The battle fought internally
Of body and of mind
Such fires rage infernally
Well fueled they’re unconfined
We wear their scars externally
Become how we’re defined
While clawing forth eternally
To just remain behind
A casualty of the war
Being fought in each of us
Our demons hunger for more
An enemy ravenous
The balance is precarious
The plummet hard and deep
The dangers not vicarious
Abysmal walls are steep
Too fearful seem nefarious
Under the drug they sweep
The naturally gregarious
To sow then we must reap
A casualty of the war
Being fought under the skin
Incessant hunger for more
Must consume us from within
The body becomes a jail
With the sickness in its cells
Existence prison detail
Where burgeoning toxin swells
Excruciating travail
Clarity of death’s harsh knells
Faced with catastrophic fail
What remains is our farewells
A casualty of the war
Waged internal to our chagrin
While we only dream of more
In the end no one will win
In memory of Ramin Shirazi.
© 2017
simmbiosis
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Sunday, October 1, 2017
The Voice
The Voice has been silenced
Again art knows lament
The end has come too quickly
Too soon his life was spent
No more to face the music
The song turns into cry
Authorities shrugged ‘suicide’
Confused we just ask Why?
While I lament your death
In your life I can rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
The world needs its artists
Few amazing still remain
How to reconcile such loss
How to contend with pain
When you can’t fill the empty
With too much on the plate
The brain as adversary
Where poisons incubate
While I lament your death
In your life I do rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
We’re shown that satisfaction
Exists but in success
The impactful distraction
Lives enjoyed in excess
Contentment as abstraction
To know the answer yes
Lives reduced to transaction
Inflate and then depress
While I lament your death
In your life I shall rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
While we lament your passing
We loved your garden sound
Capacity surpassing
Mighty glad you were around
For Chris Cornell
© 2017
Again art knows lament
The end has come too quickly
Too soon his life was spent
No more to face the music
The song turns into cry
Authorities shrugged ‘suicide’
Confused we just ask Why?
While I lament your death
In your life I can rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
The world needs its artists
Few amazing still remain
How to reconcile such loss
How to contend with pain
When you can’t fill the empty
With too much on the plate
The brain as adversary
Where poisons incubate
While I lament your death
In your life I do rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
We’re shown that satisfaction
Exists but in success
The impactful distraction
Lives enjoyed in excess
Contentment as abstraction
To know the answer yes
Lives reduced to transaction
Inflate and then depress
While I lament your death
In your life I shall rejoice
On words of such sweet breath
You shared with us the Voice
While we lament your passing
We loved your garden sound
Capacity surpassing
Mighty glad you were around
For Chris Cornell
© 2017
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Roswell's Ghost
The chopper flew in low over the arid desert plane, which had just landed owing to its arid condition in search of the fuel truck near the end of this makeshift runway in Tacos, New Mexico. We were behind schedule and Ford hadn’t helped any by his impromptu rescue of what he laughingly referred to as the ‘alien’.
When he’d finally set down over by the cratering truck, (a catering truck sinking into a crater – duh…) I hustled over to where he landed and beckoned him.
“Jesus Harry, we’re sucking sunlight here and you’re off chasing after…” I looked at the tarp he had thrown over the thing, then back at him. He looked up at me, with that Harrison Ford twinkle, and realizing he had disarmed me again, smiled.
“You won’t believe it. This thing is the real deal.” He was enthusiastic. I was skeptical.
We were shooting second unit stunts with Ford and Daniel Craig for the film, Cowhards and Lizard People From Qantolopopolous (later shortened to Cowboys and Lizard People)*. It wasn’t going well. I was fresh off my script ER work on the ill-fated Spunky Does series when I got a call to direct some touchy second unit stuff with the principals from the film. As Spunky didn’t, I needed a break, so I caught a flight to Taos, New Mexico and things got weird.
*later shortened to Little Greeny
It turns out there is a Taos New Mexico and a Tacos New Mexico and that pretty much everyone involved in the project ended up in the wrong place, Jimmy Smits completely befuddled landed in Chimichanga, Old Mexico. So, by the time I had assembled everyone, I was in no mood to fuck around.
Unfortunately for me, Harrison Ford was always in the mood to fuck around. And as he was the money shot, (sorry Danny, we had some good times, but you know Han Solo trumps Bond every time – so get over it) I had to play along to keep him mollified.
At first it was drunken pranks, we’d sit up drinking until late and then guess who on the crew was gay, then call gay escorts to their hotel rooms and bet which ones would end up staying. Tacos has a major underground gay scene, literally in bunkers to protect them from illegal aliens, outer space aliens and Dick Cheney and we found some of the overnighters a little surprising – and you know who I’m talking to, Danny.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for Harrison to get bored with the gender preferences of the crew and others, and take up more troublesome exploits to stave his advancing ennui. We barely avoided a national incident when he loaded about 500 gallons of black paint into hoppers on his chopper and set about painting some of the White Sands military installation black. We had 2 F-16s on us until one of the pilots made visual confirmation that the pilot was indeed Indiana Jones so they let him finish painting, then blew it up after we flew out of visual range. Some great guys. My ass.
Daniel Craig, drunk again, (Christ, it was 10:00 in the fucking morning, what is with these Brits?) sauntered over and glanced between Harrison and the tarp strapped to the skid of his chopper. Ford had set it up for medical carry so whatever he was up to was contained on a stretcher, lashed down under the tarp.
“I saw it while flying over the mesa. I landed up on a dune and snuck up on the little bugger.” His eyes twinkled, “Fought like a son of a bitch. Lucky I didn’t get bit.”
We peered underneath and saw the oddest creature. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. They made it all sticky and all but impossible for me to see. I pulled back and gave them a quick rinse with a bota bag I carried for just such emergencies, sweet, sweet saline solution. The critter either belched or farted, as I couldn’t tell one end from another it was impossible to determine.
Meanwhile, Craig was vomiting onto the pavement, mostly due to the wretched smells emanating from the “thing” we had just taken hostage – but his drunkenness usually led to a puking frenzy some time during each shooting day so it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Just horribly disgusting.
We had both seen plenty of weird things lately, but this last was a real doozy. It looked like a family of five all living in the same body, oddly potato like, but very spewish. It writhed around, almost appeared to be copulating with itself and made all manner of unfortunate sounds
What was it? Where did it come from? Could we eat it? Seriously, I was getting hungry and really needed to know. The cratering truck had cratered completely – I told them not to park there but the stupid bastards wouldn’t listen and now we had to send all the way back to Tacos for burritos.
I lay flat down and examined the creature more closely. It was scared, that’s all I could tell. Harrison was all full of himself, puffed up as if he had discovered a new species. He addressed no one in particular as the crew began to congregate.
“Think I caught an alien. A, a real one, not like someone from Mexico.”
The thing made a sound “Dekkerssssszzz” then deflated into nothing. I looked at Harrison. “Nice Harry, real nice. Now can we get on with our real reason for being here…?”
Harrison looked perplexed and befuddled. “What the…? What did you do? The…”
I squared off with him, just like Lou did with Jake in Chinatown, Craig in the background wiping spittle from his mouth, “Harry. It’s Roswell.”
When he’d finally set down over by the cratering truck, (a catering truck sinking into a crater – duh…) I hustled over to where he landed and beckoned him.
“Jesus Harry, we’re sucking sunlight here and you’re off chasing after…” I looked at the tarp he had thrown over the thing, then back at him. He looked up at me, with that Harrison Ford twinkle, and realizing he had disarmed me again, smiled.
“You won’t believe it. This thing is the real deal.” He was enthusiastic. I was skeptical.
We were shooting second unit stunts with Ford and Daniel Craig for the film, Cowhards and Lizard People From Qantolopopolous (later shortened to Cowboys and Lizard People)*. It wasn’t going well. I was fresh off my script ER work on the ill-fated Spunky Does series when I got a call to direct some touchy second unit stuff with the principals from the film. As Spunky didn’t, I needed a break, so I caught a flight to Taos, New Mexico and things got weird.
*later shortened to Little Greeny
It turns out there is a Taos New Mexico and a Tacos New Mexico and that pretty much everyone involved in the project ended up in the wrong place, Jimmy Smits completely befuddled landed in Chimichanga, Old Mexico. So, by the time I had assembled everyone, I was in no mood to fuck around.
Unfortunately for me, Harrison Ford was always in the mood to fuck around. And as he was the money shot, (sorry Danny, we had some good times, but you know Han Solo trumps Bond every time – so get over it) I had to play along to keep him mollified.
At first it was drunken pranks, we’d sit up drinking until late and then guess who on the crew was gay, then call gay escorts to their hotel rooms and bet which ones would end up staying. Tacos has a major underground gay scene, literally in bunkers to protect them from illegal aliens, outer space aliens and Dick Cheney and we found some of the overnighters a little surprising – and you know who I’m talking to, Danny.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for Harrison to get bored with the gender preferences of the crew and others, and take up more troublesome exploits to stave his advancing ennui. We barely avoided a national incident when he loaded about 500 gallons of black paint into hoppers on his chopper and set about painting some of the White Sands military installation black. We had 2 F-16s on us until one of the pilots made visual confirmation that the pilot was indeed Indiana Jones so they let him finish painting, then blew it up after we flew out of visual range. Some great guys. My ass.
Daniel Craig, drunk again, (Christ, it was 10:00 in the fucking morning, what is with these Brits?) sauntered over and glanced between Harrison and the tarp strapped to the skid of his chopper. Ford had set it up for medical carry so whatever he was up to was contained on a stretcher, lashed down under the tarp.
“I saw it while flying over the mesa. I landed up on a dune and snuck up on the little bugger.” His eyes twinkled, “Fought like a son of a bitch. Lucky I didn’t get bit.”
We peered underneath and saw the oddest creature. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. They made it all sticky and all but impossible for me to see. I pulled back and gave them a quick rinse with a bota bag I carried for just such emergencies, sweet, sweet saline solution. The critter either belched or farted, as I couldn’t tell one end from another it was impossible to determine.
Meanwhile, Craig was vomiting onto the pavement, mostly due to the wretched smells emanating from the “thing” we had just taken hostage – but his drunkenness usually led to a puking frenzy some time during each shooting day so it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Just horribly disgusting.
We had both seen plenty of weird things lately, but this last was a real doozy. It looked like a family of five all living in the same body, oddly potato like, but very spewish. It writhed around, almost appeared to be copulating with itself and made all manner of unfortunate sounds
What was it? Where did it come from? Could we eat it? Seriously, I was getting hungry and really needed to know. The cratering truck had cratered completely – I told them not to park there but the stupid bastards wouldn’t listen and now we had to send all the way back to Tacos for burritos.
I lay flat down and examined the creature more closely. It was scared, that’s all I could tell. Harrison was all full of himself, puffed up as if he had discovered a new species. He addressed no one in particular as the crew began to congregate.
“Think I caught an alien. A, a real one, not like someone from Mexico.”
The thing made a sound “Dekkerssssszzz” then deflated into nothing. I looked at Harrison. “Nice Harry, real nice. Now can we get on with our real reason for being here…?”
Harrison looked perplexed and befuddled. “What the…? What did you do? The…”
I squared off with him, just like Lou did with Jake in Chinatown, Craig in the background wiping spittle from his mouth, “Harry. It’s Roswell.”
Stupid Hair
I often hear people talk about having a “bad hair day.” This is a social indicator of individual displeasure at not looking as good as you did, say, the night before when everyone was looking at you through beer goggles. At least as good as you thought you looked. The sad admission that, no matter how hard you tried, your physical self was intent on not living up to your mental expectation, or at least desire, of how it should be best presented to an unsuspecting public.
“I’m having a bad hair day” has entered our cliché lexicon and very pleased we are with it.
I doubt that I have ever had a good hair day. Ever. You see, I have stupid hair. This is no reflection on its intellect (as most hair would be hard pressed to even register on the SATs), just my acknowledged exasperation at having hair with a mind of its own. Regardless of my desire or best efforts, my hair does just as it chooses, consistently in direct contravention to my own wishes for it. It’s an amazing thing to see. Amusing. Fairly goofy-looking with no assistance, when my hair enters the picture I am destined to the ignominy of total goofydom.
An apt representation of what lives beneath its wild and unpredictable depths, it shoots out all directions at once, is multi-colored (though this year has seen much of that leave) and most of it insanely curly, with the odd straight ones just to make sure we all know who’s in charge. No amount of grease or unguent can contain its unruly design: short, it defines piles of curls that all have different places to go at the same time; long, I can bind it, but it either compresses into a single homogeneous swirl of hair, with lots of delightful stragglers tickling my face and ears and pretty much just floating around halo-like, or becomes a huge poof, a Brillo pad of fuzz attached to the back of my neck with a frenzy of flying facial follicles.
As I become an oldling, it has taken on migratory patterns displeasing to the split-end user, deserting the top of my head, making my face a huge spotty bean, and reappearing on my back. I’m concerned this progression could leave me entirely bald with a nice furry tail. I suppose a tail would at least offer some compensatory value to chrome-domery but I prefer my hair atop Mount C Rage where it belongs, not fleeing in shame out the back way.
Then to make it worse, it’s taken to growing out my ears. What is that shit? Why do I need hairy ears? I’m not a fucking Hobbit or some barnyard buddy. It’s hard enough for me to hear as it is without my ears going for a look. I’ve never seen ears with a nice style job, they just look fuzzy and odd. And to add a little slap, my mustache is growing up my nose. It was always a separate entity from my nose hairs; they were neighbors, got along fine.
Perhaps too fine as they now appear to be cohabitating. I am at a loss to define the evolutionary value of hairy ears and nostrils, but aesthetically they are irritating nonsense.
Some would suggest the completely shaved head as a means of coping. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory solution. At its very root it signals surrender, a pyrrhic victory to remove an offender that was leaving on its own…Slowly…But in that I would have to face an even grimmer reality: I would look impossibly goofy with no hair. My head is oddly shaped and were it exposed in its entirety, I would likely be relegated to sideshow status, which would at least accord me steady employment and an audience.
But of course, the main issue is the shaving. I hate shaving my face and it’s right there in front of me. My head goes all the way around the back, to regions I rarely view and can see only with considerable difficultly. There seems an inherent danger in thrashing around the back of one’s head with a plastic machete. And once back there, where does one stop clear cutting with the back forest in full bloom? It goes on and on… Shaving my head wouldn’t reduce my GQ (Goofiness Quotient) and would require even more maintenance, with blades of varying degrees of sharpness. This is not an option.
My head hair fleeing down my back, my face hair being completely ridiculous and inappropriate, I seem to be in the midst of some kind of insurgency of attrition by militant hairrorists, though I’m disinclined to wage a count hair revolution. Guess I’ve always had a soft spot for kinky rebels. What little of my hair that still remains covers it nicely…
© simmbiosis 10/6/14
“I’m having a bad hair day” has entered our cliché lexicon and very pleased we are with it.
I doubt that I have ever had a good hair day. Ever. You see, I have stupid hair. This is no reflection on its intellect (as most hair would be hard pressed to even register on the SATs), just my acknowledged exasperation at having hair with a mind of its own. Regardless of my desire or best efforts, my hair does just as it chooses, consistently in direct contravention to my own wishes for it. It’s an amazing thing to see. Amusing. Fairly goofy-looking with no assistance, when my hair enters the picture I am destined to the ignominy of total goofydom.
An apt representation of what lives beneath its wild and unpredictable depths, it shoots out all directions at once, is multi-colored (though this year has seen much of that leave) and most of it insanely curly, with the odd straight ones just to make sure we all know who’s in charge. No amount of grease or unguent can contain its unruly design: short, it defines piles of curls that all have different places to go at the same time; long, I can bind it, but it either compresses into a single homogeneous swirl of hair, with lots of delightful stragglers tickling my face and ears and pretty much just floating around halo-like, or becomes a huge poof, a Brillo pad of fuzz attached to the back of my neck with a frenzy of flying facial follicles.
As I become an oldling, it has taken on migratory patterns displeasing to the split-end user, deserting the top of my head, making my face a huge spotty bean, and reappearing on my back. I’m concerned this progression could leave me entirely bald with a nice furry tail. I suppose a tail would at least offer some compensatory value to chrome-domery but I prefer my hair atop Mount C Rage where it belongs, not fleeing in shame out the back way.
Then to make it worse, it’s taken to growing out my ears. What is that shit? Why do I need hairy ears? I’m not a fucking Hobbit or some barnyard buddy. It’s hard enough for me to hear as it is without my ears going for a look. I’ve never seen ears with a nice style job, they just look fuzzy and odd. And to add a little slap, my mustache is growing up my nose. It was always a separate entity from my nose hairs; they were neighbors, got along fine.
Perhaps too fine as they now appear to be cohabitating. I am at a loss to define the evolutionary value of hairy ears and nostrils, but aesthetically they are irritating nonsense.
Some would suggest the completely shaved head as a means of coping. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory solution. At its very root it signals surrender, a pyrrhic victory to remove an offender that was leaving on its own…Slowly…But in that I would have to face an even grimmer reality: I would look impossibly goofy with no hair. My head is oddly shaped and were it exposed in its entirety, I would likely be relegated to sideshow status, which would at least accord me steady employment and an audience.
But of course, the main issue is the shaving. I hate shaving my face and it’s right there in front of me. My head goes all the way around the back, to regions I rarely view and can see only with considerable difficultly. There seems an inherent danger in thrashing around the back of one’s head with a plastic machete. And once back there, where does one stop clear cutting with the back forest in full bloom? It goes on and on… Shaving my head wouldn’t reduce my GQ (Goofiness Quotient) and would require even more maintenance, with blades of varying degrees of sharpness. This is not an option.
My head hair fleeing down my back, my face hair being completely ridiculous and inappropriate, I seem to be in the midst of some kind of insurgency of attrition by militant hairrorists, though I’m disinclined to wage a count hair revolution. Guess I’ve always had a soft spot for kinky rebels. What little of my hair that still remains covers it nicely…
© simmbiosis 10/6/14
Mom
Let me tell you about my mom. Because really, to truly understand a person, you kinda need to know where they came from. My mom is where I came from: popped right out of her…well, probably not that easily. According to the popular recollection, my dad put me in her initially, so clearly as with all things mammalian, I am product of a group effort. It might not take a village, but a couple of families and distillery will deliver in a pinch.
Jan, as I am wont to call her when not using her maternal title, was a product of the Great Depression, the one in the 1930s that the bankers used to gin us for World War II. Youngest of 3 sisters, her dad died when she was 2, and for a time she grew up with a stepfather. A drinker unsurprisingly, as this culture is particularly good at producing those as well. Jan told of how Jim, her stepdrunk, would hide bottles around the house to make it seem that his drunkenness was in fact a glandular condition that only smelled of rye.
Jan and her sisters were all redheads – a gingery lot. I remember how the room seemed on fire when they would get together, their behivey hairdos arching toward the ceiling, threatening to ignite the insulation. Spots? You bet. They were a freckly collective, Jan to my recollection the spottiest of them all. They proved contagious, those spots, and I ended up with the little bastards all over me too while my brother, with the hairline, has none. My sister got a few.
I got my Dad’s gender and my Mom’s spots. Among many other attributes as well. Didn’t get the red hair thing, so I dodged that additional torture, but my parents’ head genetics combined to give me a noggin of the curliest Goddamned hair you’ve ever seen. Short, its ringlets jockey for position of cranial primacy; long, it is a diaphanous hydra lashing out in all directions simultaneously, independently. Quite the thing to see.
Then of course there’s the hairline issue. The last time I saw my Dad he lay in silent repose upon the mortician’s slab. Through my tears I noted that while his mind, then body, had wasted away into ineffectiveness, he had a perfect hairline. Thick, defined, still had a little color. My Mom’s hair is fairly thin in age. That’s the hair I got, the thin curly stuff.
Bill, my dad, liked his drink. And upon deciding that she was inextricably linked with him, Jan decided to become a drinker as well. And as many Americans (and non-Americans alike) they would enjoy the occasional libation. Every day. As it was legal, readily available without a prescription and promoted widely, she joined the majority of drinkers in the notion that it is safe, forgetting that war is legal, readily available and prescribed regularly and promoted widely but is in fact quite dangerous.
A notion I would come to by and by.
Fueled by similar logic and deep cravings for acceptance then relief, my folks smoked cigarettes as well. My dad changed brands on occasion based likely upon what the rugged, manly individual on the TV told him would best fulfill his vaporous machismo needs, but my mom was a loyalist, and to the best of my recall smoked Salem menthols in the green pack. By their 50s they both hung that fun up.
And good for them.
In his 50s my dad also stopped drinking, which was good for everyone else, but signified in him the death of his childlike/childish joys, which I suspect led to his deterioration. He gave up.
Jan, on the other hand, likes her drink to this day. While it might be suggested that combining a tumbler of vodka with a handful of pharmaceuticals could be dangerous, Jan abides now in her 80s. In this an argument could be posited that our addictions sustain us as we must work to sustain them. Gives us something to do, gives us something to look forward to. As I get old I understand this.
Mom was afflicted. The tensions of life with Bill; raising a spoiled little boy while contending with a self-indulgent adult boy; a couple of miscarriages; then a damaged boy and finally an even more spoiled girl led to her back ailments, many and excruciatingly unpleasant. Body affliction leads to pill addiction, and as the years progressed, so did Jan’s dependence on the things which palliated her symptoms, for in cure comes diminished sales receipts. And in the USA we invent afflictions to profit from the cure. Just like with our computers.
I can’t say how much of my crazy mom was my crazy mom and how much was the combination of pharmaceuticals with the psychological stressors attendant in her life. She came of age during the USA’s mass chemical testing on its citizens and was certainly impacted by it as were (and are) we all. Upon reflection I see a person in pain reacting to all kinds of new and untested substances more than the angry lady that used to chase me around the house yelling at me.
When I had reached teenage, Mom made an acquisition (or two) that certainly changed my life. She bought a piano. A big old upright. Then she bought a player piano. The upright was boomy and loud and out of tune, just like me, and we fell into immediate accord. I recall the joy of watching the player piano work its magic and marveling at all the amazing sounds such devices can manifest. Bill was really into music so my interest in piano held little appeal to him because he saw I would never make any money with it. Mom, I think, takes pleasure in the fact I can make music, and she actually liked some of my songs of old. Probably doesn’t mind some of my current ones either.
Some.
My dad was good with the English language and had a sense of humor. Mom has an infectious laugh. A useful combination as I learned young a good way to relieve distress was to get a laugh. Unsurprisingly, distress increased as the innocent guilt of childhood metamorphosed into the guilty innocence of teenage. I was called upon more often to find humor in the myriad unfortunate situations I got into, which made some of them better, but only served to exacerbate most.
I would suggest that this has led to my creative endeavor in life. As the solitary child for nearly 3 years, my primacy was usurped by first my brother then 11 months later, my sister. I went from all the attention (at least the good attention) to barely any at all. In Showoffitude I realized the means to recapturing the spotlight. Mom’s receptiveness to my goofiness evolved as my goofiness developed into useful capacities.
I know that the positive rewards I realized as a boy drive my creativity still, even though I’ve long since given up trying to impress my mom. Maybe with music a little, but for the most part, my family from top to bottom don’t much cotton to what I create, so I impose it upon them less and less. Which is fine. We each have tastes peculiar to us and mine are far too peculiar for most.
Mom is very feisty. She terrified all of us kids and Bill when we were young and has never been one to want in her expression of her perspective. If she felt we should know what she was displeased by, she was always very ready to let us know. Curiously, she was displeased by a lot. We were fairly rambunctious as children, growing into positively dangerous as we got older.
She got involved in politics fairly young, likely owing to Bill’s political awareness, and ran and served in local county politics when I was teenaged and getting into all kinds of mischief. I’m sure my behaviors didn’t advance her political aspirations. She takes pride in her civic activism and I suspect she enjoyed her foray into politics more than she would have had it become a career. Even from a spectator’s perspective it is corrupting.
In our non-religious house, politics became the subject of esteem. Jan is a life-long Republican and fiercely proud of it. Just like Bill. I was raised very conservative with strong libertarian leanings, as Bill was not a big fan of Drug Prohibition and repeatedly expressed that the Constitution made no provision for the legislation of morality. Jan is more Law & Order: it doesn’t matter if it is right or not, if it is the law, it must be enforced. I suspect her exception (as with everyone) is when it is applied to her and those close to her. She didn’t like my drug use, she hated it for a period, but I don’t think my time behind bars as a result of it made her very happy either.
Even though I was just an asshole kid, I was still her asshole kid.
And while I find many positions she holds to be in tension with my perspectives, I don’t see my mom as a liar. My dad either. Mistaken perhaps, an easy mantel to hoist, but I have no recollection of them lying to me or promoting the idea that mendacity paid dividends. They believed what they said and didn’t allow me to think lying was a good thing. The result is that I am a terrible liar and more truthful (or direct) than polite society prefers.
In this I learned to own my shit. Everyone is happy to jump in with reminders of their successes, but Mom inculcated in me the importance of accepting my failures as well and, perhaps more importantly, admitting them. Owning my actions is something I am pleased I was raised with; wish more had been raised with it.
I consider myself among the fortunate few who get to enjoy really good lives. I grew up in a good time, good conditions surrounded by good people for the most part. I’ve had an amazing amount of joy. Fun, lots of fun. If I could have been any person at any time in history I’d still be me now (or George Clooney) because most of the people in history are dead and I like being alive. A lot. And even in my usual privation I live better than most while even George Clooney can’t do what I can do. So, he’ll just have to settle for remaining himself.
Mom is a fighter and that above all other traits I prize because I got some of her whiner and the fighter helps me modify it into qualities less repellant. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, Bill will pipe up, “Don’t be a baby, you baby.” To which Jan will respond, “I’m not a baby. You’re a baby…” And I will usually grab for some intoxicant or another to push them back with the full understanding that no matter how old I get, how smart or how stupid, no matter what I do with the remainder of my life, they will always be in there guiding me, driving me.
I take a certain comfort in that.
(They insisted I include that…)
Thanks, Ma.
6/17/14
Jan, as I am wont to call her when not using her maternal title, was a product of the Great Depression, the one in the 1930s that the bankers used to gin us for World War II. Youngest of 3 sisters, her dad died when she was 2, and for a time she grew up with a stepfather. A drinker unsurprisingly, as this culture is particularly good at producing those as well. Jan told of how Jim, her stepdrunk, would hide bottles around the house to make it seem that his drunkenness was in fact a glandular condition that only smelled of rye.
Jan and her sisters were all redheads – a gingery lot. I remember how the room seemed on fire when they would get together, their behivey hairdos arching toward the ceiling, threatening to ignite the insulation. Spots? You bet. They were a freckly collective, Jan to my recollection the spottiest of them all. They proved contagious, those spots, and I ended up with the little bastards all over me too while my brother, with the hairline, has none. My sister got a few.
I got my Dad’s gender and my Mom’s spots. Among many other attributes as well. Didn’t get the red hair thing, so I dodged that additional torture, but my parents’ head genetics combined to give me a noggin of the curliest Goddamned hair you’ve ever seen. Short, its ringlets jockey for position of cranial primacy; long, it is a diaphanous hydra lashing out in all directions simultaneously, independently. Quite the thing to see.
Then of course there’s the hairline issue. The last time I saw my Dad he lay in silent repose upon the mortician’s slab. Through my tears I noted that while his mind, then body, had wasted away into ineffectiveness, he had a perfect hairline. Thick, defined, still had a little color. My Mom’s hair is fairly thin in age. That’s the hair I got, the thin curly stuff.
Bill, my dad, liked his drink. And upon deciding that she was inextricably linked with him, Jan decided to become a drinker as well. And as many Americans (and non-Americans alike) they would enjoy the occasional libation. Every day. As it was legal, readily available without a prescription and promoted widely, she joined the majority of drinkers in the notion that it is safe, forgetting that war is legal, readily available and prescribed regularly and promoted widely but is in fact quite dangerous.
A notion I would come to by and by.
Fueled by similar logic and deep cravings for acceptance then relief, my folks smoked cigarettes as well. My dad changed brands on occasion based likely upon what the rugged, manly individual on the TV told him would best fulfill his vaporous machismo needs, but my mom was a loyalist, and to the best of my recall smoked Salem menthols in the green pack. By their 50s they both hung that fun up.
And good for them.
In his 50s my dad also stopped drinking, which was good for everyone else, but signified in him the death of his childlike/childish joys, which I suspect led to his deterioration. He gave up.
Jan, on the other hand, likes her drink to this day. While it might be suggested that combining a tumbler of vodka with a handful of pharmaceuticals could be dangerous, Jan abides now in her 80s. In this an argument could be posited that our addictions sustain us as we must work to sustain them. Gives us something to do, gives us something to look forward to. As I get old I understand this.
Mom was afflicted. The tensions of life with Bill; raising a spoiled little boy while contending with a self-indulgent adult boy; a couple of miscarriages; then a damaged boy and finally an even more spoiled girl led to her back ailments, many and excruciatingly unpleasant. Body affliction leads to pill addiction, and as the years progressed, so did Jan’s dependence on the things which palliated her symptoms, for in cure comes diminished sales receipts. And in the USA we invent afflictions to profit from the cure. Just like with our computers.
I can’t say how much of my crazy mom was my crazy mom and how much was the combination of pharmaceuticals with the psychological stressors attendant in her life. She came of age during the USA’s mass chemical testing on its citizens and was certainly impacted by it as were (and are) we all. Upon reflection I see a person in pain reacting to all kinds of new and untested substances more than the angry lady that used to chase me around the house yelling at me.
When I had reached teenage, Mom made an acquisition (or two) that certainly changed my life. She bought a piano. A big old upright. Then she bought a player piano. The upright was boomy and loud and out of tune, just like me, and we fell into immediate accord. I recall the joy of watching the player piano work its magic and marveling at all the amazing sounds such devices can manifest. Bill was really into music so my interest in piano held little appeal to him because he saw I would never make any money with it. Mom, I think, takes pleasure in the fact I can make music, and she actually liked some of my songs of old. Probably doesn’t mind some of my current ones either.
Some.
My dad was good with the English language and had a sense of humor. Mom has an infectious laugh. A useful combination as I learned young a good way to relieve distress was to get a laugh. Unsurprisingly, distress increased as the innocent guilt of childhood metamorphosed into the guilty innocence of teenage. I was called upon more often to find humor in the myriad unfortunate situations I got into, which made some of them better, but only served to exacerbate most.
I would suggest that this has led to my creative endeavor in life. As the solitary child for nearly 3 years, my primacy was usurped by first my brother then 11 months later, my sister. I went from all the attention (at least the good attention) to barely any at all. In Showoffitude I realized the means to recapturing the spotlight. Mom’s receptiveness to my goofiness evolved as my goofiness developed into useful capacities.
I know that the positive rewards I realized as a boy drive my creativity still, even though I’ve long since given up trying to impress my mom. Maybe with music a little, but for the most part, my family from top to bottom don’t much cotton to what I create, so I impose it upon them less and less. Which is fine. We each have tastes peculiar to us and mine are far too peculiar for most.
Mom is very feisty. She terrified all of us kids and Bill when we were young and has never been one to want in her expression of her perspective. If she felt we should know what she was displeased by, she was always very ready to let us know. Curiously, she was displeased by a lot. We were fairly rambunctious as children, growing into positively dangerous as we got older.
She got involved in politics fairly young, likely owing to Bill’s political awareness, and ran and served in local county politics when I was teenaged and getting into all kinds of mischief. I’m sure my behaviors didn’t advance her political aspirations. She takes pride in her civic activism and I suspect she enjoyed her foray into politics more than she would have had it become a career. Even from a spectator’s perspective it is corrupting.
In our non-religious house, politics became the subject of esteem. Jan is a life-long Republican and fiercely proud of it. Just like Bill. I was raised very conservative with strong libertarian leanings, as Bill was not a big fan of Drug Prohibition and repeatedly expressed that the Constitution made no provision for the legislation of morality. Jan is more Law & Order: it doesn’t matter if it is right or not, if it is the law, it must be enforced. I suspect her exception (as with everyone) is when it is applied to her and those close to her. She didn’t like my drug use, she hated it for a period, but I don’t think my time behind bars as a result of it made her very happy either.
Even though I was just an asshole kid, I was still her asshole kid.
And while I find many positions she holds to be in tension with my perspectives, I don’t see my mom as a liar. My dad either. Mistaken perhaps, an easy mantel to hoist, but I have no recollection of them lying to me or promoting the idea that mendacity paid dividends. They believed what they said and didn’t allow me to think lying was a good thing. The result is that I am a terrible liar and more truthful (or direct) than polite society prefers.
In this I learned to own my shit. Everyone is happy to jump in with reminders of their successes, but Mom inculcated in me the importance of accepting my failures as well and, perhaps more importantly, admitting them. Owning my actions is something I am pleased I was raised with; wish more had been raised with it.
I consider myself among the fortunate few who get to enjoy really good lives. I grew up in a good time, good conditions surrounded by good people for the most part. I’ve had an amazing amount of joy. Fun, lots of fun. If I could have been any person at any time in history I’d still be me now (or George Clooney) because most of the people in history are dead and I like being alive. A lot. And even in my usual privation I live better than most while even George Clooney can’t do what I can do. So, he’ll just have to settle for remaining himself.
Mom is a fighter and that above all other traits I prize because I got some of her whiner and the fighter helps me modify it into qualities less repellant. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, Bill will pipe up, “Don’t be a baby, you baby.” To which Jan will respond, “I’m not a baby. You’re a baby…” And I will usually grab for some intoxicant or another to push them back with the full understanding that no matter how old I get, how smart or how stupid, no matter what I do with the remainder of my life, they will always be in there guiding me, driving me.
I take a certain comfort in that.
(They insisted I include that…)
Thanks, Ma.
6/17/14
Bastard
When I was young and had the occasion to run afoul of my mother (an occurrence more than just occasional), she would call me a bastard. Occasionally. When my dad would transgress, as he was indeed wont to do, she would call him that as well: a bastard. Now in my case that was a certainly less self-denigrating insult than calling me ‘son-of-a-bitch’ if only by degrees. When she would talk to Opal, Bill’s mom, she would refer to him as a son-of-a-bitch. In later years she claimed she didn’t realize what she was saying.
Clearly one could apply the same standard to calling one’s son a bastard: the insult self-applied in the inherent suggestion of one’s dodgy morality. It could be in no way my fault that I am or am not a bastard from a biological standpoint – I was too ill-formed to have any real influence on the matter. So it becomes an odd insult at best when directed at one’s offspring. Indeed that moniker applied, regardless of where, is a commentary on someone’s parents’ behaviors and is no way reflective of the child’s choice. If it was up to us, we’d all be George Clooney.
As I got old enough to consider simple mathematical equations I realized my parents’ anniversary was a mere 8 months from my birthday. While mature beyond my years, it was never indicated that I arrived any earlier than my allotted 9 months – conditions were cozy, I was well tended, why vacate before the lease is up? I say… But simple math confirms: my Mom was with me before she married my Dad.
I am of virgin birth.
Or my Mom wasn’t necessarily as chaste as she led many of us to believe. In fact, whenever I alluded to said sidereal discrepancy, she was quick to giggle and avoid the subject completely. As avoidance was how we dealt with many issues around our house, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. As she didn’t admit to having premarital hummana-hummana with my Dad nor did she deny the virgin birth possibility, I ran with the likely rather than the divine explanation, always holding out the grander hope…
You see, I am very different from my family. My family is crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I am crazy as well, being a part of the whole ‘family’ aspect of the observation. The difference is (as it usually is) is that I know I am crazy. I’m not homicidal or anything, don’t have special relationships with my stuffed bunny or whatever, but I understand by any rational measure – you know, what society presents as rational – I am crazy.
My family (what remains of them) accepts that I am crazy, but – here’s the scary part – they think they are sane. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the only truly sane members of my crazy family are the ones, like me, who understand they are crazy. Of particular interest to no one in particular, there is no one in my family like me.
I suspect now that I might understand why.
This has been a hard year by any measure. Started out destitute, and after visiting a dear friend who was recovering from lung cancer, got terribly ill while repairing a piss-saturated deck at Bobby Kennedy’s kid’s house in the Palisades. For half a month’s rent. In March, my nephew died horribly in a single-car collision. In June, Gayle was felled by that cancer and in July my mother died. For 2 weeks, I traveled a thousand miles of the deepest grief I believe I have yet known.
Before my Mom died she called me and asked me to come and see her. At this point she had entered hospice and knew the end was near, so her request for me to come back was very sad but understandable. I was working on the ESPN machine so I told her I’d be up in early June. But the check got tied up, as checks will, and by the time we were able to head Northward I got the call: Gayle had passed. Pat, my oldest friend, was utterly devastated.
The trip became immensely harder.
Upon arrival, we found Jan doped out of her skull on huge amounts of morphine and an endless panoply of other chemical emollients, an oxygen tube wrapped around her face. Death seemed imminent, and all communications had that dream/nightmare quality as she shifted about in her drug haze talking to people who weren’t present and preparing for events long past. Moments of recognition were punctuated with moments of confused terror, delusion and paranoia.
I hearkened back to my Dad’s death in 2001. Alzheimer’s took him down slow and hard, leaving him lost and terrified, coveting death. Begging for it. Of course a humane society doesn’t allow people who have deteriorated so awfully that only death will end their suffering to die with dignity, so Bill soldiered through until catatonia stole his motor function and held out till I could send him off.
People I know have bad deaths. Sorry to those of you I know. Keeping that in mind, I recommend all those I know to have good lives just in case this horrid trend continues.
One moment of lucidity will stay with me the remainder of my days: my son Errol (who had been caring for her for some time before we arrived), Robin and I were with Jan when the haze cleared and she knew us all. She was pleased we were there, together, especially as her other two children who lived more locally couldn’t make the trip. Errol set up the CD player and put on The Moment, my first piano concerto, which astounded and pleased Jan greatly. She was amazed at what her boy had created, at what he could do.
I told her, “I made that but you made me so this music wouldn’t exist if not for you. You’ve made the world a more beautiful place.” The look of satisfaction on that one face in that single instant made all the work required to create it dissipate into delight. Art can do that. The moment shared.
Before Jan went down, and she went down very hard with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she had an unexpected burst of lucidity. She had joined wonder-girl Robin and me for a compelling little chat that I had the occasion to record in which she offered the real reason for needing to see me: she needed to get something off her chest.
As her coherence was dodgy at best, at first I didn’t pick up on what she was saying. Some of the conversation was to me while big parts of it (the juicy stuff) had me as a neutral unnamed 3rd party to whom she confided about me. She made it clear to us that she didn’t want me to know about this. She’d kept it a secret my entire life, apparently only her mother knew:
Bill wasn’t my biological father.
That honor/disgrace belonged to someone in San Pedro named Tidwell. While dating Bill, she had messed around with Tidwell, found herself with child (zygoat) and seduced Bill with the notion that the little bundle of freedom-ending responsibility gestating in her womb was of his delight. She indicated that he never found out.
She had tricked my father into marrying her under the pretext that he had knocked her up, and he raised me under the belief that my curly, reddish hair and spots were the natural outcome of his natural manly outpouring. I have lived the entirety of my life under this perception. If he had any idea, he never let me know.
“The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties…” – Oscar Wilde
I’ll admit I was fairly surprised by this revelation. 58 years seems a long time to keep secret what some might imagine as relatively significant information. Learning about your real father when there might actually be a possibility he’s still vital seems more likely to achieve any hope of a functional relationship. Expand the Christmas card list, that kind of thing. But she kept it, her private little embarrassment, all to herself.
Grown larger each passing thought, the secret becomes more difficult to tell the longer it hides.
Such secrets, it seems, become a burden and as with all burdens, the longer you carry them, the more back-breaking they become. All who knew Jan knew of her back afflictions. It would seem in trying to put something she couldn’t face behind her, the weight necessarily became more crippling each year until she could carry it no more. At the end, she gave it to me, with the tease of relevance, plummeted into the hospital, and within a few days, was dead.
Taking the short view, this could be seen as selfish and a little cold; keeping the true biological nature of a child’s parentage from them the entirety of their life, then achieving catharsis by dropping it on them at the last moment, callous.
The long view affords a more palatable palliative: when she called me a bastard, she was just being honest.
RIP Jan Simmons 5/20/31 – 7/7/14
7/31/14
Clearly one could apply the same standard to calling one’s son a bastard: the insult self-applied in the inherent suggestion of one’s dodgy morality. It could be in no way my fault that I am or am not a bastard from a biological standpoint – I was too ill-formed to have any real influence on the matter. So it becomes an odd insult at best when directed at one’s offspring. Indeed that moniker applied, regardless of where, is a commentary on someone’s parents’ behaviors and is no way reflective of the child’s choice. If it was up to us, we’d all be George Clooney.
As I got old enough to consider simple mathematical equations I realized my parents’ anniversary was a mere 8 months from my birthday. While mature beyond my years, it was never indicated that I arrived any earlier than my allotted 9 months – conditions were cozy, I was well tended, why vacate before the lease is up? I say… But simple math confirms: my Mom was with me before she married my Dad.
I am of virgin birth.
Or my Mom wasn’t necessarily as chaste as she led many of us to believe. In fact, whenever I alluded to said sidereal discrepancy, she was quick to giggle and avoid the subject completely. As avoidance was how we dealt with many issues around our house, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. As she didn’t admit to having premarital hummana-hummana with my Dad nor did she deny the virgin birth possibility, I ran with the likely rather than the divine explanation, always holding out the grander hope…
You see, I am very different from my family. My family is crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I am crazy as well, being a part of the whole ‘family’ aspect of the observation. The difference is (as it usually is) is that I know I am crazy. I’m not homicidal or anything, don’t have special relationships with my stuffed bunny or whatever, but I understand by any rational measure – you know, what society presents as rational – I am crazy.
My family (what remains of them) accepts that I am crazy, but – here’s the scary part – they think they are sane. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the only truly sane members of my crazy family are the ones, like me, who understand they are crazy. Of particular interest to no one in particular, there is no one in my family like me.
I suspect now that I might understand why.
This has been a hard year by any measure. Started out destitute, and after visiting a dear friend who was recovering from lung cancer, got terribly ill while repairing a piss-saturated deck at Bobby Kennedy’s kid’s house in the Palisades. For half a month’s rent. In March, my nephew died horribly in a single-car collision. In June, Gayle was felled by that cancer and in July my mother died. For 2 weeks, I traveled a thousand miles of the deepest grief I believe I have yet known.
Before my Mom died she called me and asked me to come and see her. At this point she had entered hospice and knew the end was near, so her request for me to come back was very sad but understandable. I was working on the ESPN machine so I told her I’d be up in early June. But the check got tied up, as checks will, and by the time we were able to head Northward I got the call: Gayle had passed. Pat, my oldest friend, was utterly devastated.
The trip became immensely harder.
Upon arrival, we found Jan doped out of her skull on huge amounts of morphine and an endless panoply of other chemical emollients, an oxygen tube wrapped around her face. Death seemed imminent, and all communications had that dream/nightmare quality as she shifted about in her drug haze talking to people who weren’t present and preparing for events long past. Moments of recognition were punctuated with moments of confused terror, delusion and paranoia.
I hearkened back to my Dad’s death in 2001. Alzheimer’s took him down slow and hard, leaving him lost and terrified, coveting death. Begging for it. Of course a humane society doesn’t allow people who have deteriorated so awfully that only death will end their suffering to die with dignity, so Bill soldiered through until catatonia stole his motor function and held out till I could send him off.
People I know have bad deaths. Sorry to those of you I know. Keeping that in mind, I recommend all those I know to have good lives just in case this horrid trend continues.
One moment of lucidity will stay with me the remainder of my days: my son Errol (who had been caring for her for some time before we arrived), Robin and I were with Jan when the haze cleared and she knew us all. She was pleased we were there, together, especially as her other two children who lived more locally couldn’t make the trip. Errol set up the CD player and put on The Moment, my first piano concerto, which astounded and pleased Jan greatly. She was amazed at what her boy had created, at what he could do.
I told her, “I made that but you made me so this music wouldn’t exist if not for you. You’ve made the world a more beautiful place.” The look of satisfaction on that one face in that single instant made all the work required to create it dissipate into delight. Art can do that. The moment shared.
Before Jan went down, and she went down very hard with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she had an unexpected burst of lucidity. She had joined wonder-girl Robin and me for a compelling little chat that I had the occasion to record in which she offered the real reason for needing to see me: she needed to get something off her chest.
As her coherence was dodgy at best, at first I didn’t pick up on what she was saying. Some of the conversation was to me while big parts of it (the juicy stuff) had me as a neutral unnamed 3rd party to whom she confided about me. She made it clear to us that she didn’t want me to know about this. She’d kept it a secret my entire life, apparently only her mother knew:
Bill wasn’t my biological father.
That honor/disgrace belonged to someone in San Pedro named Tidwell. While dating Bill, she had messed around with Tidwell, found herself with child (zygoat) and seduced Bill with the notion that the little bundle of freedom-ending responsibility gestating in her womb was of his delight. She indicated that he never found out.
She had tricked my father into marrying her under the pretext that he had knocked her up, and he raised me under the belief that my curly, reddish hair and spots were the natural outcome of his natural manly outpouring. I have lived the entirety of my life under this perception. If he had any idea, he never let me know.
“The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties…” – Oscar Wilde
I’ll admit I was fairly surprised by this revelation. 58 years seems a long time to keep secret what some might imagine as relatively significant information. Learning about your real father when there might actually be a possibility he’s still vital seems more likely to achieve any hope of a functional relationship. Expand the Christmas card list, that kind of thing. But she kept it, her private little embarrassment, all to herself.
Grown larger each passing thought, the secret becomes more difficult to tell the longer it hides.
Such secrets, it seems, become a burden and as with all burdens, the longer you carry them, the more back-breaking they become. All who knew Jan knew of her back afflictions. It would seem in trying to put something she couldn’t face behind her, the weight necessarily became more crippling each year until she could carry it no more. At the end, she gave it to me, with the tease of relevance, plummeted into the hospital, and within a few days, was dead.
Taking the short view, this could be seen as selfish and a little cold; keeping the true biological nature of a child’s parentage from them the entirety of their life, then achieving catharsis by dropping it on them at the last moment, callous.
The long view affords a more palatable palliative: when she called me a bastard, she was just being honest.
RIP Jan Simmons 5/20/31 – 7/7/14
7/31/14
A Little Chat
When I entered the room, everything was already in place. I appreciate good prep and well understand the revealed costs of sloppy planning, having too many times spent precious hours compensating for amateurism and the preciousness of dilettantism. These jobs can be so messy when not properly attended, and posers and show-offs merely increase the difficulty of a hard circumstance.
I am an executioner. I receive pay and even the occasional plaudit for making people offensive to my employer non-existent. To that end, often at my discretion, usually at direct request, I see to it that those dispatched enjoy a journey of agony so remarkably intense that demise is a welcomed mercy at my hand. Often the pain inflicted is sufficient to send my subjects into the great beyond without further inducement on my part.
Which is fine. I find no particular joy in my work, it is but a job and one few are properly suited to. Through training and practice one develops skills, but the drive to such avocation must exist innate: executioners are born then made good through work. Those who take up the work owing to some psychopathology or sociopathology invariably leave the field, often the way many of their subjects do – by death’s official hand. I’ve dispatched more than a few.
Today was different – a little moonlighting. A favor to a friend if you will. Death was not the object, no. Something much deeper and more grievous – I would find this wretch’s spirit and rip it from him. I would eviscerate without ever touching a blade. I’m just that good.
I didn’t know him, didn’t know why, don’t care. Ever. Not my place. I am a technician, an engineer of pain, of death, but not a moral authority or judge. I seek no confession or repentance, I offer no atonement. Those fall out of the purview of my department. I’m the nuts and bolts guy, dealing in hard realities, not squishy abstracts. Salvation? Repentance? Take it to the man in the dress if you want someone to feel your pain. You come to me, you feel your own as well as any I can muster for you.
Usually I work in a fairly sterile official environment – blank walls, tile floor with a drain, good light but not too bright (I have my vision to consider), a rolling worktable for my tools, and a single metal chair or gurney for the subject. Intensity Rooms, as we call them, are ideally isolated with good sound-proofing and access to running water. Water is vital for cleaning up as well as making a mess out of someone, so a good room always has a nozzle.
As I wasn’t working in my usual institutional environment I was pleased at the steps taken to assure my maximum effectiveness. The room appeared as an add-on to a residential house: tile floor, glass walls, decent ceiling clearance.
It had been cleared of everything but a single chair, upon which the subject had the occasion to be lashed. The walls were enshrouded in black to control the light, visibility, and to deaden sound. As this was to transpire in a fairly populated suburban setting, I took the unusual step of turning on some music, giving it some volume. It was just me and him. As it should be.
The music was my own, something driving yet grating, like running the finest edge of a cheese grater across the inside of your skull, back and forth with increasing urgency. I wisely wore earplugs: often even with gags and other sonic muffling accoutrements the subject can manifest cries so shrill as to leave one with hearing loss if not adequately prepared. My ears still ring from an evisceration in Wrilling where the subject shook so violently as to dislodge my ear protection and render me permanently impaired.
Such are the hazards of such work. Beats plumbing…
He was naked but for a sack over his head. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was additionally secured to the chair (which was bolted to the floor) by his ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere. I had all day.
I stepped over to him after setting my toolkit on the table which had been set for me. As the music wailed I leaned in close to his head. “Can you hear me now?” I ground my boot heel on his left foot’s little toes, crushing them. He shuddered then slammed his bagged head right into my nose, breaking it, blood gushing. He had spirit. Even pained, I found that to be good. I was there to remove it, crush it, demolish it, shred it beyond any recognition – I needed to know where it was.
I stood, grabbing my bleeding nose with my left hand, elbowing his face with my right, knocking a few teeth out. They oozed out in a bloody drool under the sack which obscured him from me. He heard me.
I was furious, more at myself than him. I hadn’t even changed out of my street clothes, my shirt was saturated with blood – my blood. I got cocky, and the pro knows that getting cocky is a sure way to get yourself fucked up. And with no one more so than a person you are about to kill, a person who knows you are going to kill them. They don’t tend toward tolerance or ready compliance – most when pressed will fight to stay alive.
In those moments, I am the one they fight. Hence the precautions. I am the vanguard against run-amok disregard for rule of authority: after me comes chaos. With me comes chaos controlled. That is the role of the executioner: chaos controlled.
He got me right on the nose. Assuredly broken. It hurt an awful lot, my eyes welled with tears. I instinctively looked around: any cameras? The threat of embarrassment overcame the pain of injury, an amazing condition. Upon establishing our privacy, the throbbing became one with the pulsing musical beat swirling around us in our special time together, and I grabbed some cotton and stuffed it in my nose. My shirt was a mess. I was annoyed.
I took it off and considered it – if I didn’t give it a good cleaning right now, it was lost. I was at work: lost. I set it aside; I would make use of it soon enough. Long ago I determined to accept loss or personal failure with dispassion – my line of work is about loss and personal failure, to get trapped by sentiment is to perish. I stepped up and kneed him in the nuts. Even though the chair was bolted to the floor, the impact moved him back at least a foot – he literally compressed under my assault.
Then he expanded! I pulled back just as he erupted in puke and blood, cascading from under the sack, rolling down his chest and belly, pooling around his horribly mashed balls. I stepped back and brushed a little puke and what looked to be part of a tooth from my pant cuff. He trembled violently, sweat pouring from him along with more puke and blood. He definitely heard me.
“You know why you’re here.” A statement, not a question. They always know why they are there and to a person deny it till they can endure it no longer. Many cave rather quickly these days as the pussification of our culture has lowered our threshold of pain. Now it hurts too much to even go to work and everybody sits around whining about their pain online. It sickens me.
He was silent. I wasn’t sure if he was being cagey, thought he was being tough, or had swallowed his tongue, so I posited my suggestion more forcefully by bringing a two-foot length of 1.5-inch steel pipe down on his knee, busting the cap right out of his leg, sending it bouncing across the floor. Must have caught him with the edge. Oh well…
The third option averted, he bellowed, “Cocksucker!” I brought the pipe down hard on his shoulder, shattering his right collarbone. He heaved, flopping that direction, and I hit him upside the head with the pipe, just a tap, to keep him focused. He reeled. His chest and crotch were fairly covered with bloody puke and what looked to be chunks of flesh – he probably bit through his cheek. But still he didn’t cry or beg. Defiance. I like it.
I dropped the pipe end down on his right foot – it caught him on the middle toes, breaking three of them nicely, nearly severing the middle one. He jerked. “Still feel tough huh? I’ve got all day. This is just the intro, you can trust me on that. They’ll be finding pieces of you in coyote shit from here to Pomona.” I grabbed my desecrated shirt and stepped over to him. My kid gave me that shirt. Still, as I had executed him several years back the sentiment just wasn’t there.
I took the shirt and wound it into a fairly tight rope. Wrapping it around his neck, I twisted it tight and pulled him up hard. Holding the shirt in my left hand I began to pummel his face through the bag with my right, pounding, pounding.
Then, one good smack and the bag came off. I beheld the wretch. He had allowed his transitory other pursuits to distract him, he had neglected the one person who stood by him and made her sad. The wretch was I.
I woke with a start. I trembled and noticed I was soaked with sweat. Robin slept peacefully next to me. She had been reading more of her grim tales of monsters of days gone by. Once more, her sickness caught up with my madness and it infected my dreams. Sure, I had missed her birthday gift, I deserved the beating. But I was so sick of her psycho nightmares.
I smacked her on the back of the head and pretended to be asleep. She woke up all kerflubbled.
It’s good being a jerk….
I am an executioner. I receive pay and even the occasional plaudit for making people offensive to my employer non-existent. To that end, often at my discretion, usually at direct request, I see to it that those dispatched enjoy a journey of agony so remarkably intense that demise is a welcomed mercy at my hand. Often the pain inflicted is sufficient to send my subjects into the great beyond without further inducement on my part.
Which is fine. I find no particular joy in my work, it is but a job and one few are properly suited to. Through training and practice one develops skills, but the drive to such avocation must exist innate: executioners are born then made good through work. Those who take up the work owing to some psychopathology or sociopathology invariably leave the field, often the way many of their subjects do – by death’s official hand. I’ve dispatched more than a few.
Today was different – a little moonlighting. A favor to a friend if you will. Death was not the object, no. Something much deeper and more grievous – I would find this wretch’s spirit and rip it from him. I would eviscerate without ever touching a blade. I’m just that good.
I didn’t know him, didn’t know why, don’t care. Ever. Not my place. I am a technician, an engineer of pain, of death, but not a moral authority or judge. I seek no confession or repentance, I offer no atonement. Those fall out of the purview of my department. I’m the nuts and bolts guy, dealing in hard realities, not squishy abstracts. Salvation? Repentance? Take it to the man in the dress if you want someone to feel your pain. You come to me, you feel your own as well as any I can muster for you.
Usually I work in a fairly sterile official environment – blank walls, tile floor with a drain, good light but not too bright (I have my vision to consider), a rolling worktable for my tools, and a single metal chair or gurney for the subject. Intensity Rooms, as we call them, are ideally isolated with good sound-proofing and access to running water. Water is vital for cleaning up as well as making a mess out of someone, so a good room always has a nozzle.
As I wasn’t working in my usual institutional environment I was pleased at the steps taken to assure my maximum effectiveness. The room appeared as an add-on to a residential house: tile floor, glass walls, decent ceiling clearance.
It had been cleared of everything but a single chair, upon which the subject had the occasion to be lashed. The walls were enshrouded in black to control the light, visibility, and to deaden sound. As this was to transpire in a fairly populated suburban setting, I took the unusual step of turning on some music, giving it some volume. It was just me and him. As it should be.
The music was my own, something driving yet grating, like running the finest edge of a cheese grater across the inside of your skull, back and forth with increasing urgency. I wisely wore earplugs: often even with gags and other sonic muffling accoutrements the subject can manifest cries so shrill as to leave one with hearing loss if not adequately prepared. My ears still ring from an evisceration in Wrilling where the subject shook so violently as to dislodge my ear protection and render me permanently impaired.
Such are the hazards of such work. Beats plumbing…
He was naked but for a sack over his head. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was additionally secured to the chair (which was bolted to the floor) by his ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere. I had all day.
I stepped over to him after setting my toolkit on the table which had been set for me. As the music wailed I leaned in close to his head. “Can you hear me now?” I ground my boot heel on his left foot’s little toes, crushing them. He shuddered then slammed his bagged head right into my nose, breaking it, blood gushing. He had spirit. Even pained, I found that to be good. I was there to remove it, crush it, demolish it, shred it beyond any recognition – I needed to know where it was.
I stood, grabbing my bleeding nose with my left hand, elbowing his face with my right, knocking a few teeth out. They oozed out in a bloody drool under the sack which obscured him from me. He heard me.
I was furious, more at myself than him. I hadn’t even changed out of my street clothes, my shirt was saturated with blood – my blood. I got cocky, and the pro knows that getting cocky is a sure way to get yourself fucked up. And with no one more so than a person you are about to kill, a person who knows you are going to kill them. They don’t tend toward tolerance or ready compliance – most when pressed will fight to stay alive.
In those moments, I am the one they fight. Hence the precautions. I am the vanguard against run-amok disregard for rule of authority: after me comes chaos. With me comes chaos controlled. That is the role of the executioner: chaos controlled.
He got me right on the nose. Assuredly broken. It hurt an awful lot, my eyes welled with tears. I instinctively looked around: any cameras? The threat of embarrassment overcame the pain of injury, an amazing condition. Upon establishing our privacy, the throbbing became one with the pulsing musical beat swirling around us in our special time together, and I grabbed some cotton and stuffed it in my nose. My shirt was a mess. I was annoyed.
I took it off and considered it – if I didn’t give it a good cleaning right now, it was lost. I was at work: lost. I set it aside; I would make use of it soon enough. Long ago I determined to accept loss or personal failure with dispassion – my line of work is about loss and personal failure, to get trapped by sentiment is to perish. I stepped up and kneed him in the nuts. Even though the chair was bolted to the floor, the impact moved him back at least a foot – he literally compressed under my assault.
Then he expanded! I pulled back just as he erupted in puke and blood, cascading from under the sack, rolling down his chest and belly, pooling around his horribly mashed balls. I stepped back and brushed a little puke and what looked to be part of a tooth from my pant cuff. He trembled violently, sweat pouring from him along with more puke and blood. He definitely heard me.
“You know why you’re here.” A statement, not a question. They always know why they are there and to a person deny it till they can endure it no longer. Many cave rather quickly these days as the pussification of our culture has lowered our threshold of pain. Now it hurts too much to even go to work and everybody sits around whining about their pain online. It sickens me.
He was silent. I wasn’t sure if he was being cagey, thought he was being tough, or had swallowed his tongue, so I posited my suggestion more forcefully by bringing a two-foot length of 1.5-inch steel pipe down on his knee, busting the cap right out of his leg, sending it bouncing across the floor. Must have caught him with the edge. Oh well…
The third option averted, he bellowed, “Cocksucker!” I brought the pipe down hard on his shoulder, shattering his right collarbone. He heaved, flopping that direction, and I hit him upside the head with the pipe, just a tap, to keep him focused. He reeled. His chest and crotch were fairly covered with bloody puke and what looked to be chunks of flesh – he probably bit through his cheek. But still he didn’t cry or beg. Defiance. I like it.
I dropped the pipe end down on his right foot – it caught him on the middle toes, breaking three of them nicely, nearly severing the middle one. He jerked. “Still feel tough huh? I’ve got all day. This is just the intro, you can trust me on that. They’ll be finding pieces of you in coyote shit from here to Pomona.” I grabbed my desecrated shirt and stepped over to him. My kid gave me that shirt. Still, as I had executed him several years back the sentiment just wasn’t there.
I took the shirt and wound it into a fairly tight rope. Wrapping it around his neck, I twisted it tight and pulled him up hard. Holding the shirt in my left hand I began to pummel his face through the bag with my right, pounding, pounding.
Then, one good smack and the bag came off. I beheld the wretch. He had allowed his transitory other pursuits to distract him, he had neglected the one person who stood by him and made her sad. The wretch was I.
I woke with a start. I trembled and noticed I was soaked with sweat. Robin slept peacefully next to me. She had been reading more of her grim tales of monsters of days gone by. Once more, her sickness caught up with my madness and it infected my dreams. Sure, I had missed her birthday gift, I deserved the beating. But I was so sick of her psycho nightmares.
I smacked her on the back of the head and pretended to be asleep. She woke up all kerflubbled.
It’s good being a jerk….
Friday, September 26, 2014
My Favorite Hour (A 50s Memoir)
When I was young, quite young actually, I held a much coveted position as a staff writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. It was there I met and worked with some of show business’s most notable comic minds: Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Ernest Hemingway (who only worked the first season) and the always hysterical Topo Gigio.
Originally called His Show of Shows, 47 writers good and true were hired and sacked before they came up with Your Show of Shows. Their Show of His, Our Show of 90 Minutes, A Show of Hands (offered by sponsor Ponds), Skippy’s Peanutorium were all floated and sunk before Sid himself came up with his Your Show of Shows. It was rumored that Mel Brooks came up with the first Your but in Sid’s autobiography Your Book of Books (not to be confused with Mel Brook’s autobiography Your Book of Brooks) Caesar dispels that notion:
“Everybody wanted a piece of the title. Woody Allen ran around for months claiming exclusive rights to the ‘of’. The ‘of’. Who wanted a stupid ‘of’? Oy!”
It was an amazing time and a rare honor, almost raw, to work with such show business luminaries and Hemingway, who mostly contributed fishing sketches and brought the beer. In fact, it is a little known story that the beer was what ultimately led to Hemingway's leaving the team. Sid wasn’t big on fishing to begin with, so most of Ernie’s work ended in the crapper, which led to contention between them.
The break came when Ernie (he despised being called that) submitted receipts for the beer. I’ll never forget Sid’s response: “Forty thousand dollars for beer!? For that I could have bought some Germans and brewed my own!”
When he found out Ernie was the only one drinking it he went through the roof. When we got him back down he kvetched: “This is the funniest thing you’ve submitted since you worked here. And it breaks my heart. I could almost understand import, but Coors?”
And with that, he had Woody Allen fire him. Hemingway was a big man and didn’t begrudge Woody for this; we all knew Sid hating firing people. Especially large, rowdy, drunken people, who liked firearms and shows of masculine physicality. He hated firing those kinds of people.
So Woody took the hit for firing Hemingway. Right cross to the nose if I remember correctly. Sent him reeling over a waste can. While hysterically distressing at the time, after Woody got out of the hospital, all fences were mended, primarily by his legal team of Pinchuck, Moosebine & Berkowitz. With the costly litigation, Ernie was driven into early retirement to enjoy his declining years in peace, I imagine. Don’t know what ever became of him…
Originally Neil Simon worked as part of a writing duo with Art Garfunkel. After the Hemingway debacle, budgets were slashed and belts were tightened (this after the disastrous belt slashing and budget tightening first attempt) and Art was let go. Sid had Mel fire him: I remember Mel’s exact woids, “Dis is television, we sell soap. There’s no place for Art in TV.” As we all know that was later expanded to motion pictures, music, literature and the stage.
Of course, Art thought Mel was joking and continued showing up for work until he finally noticed the sign on his office no longer read Garfunkel & Simon, but simply Simon. Infuriated, he grabbed his letters and numbers, storming off, but in his haste he forgot his punctuation which gave Simon the edge in the writing game and it has served him well if popular accounts are to be believed. Garfunkel moved onto other pursuits and achieved phenomenal success in dry goods, where punctuation is only a luxury.
Of course Brooks and Reiner were virtually inseparable, beyond all the time they spent apart, one hilarity after another except, oddly enough, at work. At home, at Solly’s Deli on 54th (not to be confused with Sauli’s Belli on 45th), on the subway, in the elevator for Christ’s sake, these were two of the funniest guys I ever met. I actually lost weight trying to eat with them because I couldn’t get any food past my trachea. Hysterical.
But then they’d show up at work and couldn’t rub 2 chuckles together to save their lives. It was amazing. Initially dubbed Writer’s Block on the Clock, shortened to Clock Block out of convenience, some suspected it was an attempt to hold out for bigger paychecks, knowing that if Sid fired them, invariably he’d have to have one fire the other one which would just get messy and cost more than just tolerating their shenanigans. Hard to imagine these two comic powerhouses on a career defining show unable to come up with a joke, but there it was.
They actually made Hemingway look funny, putting a little hat on him and a big squeezy red nose. This of course after he had passed out drunk again after offering up his latest version of his fishing joke. He didn’t discover his get-up until he passed a mirror on 55th St South, whereby he punched a newsy and caught a hack to Trader Vic’s on 44th St W. Interestingly, he forgot to remove the offending apparel and ended up in an impromptu rendition of HMS Pinafore at Elaine’s.
To counter Clock Block, Sid had Alice Bluhearty, the network stenographer, follow Carl and Mel around and transcribe their conversations. Their first season contribution in fact came from 7 elevator rides, 3 breakfasts, 9 lunches, 12 dinners and a traffic jam on 9th St. One of their most memorable routines, that escapes me at the moment, came from them waiting for a prescription at Schwab’s on 97th.
A couple of wonderful guys, inoffensive to work with and brilliant to hang around with – sadly, owing to the remarkable trajectory of my career, I haven’t had opportunity to keep track of their work. I hope the industry has served them well.
And little Woody Allen; 2 first names and everything. Woody was the closest one to me age-wise, we were both the young upstarts and the subject of much ribbing, a little hipping and some spining from the other guys on the staff. After some particularly vicious shinning from Neil, Woody moved closer to my end of the conference table while castigating him, “Very mature, Neil. No, no really quality stuff. I’m beginning to understand why everybody thinks they took the wrong name off your door…”
I remember one particular crunch where we needed a punch-line for the Near-sighted Boxer sketch. Reiner kept suggesting the Boxer knocks himself out, while Brooks just kept repeating “Nibbles” (ultimately the line we went with). I’ll never forget at one point Woody looked up at me, as he did most people, and said, “Uh, could you pass me that pencil?” And I did. A defining moment in my writing career to be certain.
Woody was a chick magnet and he seemed to always have one or two stuck to his shirt or trousers. Often they would become the source of material for the show as we would peel them off and make them wait for Woody in the green room. Sid often said, “If comedy doesn’t woik out for you, you could become an adult haberdasher…”
In his autobiography Sid recounted, “When the show finally cancelled, Woody gave me a lovely double knit jacket with two blonds stuck to the sleeves. I only wear it on special occasions. Usually when the wife is out…”
At first I thought Sid had hired Topo so Woody would have someone to be bigger than, but the first week Topo made it clear he was settling for no sizism or rodent bias, or he would scurry. I came to feel he held something, some deep dark secret, some ineffable shame over Sid, and I wasn’t alone in this: Woody, Neil and Ernie all expressed similar sentiment. The way Sid let that cute little fuzz ball walk all over him made us sick to our stomachs, except for Woody, who got sick to his pancreas, leading to another hospital visit.
Once, while Woody was hospitalized for a pancreatic enema (Panema) Sid became incensed at my perfume joke, telling me in no uncertain terms, “It stinks!”, while the term Simon used was Fragrant. Eager to please Sid, I set about rewriting it, removing many of the “Nose” references. As I typed furiously, I felt a tap on my shoulder – it was a boy from Western Union with a telegram for me. It read:
To: Hammer
Writing Staff – Your Show of Shows
Re: C. – Topo asked me to inform you - You’re Sacked
That is all
Hemingway
Originally called His Show of Shows, 47 writers good and true were hired and sacked before they came up with Your Show of Shows. Their Show of His, Our Show of 90 Minutes, A Show of Hands (offered by sponsor Ponds), Skippy’s Peanutorium were all floated and sunk before Sid himself came up with his Your Show of Shows. It was rumored that Mel Brooks came up with the first Your but in Sid’s autobiography Your Book of Books (not to be confused with Mel Brook’s autobiography Your Book of Brooks) Caesar dispels that notion:
“Everybody wanted a piece of the title. Woody Allen ran around for months claiming exclusive rights to the ‘of’. The ‘of’. Who wanted a stupid ‘of’? Oy!”
It was an amazing time and a rare honor, almost raw, to work with such show business luminaries and Hemingway, who mostly contributed fishing sketches and brought the beer. In fact, it is a little known story that the beer was what ultimately led to Hemingway's leaving the team. Sid wasn’t big on fishing to begin with, so most of Ernie’s work ended in the crapper, which led to contention between them.
The break came when Ernie (he despised being called that) submitted receipts for the beer. I’ll never forget Sid’s response: “Forty thousand dollars for beer!? For that I could have bought some Germans and brewed my own!”
When he found out Ernie was the only one drinking it he went through the roof. When we got him back down he kvetched: “This is the funniest thing you’ve submitted since you worked here. And it breaks my heart. I could almost understand import, but Coors?”
And with that, he had Woody Allen fire him. Hemingway was a big man and didn’t begrudge Woody for this; we all knew Sid hating firing people. Especially large, rowdy, drunken people, who liked firearms and shows of masculine physicality. He hated firing those kinds of people.
So Woody took the hit for firing Hemingway. Right cross to the nose if I remember correctly. Sent him reeling over a waste can. While hysterically distressing at the time, after Woody got out of the hospital, all fences were mended, primarily by his legal team of Pinchuck, Moosebine & Berkowitz. With the costly litigation, Ernie was driven into early retirement to enjoy his declining years in peace, I imagine. Don’t know what ever became of him…
Originally Neil Simon worked as part of a writing duo with Art Garfunkel. After the Hemingway debacle, budgets were slashed and belts were tightened (this after the disastrous belt slashing and budget tightening first attempt) and Art was let go. Sid had Mel fire him: I remember Mel’s exact woids, “Dis is television, we sell soap. There’s no place for Art in TV.” As we all know that was later expanded to motion pictures, music, literature and the stage.
Of course, Art thought Mel was joking and continued showing up for work until he finally noticed the sign on his office no longer read Garfunkel & Simon, but simply Simon. Infuriated, he grabbed his letters and numbers, storming off, but in his haste he forgot his punctuation which gave Simon the edge in the writing game and it has served him well if popular accounts are to be believed. Garfunkel moved onto other pursuits and achieved phenomenal success in dry goods, where punctuation is only a luxury.
Of course Brooks and Reiner were virtually inseparable, beyond all the time they spent apart, one hilarity after another except, oddly enough, at work. At home, at Solly’s Deli on 54th (not to be confused with Sauli’s Belli on 45th), on the subway, in the elevator for Christ’s sake, these were two of the funniest guys I ever met. I actually lost weight trying to eat with them because I couldn’t get any food past my trachea. Hysterical.
But then they’d show up at work and couldn’t rub 2 chuckles together to save their lives. It was amazing. Initially dubbed Writer’s Block on the Clock, shortened to Clock Block out of convenience, some suspected it was an attempt to hold out for bigger paychecks, knowing that if Sid fired them, invariably he’d have to have one fire the other one which would just get messy and cost more than just tolerating their shenanigans. Hard to imagine these two comic powerhouses on a career defining show unable to come up with a joke, but there it was.
They actually made Hemingway look funny, putting a little hat on him and a big squeezy red nose. This of course after he had passed out drunk again after offering up his latest version of his fishing joke. He didn’t discover his get-up until he passed a mirror on 55th St South, whereby he punched a newsy and caught a hack to Trader Vic’s on 44th St W. Interestingly, he forgot to remove the offending apparel and ended up in an impromptu rendition of HMS Pinafore at Elaine’s.
To counter Clock Block, Sid had Alice Bluhearty, the network stenographer, follow Carl and Mel around and transcribe their conversations. Their first season contribution in fact came from 7 elevator rides, 3 breakfasts, 9 lunches, 12 dinners and a traffic jam on 9th St. One of their most memorable routines, that escapes me at the moment, came from them waiting for a prescription at Schwab’s on 97th.
A couple of wonderful guys, inoffensive to work with and brilliant to hang around with – sadly, owing to the remarkable trajectory of my career, I haven’t had opportunity to keep track of their work. I hope the industry has served them well.
And little Woody Allen; 2 first names and everything. Woody was the closest one to me age-wise, we were both the young upstarts and the subject of much ribbing, a little hipping and some spining from the other guys on the staff. After some particularly vicious shinning from Neil, Woody moved closer to my end of the conference table while castigating him, “Very mature, Neil. No, no really quality stuff. I’m beginning to understand why everybody thinks they took the wrong name off your door…”
I remember one particular crunch where we needed a punch-line for the Near-sighted Boxer sketch. Reiner kept suggesting the Boxer knocks himself out, while Brooks just kept repeating “Nibbles” (ultimately the line we went with). I’ll never forget at one point Woody looked up at me, as he did most people, and said, “Uh, could you pass me that pencil?” And I did. A defining moment in my writing career to be certain.
Woody was a chick magnet and he seemed to always have one or two stuck to his shirt or trousers. Often they would become the source of material for the show as we would peel them off and make them wait for Woody in the green room. Sid often said, “If comedy doesn’t woik out for you, you could become an adult haberdasher…”
In his autobiography Sid recounted, “When the show finally cancelled, Woody gave me a lovely double knit jacket with two blonds stuck to the sleeves. I only wear it on special occasions. Usually when the wife is out…”
At first I thought Sid had hired Topo so Woody would have someone to be bigger than, but the first week Topo made it clear he was settling for no sizism or rodent bias, or he would scurry. I came to feel he held something, some deep dark secret, some ineffable shame over Sid, and I wasn’t alone in this: Woody, Neil and Ernie all expressed similar sentiment. The way Sid let that cute little fuzz ball walk all over him made us sick to our stomachs, except for Woody, who got sick to his pancreas, leading to another hospital visit.
Once, while Woody was hospitalized for a pancreatic enema (Panema) Sid became incensed at my perfume joke, telling me in no uncertain terms, “It stinks!”, while the term Simon used was Fragrant. Eager to please Sid, I set about rewriting it, removing many of the “Nose” references. As I typed furiously, I felt a tap on my shoulder – it was a boy from Western Union with a telegram for me. It read:
To: Hammer
Writing Staff – Your Show of Shows
Re: C. – Topo asked me to inform you - You’re Sacked
That is all
Hemingway
Monday, September 22, 2014
Aloft
Deranged didactics dumbing down
Waylaid wearing world’s weight
Drawing deeply designers drown
Worried wonder why we wait
Rigid reason rejects renown
Insane insistence ids inflate
For fulsome fearsome faces frown
Constant cries commiserate
Seeking solace spirits soar
Heartened healthy heads held high
Majestic minds meander more
Worried we wait, wonder why
Entreat excitements eyes explore
Freed from fear from fetters fly
Elate ecstatic evermore
Satisfaction’s soaring sky
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Afloat aloft
Cumulous caressing cloud
Far from fervor friendlies float
United untamed unbowed
Reason’s wrecks remain remote
Even empathy endowed
Resolute resisting rote
Disappointment disavowed
An aerial antidote
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Alive aloft
©2014 simmbiosis 8/27/14
Waylaid wearing world’s weight
Drawing deeply designers drown
Worried wonder why we wait
Rigid reason rejects renown
Insane insistence ids inflate
For fulsome fearsome faces frown
Constant cries commiserate
Seeking solace spirits soar
Heartened healthy heads held high
Majestic minds meander more
Worried we wait, wonder why
Entreat excitements eyes explore
Freed from fear from fetters fly
Elate ecstatic evermore
Satisfaction’s soaring sky
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Afloat aloft
Cumulous caressing cloud
Far from fervor friendlies float
United untamed unbowed
Reason’s wrecks remain remote
Even empathy endowed
Resolute resisting rote
Disappointment disavowed
An aerial antidote
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Alive aloft
©2014 simmbiosis 8/27/14
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Nature Preserves/First Period
Nature Preserves
I sat at my desk, struggling to conclude my kid’s version of the Stephen King period piece, Carrie. My publisher, Garfunkel & Schuster, had been relentlessly dogging me owing to my rapidly approaching deadline coupled with the fact I hadn’t submitted a single page after 3 months while burning through my Advance, Movie Rights Advance, TV Spin-off Advance, and the pawning of the furniture in their reception area. It wasn’t going well.
I was distracted. For a guy that can compose piano concertos while writing alliterative lyrics, philosophical studies of the foundation of human linguistics, creating intense visual artwork and watching hardcore midget/donkey porn, that is no small admission. Most people are hard pressed to accomplish anything with midget/donkey porn on.
As a child of the media age, I thrive upon distraction; there’s always some noise happening somewhere near. Of course many bemoan such attention stealers; understandably, narrow focus in this broad range is difficult at best. But I can usually pull focus and force the issue (with midget/donkey porn this is essential), thus achieving amazing things under the strangest of conditions.
But I was stymied. I had spent 3 weeks trying to sanitize the scene where Carrie impales herself on a crucifix screaming “Fuck me Jesus, fuck me Jesus!” before Robin – muse and editrix – pointed out to me that that scene was from the movie The Exorcist and was thus not germane to the original assignment.
My agent, Morrie (Moose) Berkowitz, was near apoplexy, so I stopped taking his calls, prompting him to come by unannounced and wail out on my driveway for hours at a time until Ilsa next door complained. Moose – he hated that name – countered by playing recordings of her yapping, yowling curs back at her, prompting her back inside to fume.
Of course none of this helped so when I heard a knock at the door I was prepared, so I thought, for anything. I threw on a robe, Robin’s it turned out, so it acted as a tight-fitting mini-toga, and stormed to the door.
“I got it, Morrie, Garfunkel wants his lobby set back…I’m on the phone as we speak…”
I held my dead cell phone to my head and squinted to make it look like I was trying to hear over the distant, encroaching sirens. I looked askance; this wasn’t Morrie.
Indeed, upon my porch in the middle of Godridge, 3:00 in the afternoon, stood not my agent Morrie but a very distressed looking zebra. “I’ll call you back…” I said to the phone, then let it slip from my fingers to the runner on the foyer linoleum. The zebra watched as it hit the floor then looked back up at me, puzzled. I’m sure I must have been something to see there in my wild haired, red-eyed, mini-toga thing.
Now, I’m fairly open minded; I work hard to avoid too much bias in my perspective. But even at my best I found it hard to reconcile a zebra soliciting door to door. I thought, “Jehovah’s Witness?” then quickly dispelled that notion in favor of solar retrofitting. I noticed he didn’t have a clipboard. Our eyes met.
“Uh, can I help you?” It was instinctive I suppose; I have pretty much always spoken to animals as if they could not only understand human, but Americanized English human. He looked at me imploringly, but I suspect didn’t decipher the nuance in my query. The sirens neared, accompanied now by the sounds of thoroughly unhappy people, lots of shouters.
The zebra (Eddie his name apparently) looked over his shoulder at the sounds of the nearing people then looked back at me, hopefully. I looked past him at the still street and could hear the local Godridge chopper and about 30 different sirens all closing in, fast. It took me a beat, but I got it when Eddie looked down at his hooves then back up at me.
The Welcome Mat.
Damn, he had me. Originally purchased for hookers and drug dealers, it had fallen into recent disuse owing to dearth of funds resultant to its original application coupled with Advance profligacy. I looked at him, then pulled the door open as I stepped aside. He wiped his hooves on the mat then stepped in graciously. I showed him into the dining room then closed the door.
He stood there, kind of embarrassed, which made me a little uneasy as well – some situations are more difficult than others to muster small talk in. I almost asked if he’d like a seat, then realized I didn’t know if I’d want him to stay that long. I didn’t even know what he was being pursued for. Perhaps he had mal intent. I took a cautious position.
Eddie looked at me with what I would characterize as gratitude – but later turned out to be gas - and then looked around the place. Most of my minor work he gave a quick look at, he actually snorted at Crucifried but was clearly more enamored of Robin’s Meth Odd painting over the firepit/TV hole, viewing it from different angles, adjusting the light for better representation.
There came a frenzied knocking at the door. Eddie looked up concerned. I looked at him, “Relax. I’ll see who it is…”
“There’s an escaped zebra on the loose!” He was a pudgy little bald guy. His name patch declared him Pete.
“Well, that would be consistent with escape.” Pete eyed me suspiciously – what was I up to? I elaborated, “Being on the loose and all.” He wasn’t buying it, so I turned it back on him and the wild-eyed contingent swarming the street beyond his pudgy suspicions.
“How could you lose a zebra in Northridge*!?” Pete was on the defensive, right where I wanted him, “I didn’t lose it! They had it for the Farmer’s Market. On loan from the Zoo…”
Ah, the weekly Farmer’s Market at the Fascist Center. In the media pit, Eddie knocked over The Simpson’s Season 14 with a crash while nosing around the DVDs. Pete looked up concerned. I covered.
“The Fashion Center** is 2 miles away. How did it get all the way over here? Presuming it is…” Now Pete was annoyed. He scrunched up his pudgy face, then shoved his hand in his coveralls. “Crash. Down on Plummer. Just trying to warn people.” He scowled at me then turned back to the busyness on the street beyond, his voice trailing off, “Asshole.”
I closed the door and went back in. Eddie was watching The Great Escape. I brought out the Fiddle Faddle. Don’t think I’ll ever finish that adaptation…
*what infidels call Godridge
**what conservatives call the Fascist Center
First Period
A lonely little girl lived in a town not far away. Her mother was very sick and had no one but her daughter to help her. Like her lonely girl, she was very lonely as well. They only had each other.
They lived on a quiet street in a small house with two stories. As they had no TV, they would often amuse themselves telling and retelling those stories. The little girl had a special room all to herself, under the stairs, where she could think about the stories and other things her mother wanted her to.
Her mother had a bad sickness, it made her see things that weren’t there and think people who were pretty much average were instead very, very bad. This more than any other thing kept her from having friends; she was afraid of people and that made them afraid of her too.
The little girl was like her mother in that she was afraid of people. The kids in her town didn’t understand why she was afraid of them and as most kids most places, were too selfish to care enough to find out why. So they teased her. They called her names, threw things at her and did things to embarrass her, to make her feel even worse than she did.
It worked and she sunk into her mind where she could be accepted, where she could be liked. Unlike other girls and boys who had to use their bodies to move things, she was able to move things with her thinking. The problem came in that she had the most power to move things when she was angry.
It came to pass that when her feelings got hurt, other people’s bodies got hurt too. This did not help her get more friends. And as she had none, one would be more.
When little girls become big girls, their bodies change much like when babies become little girls: they get bigger in places; they get stronger and smarter and faster. When little girls become big girls they become able to make babies. Their bodies change to allow that to occur. The girls at her school knew about this. The little girl didn’t.
She found out at school. First period, in the gym, she found out in a most embarrassing way. The girls at school saw fit to embarrass her even more; they mocked, called her names, threw things at her. This made the little girl cry. She was very sad. When she understood that her issue was normal for girls her age, she was relieved, but very unhappy.
She asked her mother why she never told her about this, why she was allowed to go to school not knowing. But her mother was sick. She told her daughter that the issue of her concern was the result of her bad behavior, that she was a bad girl with bad thoughts. She made the little girl go to her special place to think on her distress. This made the little girl very unhappy.
Things began to move about.
One of the girls at her school felt bad about making fun of the little girl. She had her boyfriend ask her to the prom, a big deal in any girl’s life. The little girl didn’t believe him; she thought she was being tricked. But her classmate’s boyfriend did not give up and finally the little girl agreed to go with him.
One of the girls who made fun of the little girl could not go to the prom for that very reason. She and her boyfriend came up with a way to really embarrass the little girl. She blamed the little girl for her not being able to go to the prom. She did not see her part in her problems. They would come to haunt her.
The little girl, in a dress she made, enjoyed the prom. She and her classmate’s boyfriend were even crowned king and queen of the prom. Then the mean girl and her meaner boyfriend played their trick on the little girl.
So she killed them all.
The End
I sat at my desk, struggling to conclude my kid’s version of the Stephen King period piece, Carrie. My publisher, Garfunkel & Schuster, had been relentlessly dogging me owing to my rapidly approaching deadline coupled with the fact I hadn’t submitted a single page after 3 months while burning through my Advance, Movie Rights Advance, TV Spin-off Advance, and the pawning of the furniture in their reception area. It wasn’t going well.
I was distracted. For a guy that can compose piano concertos while writing alliterative lyrics, philosophical studies of the foundation of human linguistics, creating intense visual artwork and watching hardcore midget/donkey porn, that is no small admission. Most people are hard pressed to accomplish anything with midget/donkey porn on.
As a child of the media age, I thrive upon distraction; there’s always some noise happening somewhere near. Of course many bemoan such attention stealers; understandably, narrow focus in this broad range is difficult at best. But I can usually pull focus and force the issue (with midget/donkey porn this is essential), thus achieving amazing things under the strangest of conditions.
But I was stymied. I had spent 3 weeks trying to sanitize the scene where Carrie impales herself on a crucifix screaming “Fuck me Jesus, fuck me Jesus!” before Robin – muse and editrix – pointed out to me that that scene was from the movie The Exorcist and was thus not germane to the original assignment.
My agent, Morrie (Moose) Berkowitz, was near apoplexy, so I stopped taking his calls, prompting him to come by unannounced and wail out on my driveway for hours at a time until Ilsa next door complained. Moose – he hated that name – countered by playing recordings of her yapping, yowling curs back at her, prompting her back inside to fume.
Of course none of this helped so when I heard a knock at the door I was prepared, so I thought, for anything. I threw on a robe, Robin’s it turned out, so it acted as a tight-fitting mini-toga, and stormed to the door.
“I got it, Morrie, Garfunkel wants his lobby set back…I’m on the phone as we speak…”
I held my dead cell phone to my head and squinted to make it look like I was trying to hear over the distant, encroaching sirens. I looked askance; this wasn’t Morrie.
Indeed, upon my porch in the middle of Godridge, 3:00 in the afternoon, stood not my agent Morrie but a very distressed looking zebra. “I’ll call you back…” I said to the phone, then let it slip from my fingers to the runner on the foyer linoleum. The zebra watched as it hit the floor then looked back up at me, puzzled. I’m sure I must have been something to see there in my wild haired, red-eyed, mini-toga thing.
Now, I’m fairly open minded; I work hard to avoid too much bias in my perspective. But even at my best I found it hard to reconcile a zebra soliciting door to door. I thought, “Jehovah’s Witness?” then quickly dispelled that notion in favor of solar retrofitting. I noticed he didn’t have a clipboard. Our eyes met.
“Uh, can I help you?” It was instinctive I suppose; I have pretty much always spoken to animals as if they could not only understand human, but Americanized English human. He looked at me imploringly, but I suspect didn’t decipher the nuance in my query. The sirens neared, accompanied now by the sounds of thoroughly unhappy people, lots of shouters.
The zebra (Eddie his name apparently) looked over his shoulder at the sounds of the nearing people then looked back at me, hopefully. I looked past him at the still street and could hear the local Godridge chopper and about 30 different sirens all closing in, fast. It took me a beat, but I got it when Eddie looked down at his hooves then back up at me.
The Welcome Mat.
Damn, he had me. Originally purchased for hookers and drug dealers, it had fallen into recent disuse owing to dearth of funds resultant to its original application coupled with Advance profligacy. I looked at him, then pulled the door open as I stepped aside. He wiped his hooves on the mat then stepped in graciously. I showed him into the dining room then closed the door.
He stood there, kind of embarrassed, which made me a little uneasy as well – some situations are more difficult than others to muster small talk in. I almost asked if he’d like a seat, then realized I didn’t know if I’d want him to stay that long. I didn’t even know what he was being pursued for. Perhaps he had mal intent. I took a cautious position.
Eddie looked at me with what I would characterize as gratitude – but later turned out to be gas - and then looked around the place. Most of my minor work he gave a quick look at, he actually snorted at Crucifried but was clearly more enamored of Robin’s Meth Odd painting over the firepit/TV hole, viewing it from different angles, adjusting the light for better representation.
There came a frenzied knocking at the door. Eddie looked up concerned. I looked at him, “Relax. I’ll see who it is…”
“There’s an escaped zebra on the loose!” He was a pudgy little bald guy. His name patch declared him Pete.
“Well, that would be consistent with escape.” Pete eyed me suspiciously – what was I up to? I elaborated, “Being on the loose and all.” He wasn’t buying it, so I turned it back on him and the wild-eyed contingent swarming the street beyond his pudgy suspicions.
“How could you lose a zebra in Northridge*!?” Pete was on the defensive, right where I wanted him, “I didn’t lose it! They had it for the Farmer’s Market. On loan from the Zoo…”
Ah, the weekly Farmer’s Market at the Fascist Center. In the media pit, Eddie knocked over The Simpson’s Season 14 with a crash while nosing around the DVDs. Pete looked up concerned. I covered.
“The Fashion Center** is 2 miles away. How did it get all the way over here? Presuming it is…” Now Pete was annoyed. He scrunched up his pudgy face, then shoved his hand in his coveralls. “Crash. Down on Plummer. Just trying to warn people.” He scowled at me then turned back to the busyness on the street beyond, his voice trailing off, “Asshole.”
I closed the door and went back in. Eddie was watching The Great Escape. I brought out the Fiddle Faddle. Don’t think I’ll ever finish that adaptation…
*what infidels call Godridge
**what conservatives call the Fascist Center
First Period
A lonely little girl lived in a town not far away. Her mother was very sick and had no one but her daughter to help her. Like her lonely girl, she was very lonely as well. They only had each other.
They lived on a quiet street in a small house with two stories. As they had no TV, they would often amuse themselves telling and retelling those stories. The little girl had a special room all to herself, under the stairs, where she could think about the stories and other things her mother wanted her to.
Her mother had a bad sickness, it made her see things that weren’t there and think people who were pretty much average were instead very, very bad. This more than any other thing kept her from having friends; she was afraid of people and that made them afraid of her too.
The little girl was like her mother in that she was afraid of people. The kids in her town didn’t understand why she was afraid of them and as most kids most places, were too selfish to care enough to find out why. So they teased her. They called her names, threw things at her and did things to embarrass her, to make her feel even worse than she did.
It worked and she sunk into her mind where she could be accepted, where she could be liked. Unlike other girls and boys who had to use their bodies to move things, she was able to move things with her thinking. The problem came in that she had the most power to move things when she was angry.
It came to pass that when her feelings got hurt, other people’s bodies got hurt too. This did not help her get more friends. And as she had none, one would be more.
When little girls become big girls, their bodies change much like when babies become little girls: they get bigger in places; they get stronger and smarter and faster. When little girls become big girls they become able to make babies. Their bodies change to allow that to occur. The girls at her school knew about this. The little girl didn’t.
She found out at school. First period, in the gym, she found out in a most embarrassing way. The girls at school saw fit to embarrass her even more; they mocked, called her names, threw things at her. This made the little girl cry. She was very sad. When she understood that her issue was normal for girls her age, she was relieved, but very unhappy.
She asked her mother why she never told her about this, why she was allowed to go to school not knowing. But her mother was sick. She told her daughter that the issue of her concern was the result of her bad behavior, that she was a bad girl with bad thoughts. She made the little girl go to her special place to think on her distress. This made the little girl very unhappy.
Things began to move about.
One of the girls at her school felt bad about making fun of the little girl. She had her boyfriend ask her to the prom, a big deal in any girl’s life. The little girl didn’t believe him; she thought she was being tricked. But her classmate’s boyfriend did not give up and finally the little girl agreed to go with him.
One of the girls who made fun of the little girl could not go to the prom for that very reason. She and her boyfriend came up with a way to really embarrass the little girl. She blamed the little girl for her not being able to go to the prom. She did not see her part in her problems. They would come to haunt her.
The little girl, in a dress she made, enjoyed the prom. She and her classmate’s boyfriend were even crowned king and queen of the prom. Then the mean girl and her meaner boyfriend played their trick on the little girl.
So she killed them all.
The End
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Funny Man
The laughter has abated
Alas the presses cried
Tragedy has won again
A funny man has died
They said his sadness took him
They called it suicide
It seems the best life offers
Leaves us dissatisfied
Each day seems more difficult
In all this to abide
Where all the sadness welling
In our hearts is multiplied
So often we have seen it
Where humor has belied
The smile on the face
Masks the misery inside
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
The battle with addiction
The enemy within
So hard to best the killer
That lives beneath your skin
Life within the spotlight
Hero or heroin
The high price of celebrity
The winners seldom win
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
For Robin Williams with great sorrow
© 2014 simmbiosis 8/12/14
Alas the presses cried
Tragedy has won again
A funny man has died
They said his sadness took him
They called it suicide
It seems the best life offers
Leaves us dissatisfied
Each day seems more difficult
In all this to abide
Where all the sadness welling
In our hearts is multiplied
So often we have seen it
Where humor has belied
The smile on the face
Masks the misery inside
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
The battle with addiction
The enemy within
So hard to best the killer
That lives beneath your skin
Life within the spotlight
Hero or heroin
The high price of celebrity
The winners seldom win
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
For Robin Williams with great sorrow
© 2014 simmbiosis 8/12/14
Friday, June 13, 2014
At The End
At the end as the beginning
Existence is joy and grief
Calculated underpinning
Time the existential thief
So much on the future pinning
Far too long and then too brief
Transforming our faces grinning
Weeping into handkerchief
Ultimately there’s no winning
All life the eternal’s fief
Each hour our numbers thinning
Shallow lives in broad relief
Beginning with the mind’s awareness
From there thinking can extend
Grapple within reason’s rareness
Then return it at the end
No matter what you do
Whether you are cruel or kind
Or how much you accrue
How deeply your pockets lined
Regardless of the who
Or of notions as opined
The many or the few
Disparately or aligned
Not subject to review
Not lauded nor maligned
Unable to renew
No reason to be resigned
How much you owe or due
In the body of the mind
Your joys you take with you
Your possessions leave behind
Beginning with the mind’s awareness
From there thinking can extend
Grapple within reason’s rareness
Then return it at the end
For Gayle © 2014 6/12/14
Existence is joy and grief
Calculated underpinning
Time the existential thief
So much on the future pinning
Far too long and then too brief
Transforming our faces grinning
Weeping into handkerchief
Ultimately there’s no winning
All life the eternal’s fief
Each hour our numbers thinning
Shallow lives in broad relief
Beginning with the mind’s awareness
From there thinking can extend
Grapple within reason’s rareness
Then return it at the end
No matter what you do
Whether you are cruel or kind
Or how much you accrue
How deeply your pockets lined
Regardless of the who
Or of notions as opined
The many or the few
Disparately or aligned
Not subject to review
Not lauded nor maligned
Unable to renew
No reason to be resigned
How much you owe or due
In the body of the mind
Your joys you take with you
Your possessions leave behind
Beginning with the mind’s awareness
From there thinking can extend
Grapple within reason’s rareness
Then return it at the end
For Gayle © 2014 6/12/14
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Dustin - The Wind
"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within me." Psalm 22:14
Occasionally, life will blow you away. We adapt to the little gusts and zephyrs which buffet us around in the usual course of daily activity, the bursts that knock off a hat or raise a skirt. Inconvenient, perhaps even amusing in the right circumstances, but nothing beyond what a functional person is able to contend with. Then out of nowhere the howl and rush blindside us as the grand invisible knocks us off our feet into crumpled wrecks. The power of the wind is that you can see what it does, but you can’t see it.
A young man died on Sunday. A traffic collision ended another life too soon, for no good reason. He wasn’t a celebrity or business superstar, nor a man of political ambition or even religious piety; he was a man adrift in a world full of them. As most, his note came in the lives he touched and the love he possessed. For most of us, that must be enough.
His name was Dustin Scott Haywood. He was 31, he was my nephew and, more importantly, he was my friend. I knew him all of his 31 years, distantly, as my family is nuclear (but only after the explosion and all is distributed far and wide). I met him in Sacramento/Fair Oaks when he was a baby and watched him grow in and around there and Santa Rosa, California, when I and my family would visit my folks for occasions from Los Angeles.
He was 2 years older than my son, several younger than my daughters. Dustin and his younger brother, Nick, played with my son, Errol, and they spent much of their childhoods growing up together. As Dustin grew, he found a special affinity for me as did I for him; he was fascinated by my weirdness but likely more so by my joy of living. He took an interest in piano upon seeing the fun I had with it, showed me what he’d learned when we’d see each other.
When I had the occasion to speak with his father regarding the atrocities of 9/11, Dustin saw the logic with which I presented my perspective, as did his father (who willingly bypassed the obvious in favor of the comforting). In his distrust of authority another of our bonds was formed. In the disdain of my sister and her husband for my negative influence upon him we found a mutual amusement as well – how I, who spoke to Dustin maybe 3 times a year, could have a stronger influence than his parents who he lived and worked with daily for years says much, I suppose, about all of us in his regard.
He was smart, quick-witted, but undisciplined as are most men at that age these days (undisciplined, not smart or quick-witted), and hungry for meaning. His dad is fairly conservative and very nationalist/capitalist, a flyer in the military before getting into real estate. Dustin, tall and very slight, was not of a military mind, nor was my son, which is a good thing considering what our military was getting into when they were coming of age. This is an influence I will gladly accept responsibility for: my mother, his mother and my brother all pushed for my son to join the military because he didn’t have a job. Dustin was likewise pushed by his parents.
This was around 2002. Just after we invaded Afghanistan, just before we invaded Iraq and all the rest. I repudiated my family for suggesting to my son and my nephew that they should join the military “To make men out them.” I took issue with this and do so still because that is exactly the opposite of what the military does.
What is a boy? Someone so immature that you must dress him, feed him, make him clean up after himself, tell him what to do and most importantly make all his decisions for him. That describes parenting and the military nicely. Parenting has virtue because you spend all your time trying to keep your kids from being killed or killing anyone else. The military is just about the killing.
Afterward, the young inductee, discharged back into the wild, still has to find a place to live, a car to drive, a job, a life – but now with the added benefit of having been trained to shut up, follow orders to the letter, view oneself as the lowest scum of the Earth, yet still superior to everyone else, and especially being expected to kill the competition with no qualm. Like college students, most probably end up back at home after their stint, at least until they end up on the streets as more of our social castaways.
This is a man? Shut-up, do as you’re told, follow orders, kill your fellows because it is the only way to win!? This is socially seen as our pinnacle of desirability – don’t forget, hire a vet. Because like a good saddle horse, a vet is broken; he will obey command. Those who reject such thinking are outcasts, marginalized, targeted. It happened to me. It happened to Dustin.
I will recount the bullet points of a complex relationship: Dustin worked in real estate with his dad, made some money, had a house. He allowed a female friend to stay with him, with her own room, in his house. She went wacky and became menacing so he had her move out. Then one day, while he was alone in the house, in the shower, Dustin heard someone breaking in. He threw on some pants and grabbed a shotgun. He found his former roomy and some fellow in the house and insisted they leave. After a heated exchange, they left. Dustin was arrested. Spent years enjoying the benefits of the legal system. Had to pay the intruder who broke into his house $15,000.00 - court ordered - to avoid ass-rape prison.
For holding a gun in his house.
This vexed Dustin, as well as several of us. I learned long ago that when they get you, money is the only thing that ungets you. Dustin learned too. So he lost his house, moved into his parent’s rental condo. Then they decided to sell that. Or give it to his brother. The last time I saw him, mid-last year, he and a friend had come down for a job interview and stayed at my place. He was downbeat about his living circumstance but still positive about future endeavors. He had plans.
In February he texted that he and a friend would be coming down and I let him know what he always knew: he was welcome any time. That went on hold. Then, early March, he texted me again, said he was into something that he could only talk to me about because I would understand. I told him I was all eyes and he told me he would tell me soon.
Then Sunday came the call.
Grief is as the sea – Distant: vast, impenetrable but still and calm. Close: it washes over us in waves until we are consumed. Battered we gasp for breath and clutch for something solid to moor us, coming away with only sand. The death of a love becomes like a dream, it doesn’t seem real in the midst of seeming all too real. Waiting for the wake-up that puts everything back right, the wake-up that never comes. And the dream/nightmare becomes our new reality.
When the call came, I knew instantly by the sound of my ex’s voice. That horrid sensation triggered only by a single word uttered across a phone connection that sends your body into distress mode, “What happened?” Before she could answer I thought, “It’s my Mom. Don’t let it be Errol.” When she said it was Dustin, I was stunned. Not Dustin. He’s the only one in the family that likes me. I love Dustin. As she told me what she knew, I became awash, gasping for air, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. I love Dustin.
And like that, he was gone.
Dustin understood the evils of capital but he enjoyed its benefits as well. He, like so many people young and old, found the pursuit of it empty and meaningless, a lifetime spent running in place on a treadmill that increases speed the longer you run. He had agrarian aspirations of which I dissuaded him, having farmed in my youth. He was at one point ready to put off to Fiji and areas contiguous to build a commune/resort for a charismatic leader and I dissuaded him in that as well. I wonder now if I should have.
Probably.
He saw that we had taken our paradise, which we so clamor for, and turned it into the jungle that we are so proud of climbing out of. This troubled him as it does any compassionate person and I felt his idealism turning into cynicism; he was becoming a man. The marketplace is occasionally generous to those who willingly play the game, but to we who mock convention it is a cruel mistress, offering the promise of delights never delivered.
Dustin could act the part but his heart wasn’t in it. This we shared in common as well. He had strayed from the path. He had seen what most cannot (and not owing to incapacity so much as unwillingness). Some of this I may have showed him, most he found on his own. Inquisitive minds inquire. I know he felt alone and it breaks my heart he didn’t continue our discourse.
That I didn’t.
Some, it seems, breeze through life or get blown through it (in both positive and negative connotations) while others stake a more fixed place. While I have spent annoying amounts of time around most of my other family members, Dustin always seemed in transit, moving some direction or another in that common search for sense in all this. I enjoyed our time immeasurably but rarely got more than a day here and there to enjoy his company. I am very touched he found me interesting enough to want to socialize with.
As with all friends lost, I thought I would have more opportunities.
My dad told me that if by the end of your life you can count your true friends on one hand, you’ve done okay, had a good life. At the end of his life, I was one of maybe two on his hand. I’m glad that I could be after all we went through together. I know that at the end Dustin counted me on his hand[s] and I am honored to have been there as well.
Sadly, at my end I will have one less on mine.
Rest in peace my Friend.
Love always
Occasionally, life will blow you away. We adapt to the little gusts and zephyrs which buffet us around in the usual course of daily activity, the bursts that knock off a hat or raise a skirt. Inconvenient, perhaps even amusing in the right circumstances, but nothing beyond what a functional person is able to contend with. Then out of nowhere the howl and rush blindside us as the grand invisible knocks us off our feet into crumpled wrecks. The power of the wind is that you can see what it does, but you can’t see it.
A young man died on Sunday. A traffic collision ended another life too soon, for no good reason. He wasn’t a celebrity or business superstar, nor a man of political ambition or even religious piety; he was a man adrift in a world full of them. As most, his note came in the lives he touched and the love he possessed. For most of us, that must be enough.
His name was Dustin Scott Haywood. He was 31, he was my nephew and, more importantly, he was my friend. I knew him all of his 31 years, distantly, as my family is nuclear (but only after the explosion and all is distributed far and wide). I met him in Sacramento/Fair Oaks when he was a baby and watched him grow in and around there and Santa Rosa, California, when I and my family would visit my folks for occasions from Los Angeles.
He was 2 years older than my son, several younger than my daughters. Dustin and his younger brother, Nick, played with my son, Errol, and they spent much of their childhoods growing up together. As Dustin grew, he found a special affinity for me as did I for him; he was fascinated by my weirdness but likely more so by my joy of living. He took an interest in piano upon seeing the fun I had with it, showed me what he’d learned when we’d see each other.
When I had the occasion to speak with his father regarding the atrocities of 9/11, Dustin saw the logic with which I presented my perspective, as did his father (who willingly bypassed the obvious in favor of the comforting). In his distrust of authority another of our bonds was formed. In the disdain of my sister and her husband for my negative influence upon him we found a mutual amusement as well – how I, who spoke to Dustin maybe 3 times a year, could have a stronger influence than his parents who he lived and worked with daily for years says much, I suppose, about all of us in his regard.
He was smart, quick-witted, but undisciplined as are most men at that age these days (undisciplined, not smart or quick-witted), and hungry for meaning. His dad is fairly conservative and very nationalist/capitalist, a flyer in the military before getting into real estate. Dustin, tall and very slight, was not of a military mind, nor was my son, which is a good thing considering what our military was getting into when they were coming of age. This is an influence I will gladly accept responsibility for: my mother, his mother and my brother all pushed for my son to join the military because he didn’t have a job. Dustin was likewise pushed by his parents.
This was around 2002. Just after we invaded Afghanistan, just before we invaded Iraq and all the rest. I repudiated my family for suggesting to my son and my nephew that they should join the military “To make men out them.” I took issue with this and do so still because that is exactly the opposite of what the military does.
What is a boy? Someone so immature that you must dress him, feed him, make him clean up after himself, tell him what to do and most importantly make all his decisions for him. That describes parenting and the military nicely. Parenting has virtue because you spend all your time trying to keep your kids from being killed or killing anyone else. The military is just about the killing.
Afterward, the young inductee, discharged back into the wild, still has to find a place to live, a car to drive, a job, a life – but now with the added benefit of having been trained to shut up, follow orders to the letter, view oneself as the lowest scum of the Earth, yet still superior to everyone else, and especially being expected to kill the competition with no qualm. Like college students, most probably end up back at home after their stint, at least until they end up on the streets as more of our social castaways.
This is a man? Shut-up, do as you’re told, follow orders, kill your fellows because it is the only way to win!? This is socially seen as our pinnacle of desirability – don’t forget, hire a vet. Because like a good saddle horse, a vet is broken; he will obey command. Those who reject such thinking are outcasts, marginalized, targeted. It happened to me. It happened to Dustin.
I will recount the bullet points of a complex relationship: Dustin worked in real estate with his dad, made some money, had a house. He allowed a female friend to stay with him, with her own room, in his house. She went wacky and became menacing so he had her move out. Then one day, while he was alone in the house, in the shower, Dustin heard someone breaking in. He threw on some pants and grabbed a shotgun. He found his former roomy and some fellow in the house and insisted they leave. After a heated exchange, they left. Dustin was arrested. Spent years enjoying the benefits of the legal system. Had to pay the intruder who broke into his house $15,000.00 - court ordered - to avoid ass-rape prison.
For holding a gun in his house.
This vexed Dustin, as well as several of us. I learned long ago that when they get you, money is the only thing that ungets you. Dustin learned too. So he lost his house, moved into his parent’s rental condo. Then they decided to sell that. Or give it to his brother. The last time I saw him, mid-last year, he and a friend had come down for a job interview and stayed at my place. He was downbeat about his living circumstance but still positive about future endeavors. He had plans.
In February he texted that he and a friend would be coming down and I let him know what he always knew: he was welcome any time. That went on hold. Then, early March, he texted me again, said he was into something that he could only talk to me about because I would understand. I told him I was all eyes and he told me he would tell me soon.
Then Sunday came the call.
Grief is as the sea – Distant: vast, impenetrable but still and calm. Close: it washes over us in waves until we are consumed. Battered we gasp for breath and clutch for something solid to moor us, coming away with only sand. The death of a love becomes like a dream, it doesn’t seem real in the midst of seeming all too real. Waiting for the wake-up that puts everything back right, the wake-up that never comes. And the dream/nightmare becomes our new reality.
When the call came, I knew instantly by the sound of my ex’s voice. That horrid sensation triggered only by a single word uttered across a phone connection that sends your body into distress mode, “What happened?” Before she could answer I thought, “It’s my Mom. Don’t let it be Errol.” When she said it was Dustin, I was stunned. Not Dustin. He’s the only one in the family that likes me. I love Dustin. As she told me what she knew, I became awash, gasping for air, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. I love Dustin.
And like that, he was gone.
Dustin understood the evils of capital but he enjoyed its benefits as well. He, like so many people young and old, found the pursuit of it empty and meaningless, a lifetime spent running in place on a treadmill that increases speed the longer you run. He had agrarian aspirations of which I dissuaded him, having farmed in my youth. He was at one point ready to put off to Fiji and areas contiguous to build a commune/resort for a charismatic leader and I dissuaded him in that as well. I wonder now if I should have.
Probably.
He saw that we had taken our paradise, which we so clamor for, and turned it into the jungle that we are so proud of climbing out of. This troubled him as it does any compassionate person and I felt his idealism turning into cynicism; he was becoming a man. The marketplace is occasionally generous to those who willingly play the game, but to we who mock convention it is a cruel mistress, offering the promise of delights never delivered.
Dustin could act the part but his heart wasn’t in it. This we shared in common as well. He had strayed from the path. He had seen what most cannot (and not owing to incapacity so much as unwillingness). Some of this I may have showed him, most he found on his own. Inquisitive minds inquire. I know he felt alone and it breaks my heart he didn’t continue our discourse.
That I didn’t.
Some, it seems, breeze through life or get blown through it (in both positive and negative connotations) while others stake a more fixed place. While I have spent annoying amounts of time around most of my other family members, Dustin always seemed in transit, moving some direction or another in that common search for sense in all this. I enjoyed our time immeasurably but rarely got more than a day here and there to enjoy his company. I am very touched he found me interesting enough to want to socialize with.
As with all friends lost, I thought I would have more opportunities.
My dad told me that if by the end of your life you can count your true friends on one hand, you’ve done okay, had a good life. At the end of his life, I was one of maybe two on his hand. I’m glad that I could be after all we went through together. I know that at the end Dustin counted me on his hand[s] and I am honored to have been there as well.
Sadly, at my end I will have one less on mine.
Rest in peace my Friend.
Love always
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
His Master's Voice
The other morning I had the occasion to stumble bedward around 7:00 AM. This is not unusual: I stumble many directions (often at the same time) and find myself creatively productive during normally accepted somnolent hours--less external distraction, higher output. I tend to work to the point of semi-consciousness, which is a fairly efficient stumbling enhancer, so when I hit the welcoming confines of Club Bed, I sleep pretty quickly. Quick sleep.
Well, unless I’m contacted by Riley or any of his vocal cohorts. Riley lives next door and when his master leaves for work, he shares his disdain at being a slave in a most audible manner. Riley barks. Riley is an Australian sheep-herder (heard, er?). As there are no longer any Australians about, nor any evidence of sheep (I’ve checked Ewe Tube – nothing), Riley has nothing to do.
So he barks. Now don’t get me wrong, Riley isn’t the only offender--I’ve got dogs on all three sides of me. And even though they have no idea what their counterparts look like or smell like, they all know the sound of each others' voices. As doggedlies are wont to do, one will get going at some imaginary menace or another and before you know it, all of the crotch-licking little bastards are chiming in.
Which is a treat at 7:00 in the AM, crawling into bed when most people are getting up and crawling back into life. It’s positively uncanny: he knows whenever I’m about to record vocals or the instant I settle into bed. Yap. Yap, yap. As I lay there, head swimming with exhaustion and none too distant yapping I came to understand something: why dogs bark.
Of course, the askance looks and condescending clucks--“Everybody knows why dogs bark – I’m missing America’s Got Talent for this?” And of course you’re not. I feel fairly secure that anyone predisposed to AGT wouldn’t read this in the first place, and that if they did, they would read it in the second place--at best. The pixelated word claims no primacy in the realm of the pixelated image. I’ll wait my turn. Ruff, ruff.
Beyond warning or establishing proximity, dogs in the wild (wolves, coyotes, etc.) have little reason to bark. As they have no known language, they have little to say to each other beyond the tonal inflections they use to express joy, displeasure or distress. Canines are not historically noted for their oratorical prowess, though I’ve known a howler or two that would give Rihanna a run for her money. A deep growl doesn’t necessarily suggest deep thinking.
Hunters function more effectively in silence owing to the reduced probability of scaring prey away. Beyond confounding or driving dinner to a desired location, barking is a screaming give-away, and one imagines a yapper being driven from the pack out of survival necessity. And to diminish annoyance. Us yappy types find ourselves marginalized fairly quickly.
It seemed to me in my doggy fog that canines probably didn’t get into barking until they started hanging around with humans. Barking offers decent menace to interlopers, growling even more so, and was likely encouraged in situations of peril by the tribes which were domesticated by them. Come on, they don’t feed us, or shelter us; just make us feel they appreciate it when we do it for them. Domestication is a two-way street with often faded lines of demarcation.
In order to domesticate something, a level of communication is useful, for if humans couldn’t express their desires or needs to each other, one imagines it doubly difficult to express it to an animal. Or field of wheat. And long before written logos, the grunt of early human became refined into words, then abstract expression of deeper significance as ideas were shared and expanded upon. To build cities, even lesser encampments, ancient human needed fairly precise language to engage in engineering and architecture.
Dogs dig holes. They lay around and lick their butts and genitals. People think it would be ever so exciting to talk to the animals. People get bored talking to people who do interesting things, lead interesting lives. Trust me, I know this. Dogs lick their asses. I’m sure their view on the issues of the day would be fascinating. “You know, my butt kinda tastes like dog food…”
Right. So, these animals that really have nothing to say, no language to speak of and, being domesticated, not much to do, spend hours of their days telling us about it. I listened to Riley that morning, as I have many mornings, and I realized he wasn’t barking to ward off any intruder--hell, most yappers would flee at the sight of one. He was talking the talk of an idiot, a creature with no appreciable intelligence convinced that others revel in their vocalization.
Now before I dig myself in too deep with this dog/human relationship, allow me to express: I have been master to many doggy slaves. As much as we love our little canine buddies (and imagine they love us), they exist as slaves to our dominion. They suppress their free will, or have it suppressed by another, exist in captivity, have identification papers held by their owner and have their movements completely dictated from without. Slaves.
And that’s fine. Humans have always embraced slavery and, with pets, our need to dominate is fulfilled as well our need to feel benevolent. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?” Yeah, benevolent slavers. “Yeah Massa, I’ll get your slippers for ya real good…Cracker asshole…Fucking kibble my ass…”
I’ve loved me a good number of dogs, convinced myself they loved me and buried every one of the little fuckers. (Actually, I think my final dog, Juno, resides in a can with my ex. Well, her ashes anyway.) They aren’t great for long term relationships. 10, 12 years, then weepyville.
As humans, we tend to ascribe human feelings and emotions to the things we covet. That’s why we have such jealousy-- we decide that our feelings are universal and the revelation that they aren’t is often devastating. We attach so much to words, which is funny as we play so fast and loose with them. We become utterly indignant if someone close to us uses words we don’t approve of - say they lie to us.
Then we’ll turn right around and accept the words of people who have revealed themselves as liars if they say something we wish to hear. Is it not odd how a person we know to be mendacious or disingenuous becomes believable when they tell us we’re right, or that we look ‘fabulous’? Or how a person of dubious character who suggests a way to make a bunch of money, quick – no risk – becomes worthy of consideration? (Remember that when someone says "no risk" that you will likely "know" risk.)
We clearly love the sound of the human voice. Talking, singing, humming, shouting, even screaming; we are utterly enamored with the human sound. And no sound/voice more than our own. We talk about anything, we talk about nothing. We talk to ourselves in a room full of people and to a room full of people when we’re by ourselves. We talk to strangers in line, to strangers behind counters, to strangers who bring us things we’ve ordered.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that virtually every human who has a pet, talks to it as well. And not just, “Sit. Shake. Roll over. Shut the fuck up!” I suspect that the vast majority of pet owners talk to their pets as if their pets can somehow understand them. Every one I’ve ever known, including myself, has. Dogs, cats, birds (not fish so much): pet owners talk to their pets like they talk to other people.
Curious how some people talk to them like they are children--in early childhood toddlers and dogs are about equally stupid--and others (my discipline) talk to them as they talk to adults. (I talk to children that way as well.) We talk to our dogs and otherlings about stuff we would talk about with people, if they were there. They become our surrogate, warm-blooded contacts, the only ones we can be sure won’t reveal the secrets we tell them. Our nasty little secrets.*
We are safe in this because dogs don’t speak human. Sure, there are those that bark things that sound like words, but this is equal in significance to saying “Spurlank!” is Martian for something or other. As we have no workable context for a language that doesn’t exist, dogs have no context for language that does, beyond understanding the repercussions and rewards for performing certain actions upon certain commands. Dogs have no corresponding words for “Sit” “Shake” or “Shut the fuck up!”. How could they? They have no verbal language. They respond to tonal inflection and conditioning in captivity or tonal inflection and instinct in the wild.
It seemed to me, lying there trying to sleep, that what we hear from dogs, they hear from us.
Talking is articulated grunting. We force air out our oral blow-hole and shape it with our tongue and lips. Before we as a species spoke, we grunted. After developing languages, based upon regionally approved grunting, we spoke and grunted. Fortunately, we augmented our grunting instead of replacing it. Now we reserve grunting for difficult tasks, expressions of disapproval and sex, all of which we incorporate talking into as well. Sex, often with lots of talking beforehand, considerable grunting during, then not enough talking afterwards, 4 or 5 minutes later.
While humans can understand expressions of affection (“Well, that was terrific,” and the always popular “Whadda ya mean 150 bucks?!?”), dogs presumably just hear little barking, grunting sounds. Again, they are masterful at tonal inflection, but that is not linguistically based as proven by the universality of understanding offered by the subtle nuance of a deep menacing growl or advancing guttural bark.
When we talk to our dogs, I imagine they hear something akin to, “Yarf arf barf parf darf carf larf.” They are very adept at appearing thoroughly engrossed in our dialogue, but just as explaining quantum physics to a three month-old baby is pointless beyond the release that comes of blathering, bitching to Skippy about some loser at work is only cathartic to you, where not amusing to Skippy. He’s frankly more interested in what’s in the bag.
Dogs make so much noise when we’re away because their masters make so much noise when they’re together. Dogs living with humans who talk to them become convinced that talking to one’s self is perfectly rational behavior. And while stupid by human comparison--sadly becoming less so, and dogs ain’t getting smarter--any pet knows that the upright hairless ape that’s chattering at it is just chattering. A dog can’t understand it. A cat? Sorry. They don’t speak human. They are animals. They don’t know what a ‘chair’ is, just that they get screeched at when they get caught on it.
So with the dumb animal knowing the smart animal couldn’t possibly be talking to it owing to complete lack of understanding, the dumb animal must think that the smart animal is talking (chattering) to itself. (It is.) It just isn't smart enough to understand that language is context-based, and animals operate from a different context from humans. So the dumb animal, beyond responding to commands as any slave would, thinks that smart, masterful animals talk to themselves.
So dogs talk to themselves. And each other. They yap yap yap and ramble away just like humans, blathering just to hear the sound of their own voices. And just like humans, very little they express is really understood. The joy, the disappointment, the menace: this we all understand to a degree. We possess the capacity for empathy, something dogs are masterful at. As they aren’t caught up in words, they immediately understand temperament, emotion, fear.
Our words mess us up. We get so caught up in trying to position ourselves well in conversation (made competitive like everything else in imperial politics) that we lose our capacity to truly care about what each other is feeling, what drives the expression. Competitive conversation makes us cold and aloof, like dogs barking at things they can’t see or at each other: “Stay away. I’m rough! Rough! Ruff, ruff!!”
Unfortunately, this is what our discourse has degraded to--our grand language languishing, the price of letting jocks dictate social policy and imbeciles define social discourse. We bark orders, snap at each other and growl under our breath like dogs being stupid, but we never shut up and listen, like dogs we imagine as smart (enough to understand us) do when we talk to them. They understand our feelings because they understand us. Just not our words.
Now when I have my special moments with Riley, I know what he’s really thinking: “I’m Ruff! Bird on Roof! Shut yer Yap!”
*Is this phase one of Pussies?
© 2013 simmbiosis 6/8/13
Well, unless I’m contacted by Riley or any of his vocal cohorts. Riley lives next door and when his master leaves for work, he shares his disdain at being a slave in a most audible manner. Riley barks. Riley is an Australian sheep-herder (heard, er?). As there are no longer any Australians about, nor any evidence of sheep (I’ve checked Ewe Tube – nothing), Riley has nothing to do.
So he barks. Now don’t get me wrong, Riley isn’t the only offender--I’ve got dogs on all three sides of me. And even though they have no idea what their counterparts look like or smell like, they all know the sound of each others' voices. As doggedlies are wont to do, one will get going at some imaginary menace or another and before you know it, all of the crotch-licking little bastards are chiming in.
Which is a treat at 7:00 in the AM, crawling into bed when most people are getting up and crawling back into life. It’s positively uncanny: he knows whenever I’m about to record vocals or the instant I settle into bed. Yap. Yap, yap. As I lay there, head swimming with exhaustion and none too distant yapping I came to understand something: why dogs bark.
Of course, the askance looks and condescending clucks--“Everybody knows why dogs bark – I’m missing America’s Got Talent for this?” And of course you’re not. I feel fairly secure that anyone predisposed to AGT wouldn’t read this in the first place, and that if they did, they would read it in the second place--at best. The pixelated word claims no primacy in the realm of the pixelated image. I’ll wait my turn. Ruff, ruff.
Beyond warning or establishing proximity, dogs in the wild (wolves, coyotes, etc.) have little reason to bark. As they have no known language, they have little to say to each other beyond the tonal inflections they use to express joy, displeasure or distress. Canines are not historically noted for their oratorical prowess, though I’ve known a howler or two that would give Rihanna a run for her money. A deep growl doesn’t necessarily suggest deep thinking.
Hunters function more effectively in silence owing to the reduced probability of scaring prey away. Beyond confounding or driving dinner to a desired location, barking is a screaming give-away, and one imagines a yapper being driven from the pack out of survival necessity. And to diminish annoyance. Us yappy types find ourselves marginalized fairly quickly.
It seemed to me in my doggy fog that canines probably didn’t get into barking until they started hanging around with humans. Barking offers decent menace to interlopers, growling even more so, and was likely encouraged in situations of peril by the tribes which were domesticated by them. Come on, they don’t feed us, or shelter us; just make us feel they appreciate it when we do it for them. Domestication is a two-way street with often faded lines of demarcation.
In order to domesticate something, a level of communication is useful, for if humans couldn’t express their desires or needs to each other, one imagines it doubly difficult to express it to an animal. Or field of wheat. And long before written logos, the grunt of early human became refined into words, then abstract expression of deeper significance as ideas were shared and expanded upon. To build cities, even lesser encampments, ancient human needed fairly precise language to engage in engineering and architecture.
Dogs dig holes. They lay around and lick their butts and genitals. People think it would be ever so exciting to talk to the animals. People get bored talking to people who do interesting things, lead interesting lives. Trust me, I know this. Dogs lick their asses. I’m sure their view on the issues of the day would be fascinating. “You know, my butt kinda tastes like dog food…”
Right. So, these animals that really have nothing to say, no language to speak of and, being domesticated, not much to do, spend hours of their days telling us about it. I listened to Riley that morning, as I have many mornings, and I realized he wasn’t barking to ward off any intruder--hell, most yappers would flee at the sight of one. He was talking the talk of an idiot, a creature with no appreciable intelligence convinced that others revel in their vocalization.
Now before I dig myself in too deep with this dog/human relationship, allow me to express: I have been master to many doggy slaves. As much as we love our little canine buddies (and imagine they love us), they exist as slaves to our dominion. They suppress their free will, or have it suppressed by another, exist in captivity, have identification papers held by their owner and have their movements completely dictated from without. Slaves.
And that’s fine. Humans have always embraced slavery and, with pets, our need to dominate is fulfilled as well our need to feel benevolent. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?” Yeah, benevolent slavers. “Yeah Massa, I’ll get your slippers for ya real good…Cracker asshole…Fucking kibble my ass…”
I’ve loved me a good number of dogs, convinced myself they loved me and buried every one of the little fuckers. (Actually, I think my final dog, Juno, resides in a can with my ex. Well, her ashes anyway.) They aren’t great for long term relationships. 10, 12 years, then weepyville.
As humans, we tend to ascribe human feelings and emotions to the things we covet. That’s why we have such jealousy-- we decide that our feelings are universal and the revelation that they aren’t is often devastating. We attach so much to words, which is funny as we play so fast and loose with them. We become utterly indignant if someone close to us uses words we don’t approve of - say they lie to us.
Then we’ll turn right around and accept the words of people who have revealed themselves as liars if they say something we wish to hear. Is it not odd how a person we know to be mendacious or disingenuous becomes believable when they tell us we’re right, or that we look ‘fabulous’? Or how a person of dubious character who suggests a way to make a bunch of money, quick – no risk – becomes worthy of consideration? (Remember that when someone says "no risk" that you will likely "know" risk.)
We clearly love the sound of the human voice. Talking, singing, humming, shouting, even screaming; we are utterly enamored with the human sound. And no sound/voice more than our own. We talk about anything, we talk about nothing. We talk to ourselves in a room full of people and to a room full of people when we’re by ourselves. We talk to strangers in line, to strangers behind counters, to strangers who bring us things we’ve ordered.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that virtually every human who has a pet, talks to it as well. And not just, “Sit. Shake. Roll over. Shut the fuck up!” I suspect that the vast majority of pet owners talk to their pets as if their pets can somehow understand them. Every one I’ve ever known, including myself, has. Dogs, cats, birds (not fish so much): pet owners talk to their pets like they talk to other people.
Curious how some people talk to them like they are children--in early childhood toddlers and dogs are about equally stupid--and others (my discipline) talk to them as they talk to adults. (I talk to children that way as well.) We talk to our dogs and otherlings about stuff we would talk about with people, if they were there. They become our surrogate, warm-blooded contacts, the only ones we can be sure won’t reveal the secrets we tell them. Our nasty little secrets.*
We are safe in this because dogs don’t speak human. Sure, there are those that bark things that sound like words, but this is equal in significance to saying “Spurlank!” is Martian for something or other. As we have no workable context for a language that doesn’t exist, dogs have no context for language that does, beyond understanding the repercussions and rewards for performing certain actions upon certain commands. Dogs have no corresponding words for “Sit” “Shake” or “Shut the fuck up!”. How could they? They have no verbal language. They respond to tonal inflection and conditioning in captivity or tonal inflection and instinct in the wild.
It seemed to me, lying there trying to sleep, that what we hear from dogs, they hear from us.
Talking is articulated grunting. We force air out our oral blow-hole and shape it with our tongue and lips. Before we as a species spoke, we grunted. After developing languages, based upon regionally approved grunting, we spoke and grunted. Fortunately, we augmented our grunting instead of replacing it. Now we reserve grunting for difficult tasks, expressions of disapproval and sex, all of which we incorporate talking into as well. Sex, often with lots of talking beforehand, considerable grunting during, then not enough talking afterwards, 4 or 5 minutes later.
While humans can understand expressions of affection (“Well, that was terrific,” and the always popular “Whadda ya mean 150 bucks?!?”), dogs presumably just hear little barking, grunting sounds. Again, they are masterful at tonal inflection, but that is not linguistically based as proven by the universality of understanding offered by the subtle nuance of a deep menacing growl or advancing guttural bark.
When we talk to our dogs, I imagine they hear something akin to, “Yarf arf barf parf darf carf larf.” They are very adept at appearing thoroughly engrossed in our dialogue, but just as explaining quantum physics to a three month-old baby is pointless beyond the release that comes of blathering, bitching to Skippy about some loser at work is only cathartic to you, where not amusing to Skippy. He’s frankly more interested in what’s in the bag.
Dogs make so much noise when we’re away because their masters make so much noise when they’re together. Dogs living with humans who talk to them become convinced that talking to one’s self is perfectly rational behavior. And while stupid by human comparison--sadly becoming less so, and dogs ain’t getting smarter--any pet knows that the upright hairless ape that’s chattering at it is just chattering. A dog can’t understand it. A cat? Sorry. They don’t speak human. They are animals. They don’t know what a ‘chair’ is, just that they get screeched at when they get caught on it.
So with the dumb animal knowing the smart animal couldn’t possibly be talking to it owing to complete lack of understanding, the dumb animal must think that the smart animal is talking (chattering) to itself. (It is.) It just isn't smart enough to understand that language is context-based, and animals operate from a different context from humans. So the dumb animal, beyond responding to commands as any slave would, thinks that smart, masterful animals talk to themselves.
So dogs talk to themselves. And each other. They yap yap yap and ramble away just like humans, blathering just to hear the sound of their own voices. And just like humans, very little they express is really understood. The joy, the disappointment, the menace: this we all understand to a degree. We possess the capacity for empathy, something dogs are masterful at. As they aren’t caught up in words, they immediately understand temperament, emotion, fear.
Our words mess us up. We get so caught up in trying to position ourselves well in conversation (made competitive like everything else in imperial politics) that we lose our capacity to truly care about what each other is feeling, what drives the expression. Competitive conversation makes us cold and aloof, like dogs barking at things they can’t see or at each other: “Stay away. I’m rough! Rough! Ruff, ruff!!”
Unfortunately, this is what our discourse has degraded to--our grand language languishing, the price of letting jocks dictate social policy and imbeciles define social discourse. We bark orders, snap at each other and growl under our breath like dogs being stupid, but we never shut up and listen, like dogs we imagine as smart (enough to understand us) do when we talk to them. They understand our feelings because they understand us. Just not our words.
Now when I have my special moments with Riley, I know what he’s really thinking: “I’m Ruff! Bird on Roof! Shut yer Yap!”
*Is this phase one of Pussies?
© 2013 simmbiosis 6/8/13
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
I Drink To…Uh, I Forget
My name is Art and I am an alcoholic. I said that once, many years ago at an AA meeting. It wasn’t a particularly revelatory exclamation to myself or others. I knew it as did those around me, in my life and at that meeting. In my life owing to my irresponsible behaviors; in that meeting owing to my admission and presence there.
I came to the meeting reluctantly. I had been drinking pretty steadily since I was about fourteen – by that point I was about 44. Thirty years of drinking had taken a heavy toll; my attendance at that meeting was a coin in the basket. A great personal dissatisfaction, alienation of my loved ones and diminishing returns on my work output/income were the real unhidden costs. And still, with escalating negative physical reaction and all the other negatives howling at me, I kept at it.
It was a family tradition, you see. My father was a lush so my mom decided to become one so they could drink together, apparently the logical choice for someone committing their own and their children’s futures to the delights of substance abuse. When I was older, I became one too. Seemed the logical choice – for a lush. Because to live in a house with substance abuse is to experience substance abuse. Some substances are necessarily more abusive than others. In my parent’s house, alcohol was the choice to beat.
I came of age at a fascinating and very dangerous time for impressionable young idiots. Vietnam was hot and heavy and the opposition was growing and becoming more vocal, more insistent. The counter-culture was in full swing, (the backlash at the oh-so-proper and boring 50s), and sex, drugs and rock and roll were my defining cultural ethos. As my preteens turned to my teens, the 60s turned to the 70s and I got caught up in all the druggishness.
I remember seeking drugs (a lid – I had no idea what that was) in late 1968 at the offering of my friend and neighbor, John. Roaming around in the dark in the fairly bucolic Santa Rosa hinterlands, I remember stumbling in a creek and going down hard, slamming my leg on a rock. It fucking hurt. But there was no pot forthcoming and we stumbled home empty-handed, acquainting me with the reality of my first drug run: pain and failure. I was ready.
Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t John who got me interested in drugs. It was the government. In 7th grade, they sequestered the students by gender and had us watch some films. Government propaganda films. While the girls watched films about why they were bleeding in certain areas during certain periods, the boys got to learn about the dangers of drugs. Drugs. (Sorry, I can’t type that to make it nearly ominous enough. You’ll just have to take my word.)
At that point, I was still too much a kid to know about drugs. Sure the Beatles were singing about stuff that had little to do with their girlfriends or dancing all night, but by the release of the White Album, I still didn’t understand. By Abbey Road, I did.
The movie, to my recollection, warned a bunch of silly little kids (and some seriously fucked up ones too) that certain drugs would lead to all manner of anti-social decay. Then they showed someone smoking a joint and seeing themselves in the mirror with the face of a gorilla. I kid you not – the makers of that movie suggested that smoking cannabis would hasten de-evolution. Spontaneous de-evolution. Pretty fucking impressive if you ask me. Then they showed how taking LSD would turn the flame of an oven range into a beautiful flower, which the crazed acid-head would presumably attempt to pluck and sniff, leading to all manner of hilarity when officials recounted the story over cocktails. Stupid hippies.
I was sold. I mean, if the authorities went out of their way to tell us that drugs were that cool, who was I to argue? Perceptional de-evolution? Come on! I was a kid so the racist undertones completely escaped me, but with my folks smoking and drinking and taking Big Pharma’s finest, clearly druggishness was the course laid out before me. I followed the path, however hazy, poorly lit, raucous, or downright terrifying – it has led me thus.
In retrospect, it appears that this was deliberate: offer enticements through compulsory media and then categorize people by which ones they respond to. Makes accounting much easier – and social engineering. I don’t know of anyone that kind of film would dissuade from trying drugs; most thought it hysterical. By my way of thinking, the adventurous spirit isn’t hastened in the meek or dissuaded in the predisposed by poorly realized propaganda. We who would drug do so readily. Those who would not, do not out of fear. But not fear of monkeyface or hotnose: fear of social stigma, fear of lack of personal control, fear of self-realization.
Euphoriants and psychedelia are a different breed of drugs from the socially sanctioned ones as they tend to enhance, not deaden. Where alcohol and pharmaceuticals make things fuzzy or even blurry, soften the sharp edges, make hideous fuckable, euphoriants and especially psychedelics tend to sharpen the focus, on occasion making the fuckable hideous where not downright hilarious. Socially demonized drugs (euphoriants and psychedelia) sharpen focus and come with no appreciable body count; socially sanctioned ones deaden focus and rack up huge numbers. Considering the drugs used by the majority, this can’t be emphasized enough.
Seriously. Cannabis, designated a Schedule 1 Drug, is categorized with heroin, a deadly narcotic. How many people does heroin kill every year? According to the CDC, heroin kills about 2,000 citizens of the USA each year. Marijuana? There are no numbers available. The CDC, the USA, the UN Convention on Narcotics, FBI, DEA, AMA: none of them can point to a single death caused by ingestion of marijuana. Ever. And not for want of trying.
The legal drugs? According to drugwarfacts.org, the AMA stated that in the year 2000, tobacco was responsible for 435,000 deaths while alcohol provided for 85,000 funerals. Pharmaceuticals take out a minimum of 100,000 of us a year and, according to the DEA, are the biggest drug problem facing the nation. One wonders if the fact that since the Reagan 80s Big Pharma has been advertising on TV has any correlation.
Don’t get me wrong, cannabis has many sedative properties and when used by lazy minds, produces lazy thinking. Just like most drugs. But as one who has used both drugs in conjunction, and each separately, I’ve made some personal observations, and they seem worthy of consideration in a nation with 100 million + people loaded up on one compound or another. Or a bunch.
After about 13 years of combined use – pretty much every drug available combined with booze and pot – I went clean. And by clean I mean that I stopped taking drugs. Well, except for alcohol, caffeine, the occasional pharmaceutical… I’m a dirty, dirty man.
Anyway, I did the family thing, cut my hair, got jobs no smart man would ever take, struggled to sell my work in a place that had no interest, and I drank. And drank.
Now, owing to what I do, I have a fairly decent memory. Reading and writing both place demands upon the memory, pump it up. In order to be a decent writer, one must read. In order to retain as much as one can from their reading, it behooves one to write. Writing is very good for the memory because the building materials of literature are uniquely interchangeable, and one must constantly seek the precise combination in order to effectively express themselves. Writing is good for the memory because we have to remember how to spell the words we use to do it.
The times of my life I found to be the foggiest were those during which I drank and watched TV. Watching is a passive activity, drinking a numbing one. Combined, I found they impacted my memory as well as my social and professional life, impacted them negatively. The more I drank, and I drank a lot, the less I worked my mind, the worse my memory became. The worse my memory became, the worse my outlook on life. It became hard to remember the good parts and easy to focus on the bad ones. Without knowing what I was trying to forget, I found that I was drinking to forget all the same. And it worked. A bit.
I found it easier to give up TV than, well, pretty much anything else. I turned it off at around 13 and have had a very tepid relationship with it since. It seemed to me that in being the good viewer, I was sacrificing my real life to watch people get paid to portray fictional ones. I had better things to do. So I drank and wrote. My memory improved. A little.
Finally the bottle took its toll and the last real doctor I had told me I had a choice: I could stay alive or I could continue drinking and die. Fairly horribly. He said my liver tests indicated that it was about halfway wasted. He suggested AA.
I drank. After diminishing myself a little while longer, I went to AA. I heard a fellow say that he woke up one morning, pulled himself together and went out. The first guy he met was an asshole. Then the next person he met was an asshole, too. He finally realized that the asshole was traveling with him, that he was the asshole. That’s when he went to AA.
AA is much lauded but doesn’t really have that great a success rate. I suspect this is owing to their approach to substance abuse. In order to get with the AA program, one has to admit they are totally helpless and require the help of an imaginary friend to overcome this. Then they call real drunks. This strikes me as utterly untenable: addiction is that very mindset – I am helpless.
Isn’t that the real problem with substance abuse: looking to an external source to contend with issues we have created for ourselves? Is not alcohol that more powerful force that we’re surrendering to? Drugs? Isn’t supplicating one’s self to a notion almost guaranteed to fail in the face of the tangible? I can pray to divinity all night and come up empty, or walk down to the corner store and fill myself with spirits in the immediate. Helpless?
Bullshit. I’m not helpless, I’m lazy, I’m weak, I’m a boy in a man’s body. To embrace their ethos I must supplicate as that boy, beg Daddy for forgiveness and admit that I have no will of my own. I must then seek out those I’ve embarrassed myself around and beg their forgiveness. Huh? For being a drunken jerk? If everybody in the USA who got drunk and acted idiotically were to do that, we would grind to a halt nationally in a weepy cluster of pathetic recriminations and self-pity. To drink is to act stupid. Considering what we know about drinking, to drink is to be stupid. If my drinking has harmed you or yours, I offer my deepest apologies. Hopefully we can leave it at that.
But owing to its unique properties, particularly its effect on memory, it is not a surprise we do it or that our world suffers for it. Drinking to forget is a very real phenomenon. Numerous studies show that alcohol consumption lowers the individual IQ as well as lowers the IQ of one’s progeny. If you’re stupid enough to drink when you’re pregnant, don’t be surprised to find your offspring even stupider still. IQ and recall are inextricably linked.
People drink when bad things happen, to help them through it. If it does in any way, and I can’t say that it has ever helped me, it seems it would be in the dimming of the memories. Why does civilization continue repeating the same imbecilic behaviors over and over and over? It’s as if we can’t recall what came before, and worse, that we don’t care about what comes after. That is alcoholic thinking, alcoholic on a downward spiral.
Alcohol is a principal cause of automobile accidents, workplace accidents, domestic accidents, domestic abuse, incest, rape, egregious assault and murder. Cops drink it. Soldiers drink it. Jocks and their sycophants drink it. Our political leaders drink it. Our religious leaders drink it. Our economists drink it and we, the people, drink it.
Consider our world: the physical USA is a shambles, regions made wastelands, seething toxins, our infrastructure collapsing – like the body of a wino; our economy is a complete disaster, unemployment and escalating and irreducible debt plague us – just like the finances of a drunk; our authorities are angry and violent, prone to crazed outbursts and remarkable cruelty for even the tiniest perceived slight or challenge – like the besotted asshole in the bar; our nation at war with the world, trying to impress everyone with how tough and cool we are as we stumble all over ourselves swinging wildly at everyone who even looks at us funny – like a teenaged boozehound on a snort. Our citizens, afflicted with diminishing memory and personal resources, find themselves lost and confounded by a world spinning out of control around them. We live for the moment waiting for our next drink to wash our horrid daze away: the lush life.
How insidious a drug that makes you feel terrible, makes you behave embarrassingly, makes you pick fights and argue over trifles, makes you harm your friends and loved ones, makes you look stupid, makes you feel depressed and then makes you forget all of it as you prepare for the next sip. Cool and refreshing, ah, that’s nice.
What are you looking at? Jerk!
© 2013 simmbiosis 4/30/13
(Leading Causes of Death 2000) "The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435,000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75,000), toxic agents (55,000), motor vehicle crashes (43,000), incidents involving firearms (29,000), sexual behaviors (20,000), and illicit use of drugs (17,000)."
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