, did tales of my godlike prowess run. Newspapers from such far-flung climes as Bemidji and Saint Cloud vied like tomcats for nacreous mots from my cupid's-bow lips. Into the shell-like ear of a young Grantland Rice, then a cub scribe for the Detroit Lakes Aftonbladet, did fall a breathless account of my exploits contra the hated crosstown Tech team. He was moved to limn it thus:

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Jorgensen, Olesson, Malmqvist and Soderberg. But the greatest of these, the most feared, is Jorgensen, for it is he whose miraculous heaves send slung stalk skywards in slow spiral, disappearing out of sight into the lowering clouds, there to mock the Gods themselves....

I carry the clipping, now crumbling with age, with me still.

We played in moleskin and leather in those days. Real men to the core, we eschewed the helmets and sissifying pads that have ruined the Glorious Game for succeeding generations -- those softened and denatured descendants of the hardy North Woods pioneers who imported the game from their native Småland. I scoff at modesty, and proudly point out that ours was the Dead-Stalk Era, when the equipment suppliers of the day would let their freshly harvested rhubarb stalks hang for three weeks in their barns, acquiring an inimitable elasticity and heft. We had a saying in those days: "Hang your 'barb for three weeks/Sling like the Greeks." (It was a bit puzzling, this saying of ours, as nobody in Crow-Wing County had ever seen a Grecian 'barb-slinger, but it was taken as read that they must have flung their rhubarb a good long way.)

Oh, how I pine for the gamey odor of well-hung rhubarb, and of the neat's-foot oil with which we softened our throwing palms! The players of today, spoiled by fresh, unhung rhubarb stalks -- we oldtimers dismiss them as "jackrabbit stalks" -- have no appreciation for it. They might as well be slinging celery-shaped sticks of frozen butter, for all they know of the ways of rhubarb!

How the grand sport has become a cruel parody of itself, an exhibition put on by hoodlums and mountebanks for yokels and rubes at country fairs and carnival midways! Scorn! Scorn! Scorn! And fiddle-faddle!

Let me show you how we did it. Gimme that stalk! You stand about three feet from the line, see, facing away, and -- hey! Where are you going! Get back here!

Honoring Kos

I want to call your attention to a temporary but important addition to the Friendly Confines: that handsome orange number over there in the left column over that Koufax Trophy I made for myself.

The progressive Drum Major think tank is awarding 2006 Drum Major for Justice Award to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos next month in New York City. Also being honored are Anna Burger of the Change to Win Labor Federation and jazz cat Wynton Marsalis.

Moulitsas, coauthor of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, richly deserves the honor for having inspired countless pinko bloggers to stop whining and start pounding keyboards to effect change. Daily Kos is what I read with my coffee every day, and I bet the same's true for you.

Come on out on June 22 to help honor Kos. Details are here.

If you'd like to help spread the word, Tom Watson has the info.

Technorati tag: HonoringKos

What Is There Is a Prayer

You'd have to have been living under a rock this last week to have missed the blogspherical uproar over the publication of the list of "Top 50 Conservative Songs," compiled by John J. Miller at The National Review. Amanda, Lance, Blue Girl and Kevin have all posted amusingly on it, and there's no need to add my own loud braying to the collective horse-laugh -- save to say that there are peabrains in this world who wouldn't know irony if it came up and bit them on their beDockered asses.

Tom Watson has also commented on it, and from his post there comes this little gem: Pete Townshend got wind of this list, and the appearance of his "Won't Get Fooled Again" at the top of it, and responded with a lovely little treatise on the dangers inherent in the interpretation of songs:

I am just a song-writer. The actions I carry out are my own, and are usually private until some digger-after-dirt questions my methods. What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with that. In the film Summer of Sam the song is used to portray white-boy 'street' idiocy; a kind of fascist absurdity, men swinging their arms over air-guitars and smashing up furniture. Spike Lee told my manager that '…he deeply understood Who music….'. What he understood was what he himself - like so many others - had made it. He saw an outrage and frustration, even a judgment or empty indictment in the song that wasn't there. What is there is a prayer.