Holding On

Chocolate covered donuts are a staple of my diet, partly because I like them, partly because they are easy to eat and do not require a lot of saliva for processing while chewing, and partly because each one contains 350 caloriea and I need all the calories I can get.

During my last trip to the store, they had the donuts on a “two for” sale, so I bought two boxes, planning to put one in the freezer until needed.. However, when I got home I discovered that there was absolutely no room in the freezer. More than once, I have opened the freezer door to have half the contents cascade out all over the floor, like Fibber McGee’s closet. So today I am determined…determined, I say…to take a large garbage bag, go through the freezer, and throw out everything I know perfectly well that I will never use. The problem is that it is all perfectly good food (well, some of it has been in there for a year or two, granted, but…) and throwing away anything that might possibly be used is totally anathema to me. If I had someone I know would like to have it…, but I don’t.

I’ve mentioned before all the things I have which I refuse to get rid of. There’s my Navy pea-coat, the sports jacket I am wearing in my NIU senior yearbook photo, the pair of NavCad sweatpants with “Margason” stenciled across the backside, several sweaters I bought while living in Chicago the first time, or in L.A.

The pajamas I put on every morning were purchased back around 2001, for wearing while I went to the hospital for repair of a para-hyatal hernia. The elastic on the pants gave out a couple years ago and are now secured with a safety pin; you can read a newspaper through the fabric at the elbows. Why in the world can I not bring myself to throw them away? That is a rhetorical question, since there is no answer.

The blanket on my bed has a hole in it from God knows where, and the silk-or-whatever-it-is edging along the top and bottom hangs on by a few threads, drooping down to the floor on the bottom side. But I can’t throw it away…it still keeps me warm, which it was meant to do. How can I throw it away? “Waste not, want not” is a saying I do not take lightly.

And somehow—I as usual have absolutely no reason why—all this is tied in with my inexplicable sense of loyalty to these things. They have served me well; how can I be so cold as to just pitch them when they are no longer as young as they used to be. Neither am I, and I would hate to be just cast aside because of it, though this is largely how I find myself being treated by much of society.

While doing laundry the other day, I noted that all five identical pair of pants I wear constantly (rather like Little Orphan Annie with her red dresses) are becoming more and more shoddy and threadbare. They are approaching the state of tatterdom where I simply will not be able to wear them out in public anymore. I should just go out and buy five more identical pairs . But will I? I won’t hold my breath. I find shopping for clothes a huge exercise in frustration, since I can stand among endless racks of thousands of pair of pants and not find a single one I like, let alone well enough to buy five of them. And what to do with the old pants? Throw them out? I never throw anything out if it has one more possible wear left in it (rather like an empty toothpaste tube…if you squeeze hard enough, there’s always one more brushing’s worth in there). Besides, to throw something out is a form of ending, and we all know how I feel about endings.

Be glad you’re you.

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Looking Down, Looking Ahead

Among humanity’s seldom-used gifts is the ability to find something positive in just about every negative situation. It often takes a lot of effort, but it’s possible.

Take, for instance, my oft-decried head-bent-forward condition, with the result that I spend much of my time staring at the ground while walking. Not good for noticing people approaching or taking in much of my surroundings, but I do find a lot of pennies. And I pick them up, too, often to the mild chagrin of whomever I’m walking with. And this morning, I followed a trail of blood from the corner of Halsted and Wellington two blocks to the Illinois Masonic Hospital’s emergency room. There was a considerable amount of it, individual drops but a lot of them, many of them in clusters at intervals of several feet. I was…and am…of course very curious as to the story behind the drops; a story I’ll never know.

And had I been able to walk like normal people, focusing on everything ahead of me, I may well never have noticed the trail.

The other day, while standing on the wide sidewalk in front of a store, waiting for something, I noticed a very small insect, marching with apparently great determination, across the concrete, which must have seemed an enormous distance to something so very small. Not knowing the acuity of an insect’s eyesight, I wondered if it could even see the end of the concrete ahead of it. I had the mental picture of someone walking across a seemingly endless dessert, and wondered if it got thirsty on the way, as well as how it ever got there in the first place.

Last week, while returning from a two-and-a-half-hour walk through Graceland Cemetery, one of Chicago’s oldest and most historic—and possibly the subject of a future blog—Gary and I were just getting ready to walk into the Addison el station near Wrigley Field when we were approached by a TV film crew from WGN News. They wanted to know our opinion on the fact that, as a result of state and local budget problems and partly because of the State of Illinois decreeing that senior citizens could ride public transit at no cost, plans are underway to increase the fares paid by everyone else. (I’ll leave the speculation of how they possibly knew we were seniors to another time.) They asked if we thought it was fair, and we both replied that while we could easily afford to pay to ride, many seniors would find it a true hardship. The woman doing the interviewing concentrated mostly on Gary, of course, since he is better spoken than I and his speech is far more intelligible.

At any rate, we were on the 9 o’clock news: a first for me, and probably as close to my 15 minutes of fame as I’ll ever get.

Just to keep you posted, between the writing of the above and this as-I-write minute, I had an appointment with a spinal surgeon, to see if something might be done to bring my head back to a more normal position. Several x-rays were taken, and it was determined that I have three vertebrae affected by arthritis and tilting forward. However, he believes it is the rock-hard muscles in my neck that are the major problem, and that if we can find some way to relax them, much of the problem might be resolved. So we are going that route, which includes a neck brace, possible Botox injections to relax the muscles, and spending as much time as I can lying on my back without a pillow which slowly forces my head and neck into a more normal position. We shall see, but I’m feeling very positive. Positive is nice.

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Fantasy

In case you may not have noticed, I’m very big on fantasies. Most of us have a small pool of fantasy into which we gaze longingly, like Narcissus. My pool, however is Olympic-sized and I don’t merely gaze into it but splash around in it constantly. It is, in fact, my primary form of mental exercise.. Truth be told, I spend more time indulging my fantasies that dwelling in the real world. But, again, that’s why I became a writer.

I have an appointment coming up later today (the day this entry appears) with a spinal surgeon to see if something might be done to in any way reverse the effects of whatever it is that is causing my head to tilt forward…a glacial-paced progression I fear is ongoing. The process at first was so slow that I didn’t notice it, and when I did, there was nothing I could do about it, if there had ever been a time when I could. I tried wearing a neck brace, but that didn’t last long— partly my own fault since I found it bothersome to wear for one hour twice a day.

I should have been alerted to the problem when, not too long after my release from treatment at Mayo, it was discovered I had developed a bone spur on one of my vertebra at the base of my neck—undoubtedly from the radiation. (My local oncologist, at a small, remote hospital in the Great North Woods, casually informed me I had cancer of the spine. Whatever possessed him to reach that conclusion, which was almost immediately proven totally wrong, I will never know; but I do know my faith in him sank so precipitously it is now somewhere in the mud at the bottom of the sea.)

Anyway, remembering the bone spur just now, I did a full Gainor high-dive into my Pool of Fantasy. A little indisputable self-diagnosis, unencumbered by any medical training whatsoever, determined that the bone spur has grown, thus forcing my neck forward and down, and that all the spinal surgeon will have to do is remove the spur and all my vertabrae will come back into line and I’ll be able to lift my head high enough to drain a can of pop, and turn it more than 10 degrees in either direction, and maybe gain 8 pounds and shed 15 years and be as I was before all this happened. (I know, I’m in the deep end of the pool here, but so what?)

And even if this particular fantasy proves to be merely that, as it quite probably will, it provides me with a great deal of hope and comfort until reality, that bull in the china shop, sends it packing.

Fantasy, in fact, is hope. It enables us all to do and be—if only in our minds—those things which we so desperately want and probably can never have. I see no harm in it, and a great deal of solace and pleasure. Fantasy is a cluster of bright, helium-filled balloons to which the small child in each of us can hold tightly, and in which we can take infinite delight. We can totally ignore the thin string which tethers us to reality.

I see a distinct danger in the fact that increasingly, in today’s culture, our fantasies come pre-packaged and bar-coded; that our own imaginations are being replaced by dreams based upon a wide array of commercially-available products. As with so many things in life, it is easier to simply take what is handed to us rather than bothering to create our own.

But I’m probably being too harsh, as usual. I watch the wonder in the eyes of small children at the zoo or in a toy store and hope against hope that the wonder of the new will blossom into the wonder of fantasy. I know it won’t happen for many…perhaps most. Reality will stomp that out of them far too soon. But for some…

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The Sky is Falling

Oh, dear. I really try to be upbeat; to see the better things in life. There is of course an infinite number of good and positive things to talk about: gratuitous kindnesses and stunning bravery and kittens and puppies and the smell of baking bread. This is the way life should be, and the fact that it is not so to the degree that I want and expect it to be casts me and other frustrated romantics like me into the role of snarling curmudgeon. All the good in the world is still offset by the infuriatingly incomprehensible and stupid things we humans insist upon doing to one another.

As a species, we have struggled for several thousand years to improve ourselves; to use our unique gifts to rise ourselves up and reach our potential. But in the careful creation of our society and our culture, we have created a Frankenstein’s monster in that what we have created is now threatening our very humanity. The old adage that “fire is a good servant but a terrible master” increasingly applies to our society, which is increasingly taking on its own power to the detriment of those who created it.

The bible was railing against Mammon a couple of thousand of years ago, and we all know how effective that was. Of all human emotions, the one that most strongly rules our society today is greed.

As recent events in the financial markets have proven, our entire world is built upon and is increasingly fueled by money. There is a growing gap between individual human beings and the culture in which we live…and which we, of course, have created. And as this separation continues and grows, guess which of the two elements, humanity or culture, forges ahead and which increasingly lags behind?

This morning I saw a news item saying that there is a new generation of parking meters which, the minute a car pulls away from it, flips back to zero so that the next car can’t use the remaining minutes! Oh, dear LORD! Just how cheap and moneygrubbing can we get? (This is a rhetorical question, since all any of us need do is look around to see ample evidence of the answer.) People are dying of disease and hunger, global warming (which of course is a myth as our beloved leader tells us), wars, poverty, unimaginable suffering and deprivation, and we spend money on designing a parking meter that will make the city using them an extra nickle?

And the most maddening thing, for me, is the knowledge that all my ranting, and raving, and arm-waving, and jumping up and down, and screaming at the top of my lungs does absolutely no good. It’s yelling into the hurricane, of trying to leave footprints on water. There is no worse feeling than that of helplessness and absolute lack of control.

Quite likely the sky is not actually falling. Somehow we have managed to muddle from disaster to disaster, calamity to calamity…always with the clock at one minute to midnight, always with Armageddon just around the corner, and we have somehow survived. Thus far. It’s almost enough to make me concede the existence of…something pulling the strings, writing the rules we cannot possibly understand. Whatever it is is not the benevolent, loving God of Sunday school, however, but a capricious, often petulant, totally unpredictable entity which takes delight in playing cat to our mouse.

So the sky may not, indeed, be falling. But it’s coming closer every day.

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Change and Endings and Memory

The recent awareness that my cat, Crickett, who is between 16-18, is failing rapidly and has very little time left to her set me off on a little philosophical jaunt about endings and change. I was a little surprised to realize that there can be change without endings, but never endings without change.

Resistance to change seems to be wired into the human psyche, probably as some sort of primordial built-in braking system to keep us on the same general track as a species and prevent us all from individually spiraling out of control in an eternal frenzy of change. Our present is made of our past, and our past provides us with stability and the foundations of who and what we are, both individually and as a race.

But change is absolutely necessary for any forward movement, and it is not so much change that I object to as it is endings, which are generally an integral part of changes. Change involves the opening of doors to our future, and often, especially on an individual-human-being level, closing doors to the past which can never be reopened. Death is the ultimate door closer, and the source of our greatest pain.

Memory, another of Mankind’s unique traits, can be both a blessing and a curse. Memory ties us to and roots us in the past. It is a gigantic storehouse of emotion, the strongest of which is love. But once something is moved into the storehouse of memory, it is lost to the world of now.

Man is a greedy creature. Once blessed with love, he is reluctant to give it up. He may pay lip service to the fact that love is not a gift but a loan. The response to losing someone or something one truly loves is sadness, grief, and an indescribable resentment for its having been taken away. It is not enough to merely be grateful for having had the love at all; we despairs over its loss and, like a little child, want it back. “If I had it once, why can’t it be mine forever?”

Memory is the mind’s eye. We need only close our physical eyes to open the eye of memory. Yet we are terribly myopic when it comes to the future and refuse to see what we do not wish to acknowledge: that time is a collection agency, and it will be paid.

Which brings me back to Crickett. She has been with me for many years, but her time, as is time for every living thing, running out. I am trying, rather belatedly, I fear, to give her the attention she has always demanded but I have been too busy with my own interests to give her. I want her to know she is loved and that I appreciate her sharing her life with me. She is still alive, so I still have some time to make up for all the past years of benevolent neglect. The door is still open, but I know it will soon close, and Crickett will pass from the tangible now to intangible memory.

But Crickett is not human. She is a cat. My love and concern for her cannot possibly be compared to the love of one human for another. My mother, my father, my aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck, my remaining cousins, my close friends to all of whom I owe so much and upon whom I depend so strongly…how can I dare equate love for them to love for a cat?

Easily. Love doesn’t come with set values or limitations: it is neither quantitative nor qualitative; it simply is. Had I to make a choice between Crickett or my mother, there would be no question, of course. But I do not have to make such a choice. Love is love.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go pet Crickett. While I can.

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Guilt

Despite not having a stereotypical Jewish Mother—she wasn’t even Jewish—I somehow managed to acquire the overwhelming sense of guilt often ascribed to Jewish writers. Mine, however, is strictly a do-it-myself project, and I credit it to several factors:

First, my emotional development pretty much ground to a halt by the time I was five. A part of me still firmly believes, as all children believe, that I am, and deservedly so, the center of the universe and that I somehow have the power, and the right, to make things be as I want them. I’ve mentioned before the dream I had when I was very young of standing in some sort of power station, with endless rows of identical, flat-surfaced machines stretching away to the horizon, all with buttons and dials and switches and knobs and levers representing infinite power which I realized I had no idea of how to use. That was perhaps the most meaningful dream of my life and it is still vividly with me after all these far-too-many years.

It is partly because I am locked into emotional childhood that I became a writer. Books and stories and even blogs stem from the imagination, and imagination is the mother’s milk of a child’s mind. However, a vivid imagination is by nature antithetical to reality, and while others have allowed themselves to be beaten into submission by reality, I have fought it tooth and nail every day of my life. I cannot and do not deny reality’s existence, but I can and do resent it with every fiber of my being. I am truly and deeply divided between acknowledging the world around me and insisting expecting/wanting people and things to be what I want them to be.

To this day, I cannot comprehend why people are not the way I expect them to be. How can anyone not be honest, caring, courteous, kind, intelligent, loyal, and logical? Some are…at least in some combination of the above traits. And if some are, why isn’t everyone? It simply makes no sense to me. So I blunder through life with my eyes partially closed so as not to see what I do not want to see. As a result, I find myself so very easily confused and flustered and frustrated and angry, all of which I channel back into myself.

And thus the guilt. Because I want so badly to have some control over things which are largely uncontrollable, I automatically assume when anything happens that goes against what I would have it be, it is axiomatic (to me) that whatever it is has to be my fault for not having, or not being able to figure out how to exercise control over it. Something bad happens. I did not prevent it. Therefore, it is my fault.

To preserve my…well, “sanity” may not be the exact word, but it comes close…sometime around the turn of the millennium, my mind and emotions held a closed-door meeting, and when the door opened, Dorien emerged, thereby neatly dividing my being into two parts. For whatever reason, Roger is in charge of struggling with a legion of inner demons, to allow Dorien, my personalized imagination, to be totally free and unencumbered by the physical and more Freudian-id issues which would otherwise encumber him. It is Roger who deals with the his inadequacies and frustrations and guilt while Dorien goes outside and plays in the sunshine.

It works for me.

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Grasshoppers & Ants

Remember the old fable about the grasshopper and the ants? The grasshopper fiddled and frivoled away his summer while the ants struggled to prepare for winter. And when winter came….

I noted when I lived in Pence, in the great north woods, that people there were like the ants of the fable, spending most of their spring and summer planting and tending gardens, their falls in harvesting and canning and cutting and stockpiling wood, all in preparation for winter.

But overall, there appear to be far more grasshoppers in the world than ants.
Man, it is said, is the only creature with a concept of the future. Yet how many humans actually do much if anything to act on this concept? Most of the world seems to operate on a day-to-day basis, with only the most general of thoughts as to any specifics of what the future beyond the next few days might hold. Goals tend to be more ethereal than solid.

And how many give any thought to posterity? To who will remember them when they are gone? With most of the world’s population being heterosexual, posterity takes care of itself in the form of one’s children. But, as was discussed in another blog some time ago, most individuals are lost to time within four generations. (What do you know about your great grandparents? What kind of people were they? What made them laugh? What gave them pleasure? So very many… lives (and not only in the physical sense…lost forever. The thought that this will happen to me makes me infinitely sad.
I suppose in a way it is just as well that the vast bulk of humanity never gives much if any thought to these things. Life is confusing enough as it is, and six billion people devoting too much time asking unanswerable questions and pondering the imponderable would make getting anything else done or just moving from day to day even more difficult than it already is. Man is an animal, after all, and even though he has the ability to contemplate the future, he seldom uses it. So most men (and women) live and die just the same as every other animal lives and dies, unaware of the possibilities around them and simply accepting their lives on face value. They are in effect grasshoppers, blithely going about living in the now and neither knowing nor caring what lies ahead. They’ll deal with it when it comes. Kind of nice, in a way. And that is fine…for them.

For me, there is not enough time to explore everything that cries out to be explored, to learn everything I’d love to know, to work on correcting my vast store of imperfections, to be able to spend the time I’d like to spend with friends and relatives, let alone meet everyone I would love to meet, to read all the books and see all the movies and go all the places I would love to go. My ego demands these things as my right. I’m like Joshua, the five-year old boy in my Dick Hardesty books, being dragged through a supermarket wanting everything that strikes his eye and being firmly told he can’t have it.

And as I wrote that last sentence it occurred to me that one of my greatest problems is my inability to accept things the way they are. I never have and never will. It is why I am an ant and not a grasshopper.

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Endless

People never cease to amaze me. Never. The bounds of their stupidity are limitless.

I watched a news program after Ike passed through Galveston…the city in which more than 8,000 people had died in a similar hurricane in 1900. They were interviewing a couple who had just been rescued the day after the storm. They had refused the mandatory evacuation order, since it obviously hadn’t been intended for and therefore equally obviously didn’t apply to them. As the waters surged into their home, they had called 911 for help and were instructed to tie identification around their ankles so that their bodies could be identified if found after the storm. They were completely outraged that the police, whose salaries, they made clear, were paid with their tax dollars, had refused to come drag their sorry asses out of harm’s way. And similar stories emerge from every hurricane.

I feel I have the right to speak contemptuously of the stupidity of others because I have worked long and hard in the field of Advanced Stupidity, and continue to hone my skills in it nearly every day. Though I cannot claim the same level of stupidity as the guy who reaches into the tiger cage to pet the big kitty, or decides to save time by blow-drying his hair while still in the bathtub, or robbing a bank and writing the stick-up note on the back of one of his own checks, I do what I can.

I never pass up an opportunity to speak before thinking, or to lose my keys or my cell phone or glasses while seated in my chair, or to write a series of up to four e-mails, each one apologizing for some dumb mistake made in the previous one. I get a note from Bethann and reply to Bertram, which necessitates an embarrassed note I invariably begin: "I’m so sorry, Beth Anne…, and from there things just naturally seem to go downhill.

I am with a good friend when another friend, who has never met the friend I’m with, approaches. I have known each of them well for a number of years, and I start to introduce them. Suddenly, I cannot remember their names. The worst example of this was when I lived in Los Angeles and, with a friend, ran into a guy with whom I had…uh…a pleasant encounter…the night before and hoped to see again. I totally forgot his name. Needless to say, I did not see him again.

I never re-read e-mails before hitting "send," even though the instant my finger lifts off the "send" button, I see that I have typed several words or even a full line with my fingers on the wrong keys. Or I hit "send" when I intended to hit the space bar.

You do the same thing, you say? Well, that’s okay. You are, after all, human, and therefore allowed to make mistakes. Unfortunately, this magnanimity does not extend to myself. Every glitch, every error, every slip, every faux-pas is inexcusable simply because I damn well should have known better before I did it, but I went ahead and did it anyway.

I love stories of the legendary feud between Claire Booth Luce, wife of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce, and poet Dorothy Parker. Speaking of Mrs. Booth, a friend said to Ms. Parker: "You know, Claire is her own worst enemy." To which Dorothy replied: "Not as long as I’m alive, she’s not."

Alas, I am Claire Booth Luce with no Dorothy Parker to take the heat off.

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The Alien as Hypocrite

If I ever needed proof that I am an alien in human form, it was proven irrevocably by a visit my friend Tony and I made to his neighborhood bar in Madison, Wisconsin after returning from Mayo.

Tony had been good enough to ride up to Rochester with me, and invited me to spend the night at his home on the way back. I had, prior to our going out for dinner, been looking at a large coffee table book he has on exotic creatures of the ocean’s depths, and walking into that bar after dinner, I might as well have been 10,000 feet beneath the ocean.

It was Baseball Night!!! (as opposed to Football Night!!! or Basketball Night!!!) And the place was packed with people with whom I might have felt some individual kinship and commonality under some other set of circumstances or in some other place. But massed together, enjoying…nay, reveling in…their unified bond of joyous heterosexuality, cheering wildly when good old Murphy (everyone in the bar knew every detail about every player on the home team—the Brewers…from Milwaukee, I’d judge, taking a wild guess) hit a double fly or whatever it is baseball players do which they considered cheerable, I was totally overwhelmed. Lots of manly arm-punchings, high-fives (a strange bonding ritual—I loathe high-fives) and prolonged applause, whistling, and foot-stomping. Meanwhile I stood there, a guppy in the shark tank, not having a clue as to what all the fuss was about, and having absolutely no interest in finding out.

Oh, and there was also a billiards/pool tournament going on to add to the general merriment. I can at least grasp the concept of pool if not be overly drawn to actually playing it.

So there they were, men, women, husbands with their wives, guys with their buddies, guys with their "chicks" (do they still use that word?): the very essence of the world to which I do not belong and in which, from the moment I realized I was "different" (I love euphemisms), it was made abundantly clear I was not wanted..

And yet, even as I rant and rave against "them" I realized that my parents and all my relatives, whom I love dearly, are, after all, "them", too, and that this was simply the straight equivalent of a gay bar. I feel (or felt, before the years began pointing their finger at me and whispering "Go away: you’re old!") totally at home in a gay bar, and can well imagine an innocent heterosexual stumbling into one unawares feeling pretty much the way I feel in their bars. Being raised in a culture which too long has considered me and those like me less than human, I am far too intolerant and critical of straights, and am, I am ashamed to say, as bigoted against heterosexuals as they are against me. Yet I fully expect them to accept me and my lifestyle as totally natural and comfortable. And therein we have a perfect definition of the word "hypocrisy."

But the fact remains that I am and have always been deeply bitter at the general heterosexual attitude of superiority-by-birthright…of total smug assumption of their dominance and their inalienable and indisputable right to be dominant…of the vast majority of heterosexuals, and of how blithely unaware they are of the fact that theirs is not the only sexual orientation within the human species.

I saw a tee-shirt once that I think sums it all up pretty well: "How dare you assume I’m heterosexual?"

But, hey, I’m not really bigoted. Why, some of my best friends are heterosexuals.

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Funks

I don’t like funks. They are a total waste of time, and they certainly are no fun, yet I am far too prone to them, and they are always precipitated by the most stupid things.

I needed, a day or so before leaving for Mayo (which turned out well, by the way), to make a copy of some documents. My printer had been acting up recently, telling me that there was a problem with my ink cartridges. It did not, of course, specify what might be wrong, or even with which ink cartridge it might be (the printer has two: black and color). My friend Gary suggested I "clean the printer head" and that I consult the manual for information on doing so. So, reluctantly, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the manual and, when I found it, discovered that there is absolutely no information contained therein which would be of the slightest help to me. Most manuals have a page for "Troubleshooting", listing common problems and how to resolve them. Hewlett-Packard, however, apparently has such confidence in its printers they believe nothing could possibly ever go wrong with them, and therefore have no information on what I need to know. There also, of course, was no mention of cleaning the printer heads (whatever printer heads might be, if that is even the correct term).

I never, ever use the color cartridge, though it is the more expensive of the two, and as a result I imagine it simply clotted up from disuse. But since I can’t be sure whether the problem lies with just one or both cartridges, and have no idea whether anything could easily be done to correct the problem, I will have to buy both a black and a color cartridge. And then, of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that having done so the printer will work. And the downward slide begins.

Greasing the slide is the fact that every morning, Gary and I go out for coffee. I’m really not sure why, since as I’ve said, I’m not that wild about coffee in the first place, and almost never drink more than 1/4 of a cup. But it’s mostly just to get out of the apartment and do a little socializing.(My self-imposed increasing isolation is Once a week or so, we walk/walk-ride to a coffee shop a mile or so away, where we meet a group of friends. All very nice people, and I enjoy their company, but after 20 minutes, I’m ready to go. Gary needs to go there today to pick up an opera ticket from one of the "gang" who won’t be there tomorrow, and I’d planned on going tomorrow to coincide with signing copies of my newest book at Unabridged Bookstore across the street—the books won’t be in until then. So I passed on going today, and immediately felt guilty. But the idea of two days in a row at the same place struck me like fingernails on a blackboard.

Guilt and frustration are the basic ingredients for a fine funk. Spice it up with concerns over my increasingly self-imposed isolation, mild though fortunately needless trepidation over the outcome of my Mayo visit, and a bunch of other niggling little annoyances that wouldn’t even occur to me when I’m not on the slide, and I might win a blue ribbon at the county fair.

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Mind over Matter

I am firmly convinced that, on certain warm nights when I of necessity have to sleep with my windows open, and the atmospheric conditions are just right, the Chicago Transit Authority re-routes its elevated tracks, normally less than 1,000 feet from my apartment, directly through my living room. The result is that as the Red Line roars past my bedroom door, I sometimes wake up...at least partially.

What time is it? My mind inevitably asks.

I have no idea, I reply without actually speaking.

Well, look.

I don’t want to look.

Yes, you do.

No, I don’t. I just want to go back to sleep.

A brief moment of silence follows, then: What time is it?

I don’t know and I don’t care!

Well, look at the clock and find out.

I don’t want to look at the clock. I want to go back to sleep.

Not until you look at the clock.

This goes on for what seems like an eternity until inevitably, I look at the clock, seething with resentment and anger over my giving in yet again to my mind’s niggling.

But finally, I am allowed to go back to sleep, until:

You have to go to the bathroom.

No, I don’t.

Yes, you do.

I don’t want to go to the bathroom.

Well, you’d better.

I’ll go later.

You’ll be sorry.

And of course, even though I may really not have needed to go to the bathroom, just thinking about it makes it so, and I get up and go to the bathroom.

In my new Elliott Smith Mystery series, Elliott has nightly conversations with a non-corporeal being named John. Guess where I got the idea?

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

Macaroni

It is, as I write, 5:45 a.m. I have no idea what I or anyone with a firm grip on their sanity, would be doing up at this hour if it weren’t absolutely necessary. But I’ve been doing it frequently of late and as a result walk around for the first two or three hours as though I had a 50-pound block of concrete on the top of my head. When I get up this early, I always tell myself I can take a nap during the day, but I never do. I dislike naps, and always have. Naps take precious minutes from a finite supply of minutes, and I resent losing any of them.

So I thought I would spend the time until I could go do laundry without fear of the machines’ noise disturbing anyone with writing a blog or two. (I like to have a small backlog to avoid the panic of arriving at a blog day and realizing I don’t have a blog to post.)

People have asked me where I come up with enough things to talk about three times a week. The question always interests me, since as a rule I have absolutely no idea. It’s like standing at a stove watching a boiling pot of elbow macaroni and randomly dipping a spoon into it to pick out one piece. (In case you were wondering where that analogy came from, it’s because all the pieces of macaroni in the pot are the same length, and all my blogs tend to turn out the same length. Not all analogies are good ones.)

There is a certain presumption in writing blogs, primarily the blogger’s somewhat arrogant assumption that anyone really cares what he/she has to say. That, of course, makes absolutely no difference to the blogger: it’s the assumption that counts.

I have often found throughout life that what I am often not aware of how strongly I feel about something until I suddenly see it written down. Occasionally I’ll find beliefs and opinions I was not aware that I had, or at least not to the degree indicated by the words. It truly disturbs me, and we’ve talked before about this, that while I consider myself a generally happy (or at least contented) person, my blogs, especially, too often reveal a bitter, cynical curmudgeon. I don’t like bitter, cynical curmudgeons, and I certainly don’t want to be one. And I’m always trying to explain where this hopefully false impression comes from: the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is. It ain’t easy being a romantic in the real world.

I lack discipline, a fact that is all too apparent, and when it comes to writing blogs, I am quite sure I have a form of mental Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: I seem unable to pick up a string of thought at one end and follow it to the other. There are far too many distractions along the way. The world is a beach filled with shiny pebbles begging to be picked up and examined and wondered over. And I am always, always aware of a voice calling: “Hurry up, Roger, it’s getting late. We have to be going soon.” I’ve heard that same voice saying the same thing since I was a kid.

So I’ll get an idea for a blog and sit down at the computer and start off, and something I say relating to the topic at hand will remind me of something else that I really don’t want to ignore, or which strikes me as more important or interesting than the subject I started off with, and I’ll wander off in pursuit of it, only to come across yet another thought or idea I really should mention. And that leads to another, and another....

And here I stand, over that boiling pot of macaroni, spoon raised in anticipation.

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

Harvey Milk

They’re making a big-budget, big-star major motion picture on the life and death of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was in some ways to the gay community what Martin Luther King is to African-Americans. It’s taken them thirty years to do it, but far better late than never.

Some years ago, an excellent and moving documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk won an academy award, and plans for a full length, mainstream movie have been on various burners and back burners for years. It finally took producer Gus Van Sant to bring it off. Starring Sean Penn as Harvey, it has an A-list cast. A trailer for the movie, which will be released in November, can be seen on YouTube (just go to YouTube and type in “Harvey Milk Movie”). It’s well worth watching.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (or, I think, to any elected office in the United States), and he became a symbol of pride and a rallying point for 20,000,000 gay and lesbian Americans. If Harvey could do it, other gays could do it...and subsequently did.

I’ve said often before that people who are not a member of a minority—and particularly of an historically persecuted and harassed minority—simply cannot comprehend the power and importance of a sense of validation and pride: the feeling that you have dignity as a human being and, together, can accomplish seemingly impossible goals. And Harvey Milk engendered these feelings within the gay community

Harvey was an unlikely hero. He was just an average guy running a small camera shop on Castro Street when he decided to take on the city’s political establishment and run for Supervisor. And at a time of the rampant bigotry of people like Anita Bryant and attempts to pass laws banning gays from teaching in California schools, he rallied not only the gays of his district in San Francisco, but of the entire city and the entire country.

And when he was assassinated, with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, on November 27, 1978, by former Supervisor Dan White, the shock and grief felt by every gay and lesbian was no less strong than African Americans’ reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Harvey was one of us. He gave us a great sense of pride, and to lose him was devastating. And then, when White was sentenced to only two years for the double murder, based on an incredible “defense” of having been on a sugar high from eating too many Twinkies (!!), the shock erupted into rage which led to the worst riots in San Francisco’s history.

But as so often happens as a result of the assassination of leaders, from Harvey Milk’s life and the reaction to his death came the iron-clad resolve for change, and gays began a march for equality which, though not yet over, has changed the nation.

Harvey would have been proud.

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

The Boggled Mind, Part 2

The other day my friend Gary received an email from the head of the FBI, assuring him that the offer of $8,000,000 he had previously received from the widow of the finance minister of Nigeria was perfectly legitimate, and that he should hasten to claim his windfall. Gary was, of course, terribly impressed and eager to send in his “earnest money”, and the only thing that gave him the slightest pause was the fact that from reading the letter it appeared the head of the FBI had never gone beyond the third grade.

Why does this sort of thing continue to drive me into paroxysms of fury? Because I have no doubt whatsoever that out there in the big world, somewhere, someone is falling for this bullshit.

On returning from work Saturday afternoon, I found no fewer than 27 spam messages waiting for me and, mental masochist that I am, I scanned quickly through them before hitting the “Condemn to the eternal fires of hell” button. I have noted that I am for some reason not getting quite as many “Make her scream with pleasure!” notes. I’d like to say I missed them, but neither you nor I would believe that. There were a couple “Actors/Models/Movie Extras Wanted” offers, and “I Guarantee You $25,000 a month”’s, and I’ve expressed my feelings on those before, many times.

The recent trend seems to be “news” headlines (“Brittany Spears having Obama’s baby”) to lure you into opening the message, which would of course unleash more demons upon you than 10,000 Pandora’s Boxes.

I must confess that I have on occasion been curious as to what does lie beyond the “come-on, open me up....please? Pretty please?” opening words, just to see what the sender is shilling, but I never have and never would.

What lies at the base of my anger with these…I cannot come up with an appropriate word…who perpetrate the billions and billions of spam messages clogging the internet like a backed-up sewer…is the knowledge that these things are not harmless; that there are real human beings, naive, gullible, downright stupid, or mentally impaired though they may be, who believe what these messages tell them. How this can happen, I have no idea. But I am infinitely sad for them. And to realize that the spammers know full well what they are doing…that they are like hyenas at the watering hole hoping to pounce upon the weakest members of the herd…is what drives me to such frenzy.

And the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing I can do, personally, to stop them or even slow them down compounds my frustration. There is nothing worse than the feeling of being utterly helpless to change what so desperately needs to be changed.

So I run around, pointing fingers and trying to get others to see what I see in the way that I see it and hoping against hope that maybe if enough people felt the same way, something positive might happen. I’m not sure what, but anything is better than nothing..

And as for the spammers…we could all get together, round them all up, and offer them the choice between life in solitary confinement and a frontal lobotomy.

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

Of a Groggy Morning

Trying an experiment here. It is 5:41 a.m. and I got out of bed at 5 in response to an itching foot. I am groggy, and feel it—it’s one of those “looking out through someone else’s eyes” feelings of which I am not particularly fond. I have the distinct impression that my mind has been replaced by an oversized lump of Play-Doh,

So I thought I’d just sit down at the computer and see what came out on the screen. (It’s quite likely, given my normal “drunk leaving the bar” staggering from place to place, that you may not even have noticed had I not told you.

And I just received a sharp rebuke from Dorien, who demands (rightly) to know by just what right I am wasting your precious time with all this nonsense. Paraphrasing Thumper’s mom, he points out that “If ‘ya can’t say somethin’ intelligent, don’t say nothin’ at all.” To which Roger replies: “In that case I would become mute.”

I have always been at war with myself, and it was only since Dorien’s emergence as my creative half that it’s been somewhat easier—and considerably less confusing—to separate the wheat from the chaff. Each half of me now has someone specific to blame for whatever mistakes the other half makes.

Roger acknowledges that he is jealous, not of Dorien’s creativity, for we are both the same person after all, but for the fact that Dorien is not bound by the laws of physics. Dorien, therefore a much happier and more content soul, nonetheless is aware that he is inextricably linked to Roger by the bonds of mortality. Neither Dorien nor Roger is very big on the idea of mortality.

When I am at the computer, I have a “streaming” link to a couple of classical music stations, and one is always on. And just this minute, they are playing the Eric Coate’s Knightsbridge March, and Dorien is instantly in the rehearsal hall at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, practicing that very piece with the Naval Aviation Cadet band for an upcoming concert in Terrytown, New York. We’re going up there as part of some official Navy event, and doing a concert at Mr. Barnes’s—he’s our director and I have something of a crush on him—prep school. Dorien is filled with wonder: Roger with sadness because he can’t be there, too.

I’ll probably never understand, either in the grogginess of not enough sleep or in whatever stage of alertness I may reach fully rested, why I feel not merely obligated but driven to lay out as many bits and pieces and details of myself and my life as I can. How can I expect anyone to care? You have your own life, every bit as full and interesting and challenging and frustrating and happy and sad as my own.

Which brings me yet again to my standard answer to the question of “why.” Because I believe that whoever/whatever designed the jigsaw puzzle which is our life, while the picture on the box may be slightly different for each of us, the pieces are largely interchangeable

I take great comfort in that.

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

Of Dreams and Hearing

I dreamt about Louise Hirsheiser last night. A lot: her name kept recurring throughout the entire course of the night, over and over again: Louise Hirsheiser. Louise Hirsheiser. Why I should be dreaming of Louise Hirsheiser may have been more clear had I the slightest idea of who Louise Hirsheiser might be. But I don’t. I’d never heard of her before. And she never physically appeared in any of the dreams, though one about halfway through the night tried to solve the mystery. It appears she was responsible somehow for the death of my mother, and was willing to pay me $2 million for my loss. However, I had to write the check myself. My father, played with the brilliant logic of dreams by actor Sam Waterston, gave me the check, which was under a sheet of glass, and a pen. Naturally, the pen wouldn’t write on the glass, and Sam was angry with me for not being able to do so. In an odd mixture of frustration and sadness, I started to cry (so real a cry I woke myself up).

Not having Siggy Freud’s Big Book of Dreams at hand, I was only able to guess at what any of it meant, if it meant anything at all. They do say that dreams are the mind’s housekeeper, sweeping up the dust-bunnies of the previous day’s thoughts and sorting out and filing recent experiences and our inner reactions to them. But for me, dreams underscore my utter fascination with life and the importance of being aware of and enjoying every aspect of it, whether it makes sense or not.

I think part of my ability to ramble endlessly, and my problem with being able to stick to one subject or idea for very long is a subconscious reaction to just how much is going on in and around me, and how very little time there is to even attempt to process it all.

And so in my fine tradition of mixing apples and walnuts, I find myself doing it again with this blog. Start out with dreams, move on to ears. Perfectly logical segue…to me, anyway (dreams are formed in the space between the ears, after all).

And, of course, as the years pass more and more quickly, I become more focused on the physical changes that take place as part of the aging process and the reluctant realization that denial and railing against the inevitable aren’t going to change things. But that doesn’t…and I hope never will…stop me from making it clear I have no intention of going gentle into that good night.

Physical changes are generally gradual, and I have noted that I frequently have trouble understanding what people are saying. It isn’t a matter of not being able to hear them speaking: it isn’t the volume that’s the problem. It’s the fact of intelligibility. I watch TV and am aware that I haven’t any idea of what in the hell these people are saying. And turning up the volume does not help: I’m simply and inexplicably finding it harder to distinguish words. “This is what I am saying” too often comes across as “Tmbr eh jllwe I’b plebus”. Frustrating. And being assured that this is perfectly normal for “someone my age” drives me up the wall. It may be perfectly normal for everyone else, but it is NOT “perfectly normal” for me and I’ll be damned if I’ll accept it.

My vanity aside, I would not be averse to looking into getting a hearing aid, were they more affordable, but I can put up with a lot of mumbling for the $3,000-up I understand hearing aids cost. Besides, I live mostly inside myself anyway. What do I need to know what other people are saying for, anyway?

Have I mentioned that reality and I don’t get along very well?

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Hubris, Sheep, and Salmon

hubris > Origin Greek, denoting presumption towards or defiance of the gods

A friend recently pointed out that I demonstrate this quality in abundance. I was flattered that he would think so.

Hubris was not smiled upon by the gods of mythology. Those mere mortals who displayed it— Prometheus, Naiobi, Arachnae, Oedipus, Cassandra, among others—suffered mightily for doing so. I’m sure I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with the gods.

Our God isn’t wild about hubris, either, which is why He and I long ago reached what I hope is an amicable parting of the ways. I never presumed to be godlike, other than in the creation of the worlds and characters within my books, but I most certainly do defy the right of anyone to tell me how to live my life.

Our government, which too often looks upon itself as godlike, definitely does not like hubris. When it comes right down to it, I cannot think of any form of authority who/which does not consider any questioning of its authority to be hubris. To question is to challenge, to challenge is to be in effect a traitor. You’re with us or you’re against us. Period. There is no middle ground. It is the ultimate irony that mankind has never made a single inch of progress without questioning some authority or other, and yet those who initially ask the questions generally do so at their peril.

Actually, I look on hubris as something of a badge of honor. Anyone who presumes to tell me what I should do, or how I should do it, or attempts to make my decisions for me had damned well better have a good reason for it..

Life is filled with choices, and hubris divides the world into salmon and sheep. To display hubris is to be a salmon swimming upstream, and fighting the currents is never easy. To never defy anything is to be a sheep, and there are far too many sheep in the world. Sheep, without a moment’s thought or question, go in whatever direction they are pointed…which is all too frequently to the slaughterhouse. Being a sheep is fine, if it is a conscious choice. But most sheep are sheep by default, simply because it never occurs to them to be anything else.

Hubris stems from independent thought, and independent thought is admittedly inconvenient. It often calls unwanted attention to the thinker, rather like watching the Rockettes and seeing one dancer not in sync with the others. It is axiomatic that most people assume that if someone says something must be done a certain way, or must be believed unquestioningly, they have a very good reason for it, and it is far safer not to make waves than to be swamped by them.

Children personify hubris. To them, the world is one vast “Why?” To answer a child’s question with “Because”, as is so often the case, does them a great disservice and merely serves, over time, to erode any desire to question. Still, many children refuse to accept “Because” as a logical answer, and it is they who continue to question and defy authority. It is they who go on to become salmon. I’m happy to say I was one of them.

It’s never too late to become a salmon.

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Silly

Dear Lord, but we are a silly lot. Each of us apparently considers the others to be dumb as a pile of rocks. That belief is the foundation of corporate America, and I am truly amazed at not only how stupid they think we are, but by the fact that too often that belief is justified.

They stroke our egos with one hand and rifle through our wallets with the other. And they have reached the conclusion that we’ll fall for anything if it sounds good enough. Banks, without our permission, take money from our checking accounts, switch it to our savings account, and proudly crow about how they are saving us money. The word “bullshit” leaps readily to mind.

We’re told we can get a Free Credit Report, without mentioning that it isn’t “Free” until we shell out our good money to become a “member” of something or other.

Cars used to be “used.” Now they are “pre-owned.” All the difference in the world! And we can get astonishing savings on the purchase of a new car if we are a “well-qualified buyer.” We are told that “No loan application is refused!” without mentioning that there is no guarantee that the application once accepted will be approved.

We can buy almost anything with “No Payments or Interest Until 2755!” Uh.....I’ve never quite figured that one out, but if it means I’ll still be paying for it in 2755, I don’t think I’m interested.

If I’m told I can get $300 off on the purchase of a new gadget, I wonder if I’m the only one curious about what the cost must normally be if they can lower it by $300 and still make a profit. (And have no doubt…no company is in business to lose money.)

Fast food restaurants lure us in with commercials showing at a “typical” one of their franchises in which at least fifteen people are simultaneously jumping up and down and sloshing Cokes all over each other in the excitement of having won tons of money.

Billboards and TV ads show us mouth-watering, 10-inch high sandwiches, open buckets of chicken with pieces piled high (a favorite phrase) above the rim. They apparently assume no one is going to be smart enough to wonder how they manage to put the lid on the bucket. Or, more importantly, they don’t care.

People who attend sporting events are obviously hard of hearing, which is why, I am sure, all commercials pertaining to them are screamed at the top of the announcer’s lungs. In print media, Second-Coming type is required for “special” sales (ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME ANNUAL PRE-GROUNDHOG DAY SAVINGS!!!) to alert the brain-dead to the spectacular values being offered.

Organizations like Publisher’s Clearing House show delirious winners (all, coincidentally, standing in front of well kept, upper-class homes...it’s probably too difficult for the cameras to walk up to a fifth-floor tenement) shouting and screaming in disbelief at their good fortune. At least I can appreciate their disbelief, since I share it wholeheartedly. Have you ever entered a Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstake? Have you ever won a Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstake? The prosecution rests.

As I say, we are a silly lot, and no one is more so than I, for letting this sort of nonsense get to me.

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

Stereotyping Cockroaches

I killed a cockroach the other day. In a large apartment building in Chicago, that’s hardly a newsworthy event. Actually, there has been a marked drop-off in the cockroach population of my building of late, for reasons known only to the cockroaches.

But the point in reporting the fact that I’d killed a cockroach is that I sincerely felt guilty about it the instant I did it. What right did I have to take its life? It was just strolling across the bathroom wall, minding its own business and had made no aggressive or threatening gestures toward me. In fact, I can’t even be sure he knew I was there. But I killed him anyway.

The justification/rationalization is the usual yattata-yattata “carrier of germs/spreader of disease” stereotyping that’s been drilled into our heads since we were kids. And in theory, it makes sense. But in practice, when it was just one cockroach going about his business, what real justification could I offer for killing it?

I read somewhere that when presented with a number of similar items—marbles, say, or cockroaches—people tend to overestimate numbers up to 100, and underestimate numbers over 100. I’m not sure why this should be, just as I am not sure why a great number of things should be, but it is a proven fact. And it is also far easier to hate a group than it is to hate a specific individual from that group.

Stereotyping is a most convenient way to eliminate the necessity for independent questioning and thought. The world has always relied on stereotypes to tell it how to react to the unfamiliar. Jews are sneaky. Ok. Blacks are lazy. Ok. The Irish are the scum of the earth. (This was very popular at the time the Irish began their mass immigration to our larger cities, but faded rather rapidly.) But Ok, if you say so. Gay men lust after and prey upon young boys. Ok. (Booooo, Gays!)

Societal changes occur when it slowly dawns on people that they can no longer buy into the stereotypes they’ve been force-fed (granted, often with little or no resistence). Racial stereotyping began to fade as individuals in the majority began to be exposed to actual Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans and to realize that people are simply people. It’s frustrating and utterly illogical that this same process has to be repeated with every minority that comes along. But eventually, after untold thousands or millions have suffered unconscionable hardship, things do change. Interracial couples on TV and in the movies? So? What’s the big deal? Asking that same question 50 years ago would have gotten a rather sharply different answer.

The same thing is happening, albeit far too slowly, with gays. As more “average” people realize that they personally know a real, live homosexual who does not fit the “faggot” or “bull dyke” stereotypes they’ve cherished all these years, the harder it is to lump together all gays into one stereotypical clump.

The very word “stereotypes” is almost always synonymous with “negative”. Stereotypes are the lumps in the gravy of humanity and have to be smoothed out.

And while the mention of “gravy” and “cockroaches” in succeeding sentences is not ideal, I guess the purpose of this entire blog is that I was stereotyping that poor creature strolling across the wall, and as so often happens with those targeted by stereotyping, he paid dearly for that prejudice.

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

Insanity

There are times when I quite seriously fear for my sanity and question whether, in fact, these blogs may be little more than a chronicling of my descent into madness. And immediately, upon having typed that sentence, my guardian angel (or, more precisely, because I am Agnostic, my mental better half Dorien) reminded me of my penchant for melodrama. However.....

Because I am less and less willing to put up with trying to eat foods that require a lot of saliva to chew and process, I’ve increasingly turned to high-calorie liquid food supplements of the Boost/Ensure variety. At 350 calories a can, I can get most of my nutritional needs that way and save myself one heck of a lot of hassle.

I buy Walgreens’ generic version, which costs considerably less than Boost or Ensure, and it comes in three flavors: Chocolate, Strawberry and so-called Vanilla. I prefer the Vanilla, to which I add yogurt (sometimes Kefir, which is a very odd foodstuff vaguely related to yogurt) or fresh fruit and a quarter to half cup of ½ and ½, and put it in the blender. (Digression, anyone?)

For the past week, all three of my nearest Walgreens have been out of the Vanilla, so the other day, while in the Loop, I found a Walgreens that had it. I bought two six-packs for $12.00, and brought them home. Because I was taking my car to the supermarket before returning to my apartment, I put my Walgreens purchase in my trunk with several other plastic bags filled with things I’d put in earlier, intending to give to a food bank supporting AIDS patients. Their hours are sporadic, however, and often when I go, I find them closed.

I finished my grocery shopping and noticed on the way out that the store had a large bin for accepting food donations for another charity. I figured as long as I was there, I’d give them what I had in my trunk, which I did.

It was not until I got home and looked for the Whatever that I realized I did not have it. And I did not have it because I had put it in the food donation bin with the other items. How could I have been so astoundingly stupid? Easily, obviously. Why am I totally incapable of thinking before I act?

Were this an isolated incident, it might be overlooked, or chalked up to experience. But I do not learn from experience. I am capable of an infinite variety of stupidity. I do not think. Ever. Oh, I think ten seconds after I’ve done some dumbfoundingly idiotic thing and feel totally like a fool. You would think…I would think…that after doing excruciatingly embarrassing things time after time after time without thinking first that I would learn. We would both be wrong.

Yesterday I lost my cell phone…not easy to do in a tiny, tiny apartment, but I managed. I spent an hour searching for it and finally e-mailed my friend Gary to ask him to call me and let the phone ring until I found it. He did, and I did.

It was in the linen closet.

To the best of my recollection (sic) I had not been near the linen closet in days. It is to weep.

There is that wonderful old saying: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and prove it.” But I insist upon not only doing such humiliating things, but compounding them by detailing them in this blog for all the world (oh, I wish!) to see.

I am hopeless, yet even in my hopelessness my ego shows through and the paraphrased words of Percy Bysshe Shelley shimmer through the darkness: “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” And round that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’”

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

King Canut

Oh, my. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I spend an inordinate amount of time…and the bulk of these blogs…in ranting and raving and waving my arms, and shouting and cursing and oozing bile from every pore. And every now and then I step back and wonder: why? Much as I would like to be appointed He Who Must Be Obeyed, it’s not very likely that’s going to happen.

And just because I rail against all the astonishing stupidity, bigotry, hatred, and intolerance that continuously wash over us all in mountainous waves doesn’t mean I have the slightest control over, let alone effect on, any of them. I’m like King Canut, standing on the shore, commanding the waves to cease. Maybe I hope that by eliciting your empathy, all of us lined up together on the shore might intimidate the tides. Or maybe not.

I am quite good at self-delusion (though I’m sure you’ve never noticed). Being the ultimate egoist, I tend to talk about things which are closest to my core being and insist on trying to foist them off on you on the unproven and unprovable grounds that you might realize that we occasionally have the same thoughts or reactions, though they are not the kind of things one talks much about to others.

I sometimes feel a bit like one of those small crabs which live inside an empty sea shell, which in this case is my mind, coming out timidly only occasionally to bitch about something, then darting back in again.

I spend almost all my waking time writing, either books or blogs or emails. About the only time I have to read for pleasure is while I’m “working” part-time at the information desk of a nearby shopping center, and yesterday I took with me a little book called Another Cat at the Door by C.W. Gusewelle. It’s a collection of totally charming short essays about the author and his family’s inability to turn away stray cats showing up at their door. (I assume they originally appeared either as a blog or in a weekly newspaper column.)

Each self-contained piece is tells a complete little story with grace, humor (and sometimes sorrow), insight, and compassion. Reading them, I wondered once again why it seems to be that my blogs are too often little more than grumpy muttered oaths and complaints. I fear you may…if you have not already…grow tired of being exposed to unrelenting negativity, and wander off in search of happier thoughts.

Mr. Gusewell is not a curmudgeon, and he does not live in a seashell. He spends his time outside, observing the world and others around him, not immersed in himself to the exclusion of the rest of the world. There is little nourishment to be found in feeding entirely on one’s self, but it is exactly what I do.

So I’ve resolved to try to get outside of myself a little more in future blogs: God knows there really is enough good and pleasant things to talk about. And I hope you understand that my apparent unhappiness stems from my soul-deep belief and expectation that people can be so very much better than they are, and my deep disappointment when constantly proven wrong.

So I talk about myself in hopes that I am also talking about you. Maybe enough of us, standing on the seashore, can make a difference. I’d like to think so.

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Society, Kicking and Screaming

I talked a bit about the rapid changes technology has made and continues to make…mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse. But it is the societal changes which have a far longer and darker history. Nearly every significant major change in our society has been forged in anger, denial, and occasional warfare.

It is of course impossible to separate technological and societal change, since it is the former which often brings on the latter. The difference between technological and social changes is that technology provides things which we did not miss before they existed. Societal changes are based more on the human mind and our perception of the world around us.

The rapid evolution of technology in electronics has produced societal sea changes. Until the middle of the last century, no one had ever heard of television, or of computers, or cell phones, or microwaves or dishwashers. With no television or video games, kids actually played outdoors and exercised their imaginations. Their days were not crammed with soccer practice and cheerleading squads and other orchestrated activities which have all but eliminated the need for the imagination or creativity. Obesity in children was not a major issue.

So many of the devices without which we cannot imagine our living today simply did not exist, and we got along perfectly well without them all. You cannot miss what you have never had and never heard of. I wonder what “wonders” the next 20 years hold in store.

Yet it is television and the internet and other technological devices which pushes and promotes societal change. Being exposed to people different from ourselves had done an admirable job in breaking down prejudices and homogenizing our world.

I’m not the first to observe that humans are an often maddening species, vehemently and violently resistant to change until that change inevitably occurs, and the exact same people who marched and screamed and ranted against it suddenly act as if it had been their idea in the first place. Segregation, ethnic and national stereotyping, women’s lib and gay rights all…every social battle that begins with a “NEVER!!!!” seems to end in a “Yeah, so what else is new?”

On the forefront of social change right now is the issue of gay marriage and gays in the military. On the issue of gay marriage, I personally don’t care how it’s done or what it’s called, so long as the end result is the same: identical rights for everyone.

I look at the smug, self-righteous political and military bigots who pontificate their objections to the right of gay and lesbian Americans to serve their country openly on the most absurdly specious of grounds and logic, and know full well that it is only a matter of time until these neanderthals will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century. And once that goal has been achieved, I will be willing to wager my soul that there will not be so much as a ripple upon the waters, and the only question will be “what in the HELL took you so long?”

Dr. Pangloss was wrong: there is no “best of all possible worlds.” There never has been, and never will be. When it comes to social progress, mankind resembles an amoeba, which can only move when one small part extends itself out from the mass and the rest of the body gradually flows into it. We just all have to do our best to move as quickly into the arm of the amoeba as we can.

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A Pile of Rocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pond Scum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Demons Within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why? (Part MLX)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Minds and Computers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better late than never, I guess.

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Little Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bubbly Creek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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