Posts
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, July 21, 2008
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, July 14, 2008
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?
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
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?
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Minds and Computers
I’ve long ago given up trying to figure out either my mind or the computer. People seem to be comparing them all the time, and I guess I have to agree. Both seem to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, both can deny you access to information you know you have and want and need at any time, and my wanting them to do anything else is like opening the door to a jetliner at 40,000 feet and stepping out without a parachute.
My computer, which I really do work to extremes, will frequently, suddenly, and for absolutely no reason I can see, decide to slow down. I will try to go from one place to another on the net (or even within the computer itself) and the screen I want to leave will just sit there, staring back at me, expressionless but obviously uncomprehending or uncaring—or, as I strongly suspect, a combination of both. Very infrequently, it will simply lock up tighter than a drum, making it impossible for me to do anything at all, other than manually turn the tower off and switch it back on again.
The other day, I clicked on a photo to move it from one part of the page to the other, dragged it halfway to where I wanted it, let my finger off the mouse for an instant, and it disappeared. Vanished, never to be seen again. It did not go back to where it was in the first place, it did not go into my overflowing “Wastebasket”, though that particular feature of my computer is so full of assorted junk I probably wouldn’t be able to find the photo even if it was there. And my mind works exactly the same way: I have an idea that I wish to make use of in another context, and somewhere in between, the idea vanishes, as does, usually, the thought I was trying to relate it to.
Though I must say, in defense of the computer, that were it as completely as unpredictable as my mind, it would be totally unuseable. You’re familiar with those annoying Pop-Up ads that just appear when you’re doing something and you have to take the time and effort to click on the little “x” in the pop-up window to get rid of them? Well, my mind is one continual pop-up window. I’m trying to think of how to describe, let’s say, a piece of furniture (don’t ask me why I might want to be describing a piece of furniture…just go with me here, okay?). The instant I start I think of a chair my mom hat that her cat totally destroyed by peeing in it. Or I am writing a note to a friend telling him/her about something that happened today while I was walking to the grocery store and here comes a pop-up alerting me to the fact that the parking garage behind the store used to be a tennis court when I first lived in Chicago. A fascinating bit of trivia, but having nothing whatever to do with the grocery store or my walking to it today.
That I am able to fan and swat my way through these swarms of mental pop-ups is, I’m sure, admirable, but it is also infinitely frustrating.
Obviously, the makers of computers had to have designed them using the brain as some sort of model, and increasingly obvious, too, is the fact that more and more people rely more heavily on the computer for things the brain should do for itself. I refer you once again to E.M. Forster’s classic 1909 short (12,000 word) story, “The Machine Stops”, which you can find on Google. (That was a classic example of one of my mental pop-ups, and only goes to prove I am not only not the first person in the world to relate computers and the mind, but I’m 99 years behind E.M. Forster.)
Better late than never, I guess.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
My computer, which I really do work to extremes, will frequently, suddenly, and for absolutely no reason I can see, decide to slow down. I will try to go from one place to another on the net (or even within the computer itself) and the screen I want to leave will just sit there, staring back at me, expressionless but obviously uncomprehending or uncaring—or, as I strongly suspect, a combination of both. Very infrequently, it will simply lock up tighter than a drum, making it impossible for me to do anything at all, other than manually turn the tower off and switch it back on again.
The other day, I clicked on a photo to move it from one part of the page to the other, dragged it halfway to where I wanted it, let my finger off the mouse for an instant, and it disappeared. Vanished, never to be seen again. It did not go back to where it was in the first place, it did not go into my overflowing “Wastebasket”, though that particular feature of my computer is so full of assorted junk I probably wouldn’t be able to find the photo even if it was there. And my mind works exactly the same way: I have an idea that I wish to make use of in another context, and somewhere in between, the idea vanishes, as does, usually, the thought I was trying to relate it to.
Though I must say, in defense of the computer, that were it as completely as unpredictable as my mind, it would be totally unuseable. You’re familiar with those annoying Pop-Up ads that just appear when you’re doing something and you have to take the time and effort to click on the little “x” in the pop-up window to get rid of them? Well, my mind is one continual pop-up window. I’m trying to think of how to describe, let’s say, a piece of furniture (don’t ask me why I might want to be describing a piece of furniture…just go with me here, okay?). The instant I start I think of a chair my mom hat that her cat totally destroyed by peeing in it. Or I am writing a note to a friend telling him/her about something that happened today while I was walking to the grocery store and here comes a pop-up alerting me to the fact that the parking garage behind the store used to be a tennis court when I first lived in Chicago. A fascinating bit of trivia, but having nothing whatever to do with the grocery store or my walking to it today.
That I am able to fan and swat my way through these swarms of mental pop-ups is, I’m sure, admirable, but it is also infinitely frustrating.
Obviously, the makers of computers had to have designed them using the brain as some sort of model, and increasingly obvious, too, is the fact that more and more people rely more heavily on the computer for things the brain should do for itself. I refer you once again to E.M. Forster’s classic 1909 short (12,000 word) story, “The Machine Stops”, which you can find on Google. (That was a classic example of one of my mental pop-ups, and only goes to prove I am not only not the first person in the world to relate computers and the mind, but I’m 99 years behind E.M. Forster.)
Better late than never, I guess.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, July 04, 2008
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
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.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Bubbly Creek
Where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River stand four large, regal-looking towers, two on each bank, flanking the lift bridge. Only one or two of them houses the mechanism that raises and lowers the bridge, but the builders thought four would look better and more impressive. So there are four. The bridge is so delicately balanced that it only takes the equivalent of a 1950s Volkswagon engine to lift and lower it.
One of them is now the Chicago Bridge Museum, which I had never even known existed, and to which, had it not been for my friend Gary, I would probably never have given a second thought.
Chicago has more lift bridges than any city in the country, and the Chicago River is, I believe, the only river in the world that flows backward. How it came to do so is a fascinating (to me) story.
Chicago was born where two slow-moving streams, the North Branch and the South Branch joined to form the Main Stem, linking the branches to Lake Michigan. The surrounding territory was largely inhospitable marshland and bogs which the city’s growth slowly consumed. The Chicago River served as the city’s sewer and until only recently was one of the most polluted bodies of water in America if not the world. Because the sewage flowed down the North Branch and up the South Branch and into the Main Stem, all the sewage, garbage, and general debris of the city flowed freely into Lake Michigan, which was and is the city’s main source of drinking water. A water pump station was built out in the lake beyond the area of main pollution, but the pollution produced by the city’s growth soon overtook it and another station was built further out, which in turn was soon overtaken.
It was decided to dig a canal connecting the South Branch to the Des Plaines river, therefore routing the growing city’s garbage and sewage from Lake Michigan and sending it down stream to the Mississippi, St. Louis and beyond. Only because the land sloped to the west was this possible, but once the canal was opened, the river reversed its flow.
All the growing city’s industrial waste and garbage could then happily be tossed into the Chicago River and let the people downstream on the Mississippi worry about it.
As the city continued to grow, the gigantic Chicago Stockyards were constructed along another stream feeding into the South Branch, called “Bubbly Creek”…a lovely name conjuring up images of forest and glens and clear artesian water bubbling up from the earth. Unfortunately, that image would be wrong. Bubbly Creek received its name from the fact that the tens of thousands of cattle carcasses and general offal from the slaughter houses were dumped into it, and their rotting at the bottom of the creek created methane gas which bubbled to the surface.
During the great Chicago fire, a large stretch of the South Branch, including Bubbly Creek, actually caught fire.
Throughout most of its history, Chicago was known not for its beauty but for its stench. One prominent New York businessman arrived in Chicago by train, stepped onto the platform, took one whiff of the air, got back on the train and never returned. And even today, after years of devoted and concentrated effort to restore the river’s purity, swimming in and fishing from the river are discouraged.
And there you have it. As I said, fascinating. You must come and visit some day, and take a boat cruise up the river. It’s a really beautiful way to see the city. And you don’t have to hold your nose anymore.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
One of them is now the Chicago Bridge Museum, which I had never even known existed, and to which, had it not been for my friend Gary, I would probably never have given a second thought.
Chicago has more lift bridges than any city in the country, and the Chicago River is, I believe, the only river in the world that flows backward. How it came to do so is a fascinating (to me) story.
Chicago was born where two slow-moving streams, the North Branch and the South Branch joined to form the Main Stem, linking the branches to Lake Michigan. The surrounding territory was largely inhospitable marshland and bogs which the city’s growth slowly consumed. The Chicago River served as the city’s sewer and until only recently was one of the most polluted bodies of water in America if not the world. Because the sewage flowed down the North Branch and up the South Branch and into the Main Stem, all the sewage, garbage, and general debris of the city flowed freely into Lake Michigan, which was and is the city’s main source of drinking water. A water pump station was built out in the lake beyond the area of main pollution, but the pollution produced by the city’s growth soon overtook it and another station was built further out, which in turn was soon overtaken.
It was decided to dig a canal connecting the South Branch to the Des Plaines river, therefore routing the growing city’s garbage and sewage from Lake Michigan and sending it down stream to the Mississippi, St. Louis and beyond. Only because the land sloped to the west was this possible, but once the canal was opened, the river reversed its flow.
All the growing city’s industrial waste and garbage could then happily be tossed into the Chicago River and let the people downstream on the Mississippi worry about it.
As the city continued to grow, the gigantic Chicago Stockyards were constructed along another stream feeding into the South Branch, called “Bubbly Creek”…a lovely name conjuring up images of forest and glens and clear artesian water bubbling up from the earth. Unfortunately, that image would be wrong. Bubbly Creek received its name from the fact that the tens of thousands of cattle carcasses and general offal from the slaughter houses were dumped into it, and their rotting at the bottom of the creek created methane gas which bubbled to the surface.
During the great Chicago fire, a large stretch of the South Branch, including Bubbly Creek, actually caught fire.
Throughout most of its history, Chicago was known not for its beauty but for its stench. One prominent New York businessman arrived in Chicago by train, stepped onto the platform, took one whiff of the air, got back on the train and never returned. And even today, after years of devoted and concentrated effort to restore the river’s purity, swimming in and fishing from the river are discouraged.
And there you have it. As I said, fascinating. You must come and visit some day, and take a boat cruise up the river. It’s a really beautiful way to see the city. And you don’t have to hold your nose anymore.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Pride
There are two basic types of pride: the pride of being a part of something much larger than one’s self, and the stuff that we are cautioned “goeth before a fall,”which is largely of our own making.
Yesterday, June 29, 2008, was a perfect example of the former. It was Gay Pride day in Chicago and many other cities across the nation. Attendance in Chicago was estimated at over 450,000, and it was not only promoted by all the local TV stations and other media, but most—including the major networks—had floats. Before leaving for the parade, I stood at my window and looked down at the Diversey el station half a block from my apartment, watching train after train disgorging platform-filling crowds of people, which then poured out onto the street and flowed eastward, like a river, toward the parade route.
Participation or at least representation in the parade has become all but mandatory for any elected official in the state (especially in election years). Great gleaming red-and-white trucks of the Chicago Fire Department, horns blaring, lights flashing, move down the street as part of the parade, and the Chicago Police Department sponsors a float with dozens of uniformed gay and lesbian police riding on it, led by a convertible carrying the Police Commissioner. This was the 39th Chicago Gay Pride parade and it, for the gay community, truly epitomizes the word “Pride.”
After hundreds of years of persecution and being told we were unworthy, unwelcome, and beneath contempt, we are entitled, I think, to a taking a little pride in how far we’ve come. When I left Chicago to move to L.A. in 1966, the first gay pride event was four years away. When I first lived here, I could have lost my job for being gay, or been evicted from my apartment with absolutely no recourse. Being gay was reason enough.. Our old slogan”“We’re Here, We’re Queer; Get Used to It” finally seems to be paying off. The world is getting used to us.
As I have said so often before, no one who is not a member of an historically persecuted minority can be expected to understand how much that means to us.
For me, the second form of pride…pride in one’s self…has not come without conflict. It is not by accident, I think, that Pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins. My pride forbids me to do many things that I really, really would love to do for fear of standing out from all those who do something well and naturally and appearing foolish. As a result, I stand out and appear foolish by not doing what others do. My pride will not allow me to dance for fear of making a fool of myself. And so I refuse any offer to do so and stand on the sidelines while everyone else is out there dancing. I’ve reported several times how my friends would tell me: “No one will notice you!” and I would reply: “I will notice me.”
My pride has, all my life, set up arbitrary rules and limitations which it demands I must follow. At the parade, I bought a rainbow flag and, while I would not allow myself to cheer and whistle (which I couldn’t have done anyway, since I lost the ability to whistle after my Mayo stay). However, in defiance, I did force myself to raise the flag over my head and wave it as my people marched by. That’s progress.
Maybe there is hope for me yet.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Yesterday, June 29, 2008, was a perfect example of the former. It was Gay Pride day in Chicago and many other cities across the nation. Attendance in Chicago was estimated at over 450,000, and it was not only promoted by all the local TV stations and other media, but most—including the major networks—had floats. Before leaving for the parade, I stood at my window and looked down at the Diversey el station half a block from my apartment, watching train after train disgorging platform-filling crowds of people, which then poured out onto the street and flowed eastward, like a river, toward the parade route.
Participation or at least representation in the parade has become all but mandatory for any elected official in the state (especially in election years). Great gleaming red-and-white trucks of the Chicago Fire Department, horns blaring, lights flashing, move down the street as part of the parade, and the Chicago Police Department sponsors a float with dozens of uniformed gay and lesbian police riding on it, led by a convertible carrying the Police Commissioner. This was the 39th Chicago Gay Pride parade and it, for the gay community, truly epitomizes the word “Pride.”
After hundreds of years of persecution and being told we were unworthy, unwelcome, and beneath contempt, we are entitled, I think, to a taking a little pride in how far we’ve come. When I left Chicago to move to L.A. in 1966, the first gay pride event was four years away. When I first lived here, I could have lost my job for being gay, or been evicted from my apartment with absolutely no recourse. Being gay was reason enough.. Our old slogan”“We’re Here, We’re Queer; Get Used to It” finally seems to be paying off. The world is getting used to us.
As I have said so often before, no one who is not a member of an historically persecuted minority can be expected to understand how much that means to us.
For me, the second form of pride…pride in one’s self…has not come without conflict. It is not by accident, I think, that Pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins. My pride forbids me to do many things that I really, really would love to do for fear of standing out from all those who do something well and naturally and appearing foolish. As a result, I stand out and appear foolish by not doing what others do. My pride will not allow me to dance for fear of making a fool of myself. And so I refuse any offer to do so and stand on the sidelines while everyone else is out there dancing. I’ve reported several times how my friends would tell me: “No one will notice you!” and I would reply: “I will notice me.”
My pride has, all my life, set up arbitrary rules and limitations which it demands I must follow. At the parade, I bought a rainbow flag and, while I would not allow myself to cheer and whistle (which I couldn’t have done anyway, since I lost the ability to whistle after my Mayo stay). However, in defiance, I did force myself to raise the flag over my head and wave it as my people marched by. That’s progress.
Maybe there is hope for me yet.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, June 27, 2008
"Cute"
Though I couldn’t immediately find it, I’m pretty sure I’ve already done a blog on this topic, talking about how warm and cuddly I always feel when beat over the head with the “cute” stick. It is apparently a given in the advertising world and on TV in general that I am incapable of recognizing “cute” when I see it unless my jaws are forced open and a gallon of the stuff is poured down my throat.
I know I have talked probably several times about weekend-morning kiddie programs hosted by absolutely adorable “little girls” who will never see 25 again, but seem convinced that by wearing their hair in pigtails or in those cute little side-buns and dressing like six-year-olds, no one will know the difference. (When I worked for the porn mill in Los Angeles, such attire was regularly featured in magazines appealing to men who I sincerely doubt watched weekend kiddie shows.)
And I know I have raled against those legions of recording “artists” who firmly believe wearing a baseball cap at any angle but straight ahead is the height of both “cute” and “cool.” Obviously they are correct, since I have not seen more than three baseball caps worn correctly in several years. Probably it’s just me.
There is an ad running currently on Chicago television for some phone company whose name I have blocked out of my head in rebellion. It features a guy who looks like he’s wearing a body-sized bowling ball. And he says he represents the “dot” in”dot com”. (“I used to be a period” he says, thus doubling me over with laughter.) But in case I don’t get it, a young woman passes by wearing…now get this…a polka dot dress, and he says (please keep up with me here, because the zingers just keep coming): “Hi, Dorothy.” Dorothy, get it? (Okay, okay, obviously you’re too dumb to figure it out: let me get out my blackboard and chalk. Follow along now: people named Dorothy are often nicknaked “Dot.” Get it now? No? Oh, forget the whole thing!)
The general assumption of our stupidity goes back to the days of radio when laugh tracks were invented. They are omnipresent today and an absolutely invaluable tool to the industry. They let you know when something is funny (“Those pants make you look fat!” .....Uproarious, prolonged laughter. “Yeah, well you ain’t so skinny youself!” Absolute pandemonium, screams and shouts and applause and guffaws that go on endlessly and reduce the amount of time and effort the writers would otherwise need to try to write something that is even vaguely amusing.)
TV programs like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (the show’s title itself an oxymoron) often feature hilariously funny clips which are so obviously set up and staged you can see them coming a mile away…often enhanced by the cause of the cuteness glancing at the camera just prior to stepping on the rake or tripping into the swimming pool as if to assure the cameraman doesn’t miss it.
Ya’ can’t fake “cute.” Those velvet paintings of the little kids with the enormous eyes (usually with a tear at the corner), or those of the dogs playing poker, or those little “I wuv you” statuettes tend to induce projectile vomiting in me.
A puppy being a puppy, a kitten being a kitten, or a baby being a baby. Now those are the real thing, and you don’t have to grab me in a choke hold for me to recognize it. “Cute”, like any form of “beauty” is in the eye of the beholder, and I’ll decide for myself, thank you.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
I know I have talked probably several times about weekend-morning kiddie programs hosted by absolutely adorable “little girls” who will never see 25 again, but seem convinced that by wearing their hair in pigtails or in those cute little side-buns and dressing like six-year-olds, no one will know the difference. (When I worked for the porn mill in Los Angeles, such attire was regularly featured in magazines appealing to men who I sincerely doubt watched weekend kiddie shows.)
And I know I have raled against those legions of recording “artists” who firmly believe wearing a baseball cap at any angle but straight ahead is the height of both “cute” and “cool.” Obviously they are correct, since I have not seen more than three baseball caps worn correctly in several years. Probably it’s just me.
There is an ad running currently on Chicago television for some phone company whose name I have blocked out of my head in rebellion. It features a guy who looks like he’s wearing a body-sized bowling ball. And he says he represents the “dot” in”dot com”. (“I used to be a period” he says, thus doubling me over with laughter.) But in case I don’t get it, a young woman passes by wearing…now get this…a polka dot dress, and he says (please keep up with me here, because the zingers just keep coming): “Hi, Dorothy.” Dorothy, get it? (Okay, okay, obviously you’re too dumb to figure it out: let me get out my blackboard and chalk. Follow along now: people named Dorothy are often nicknaked “Dot.” Get it now? No? Oh, forget the whole thing!)
The general assumption of our stupidity goes back to the days of radio when laugh tracks were invented. They are omnipresent today and an absolutely invaluable tool to the industry. They let you know when something is funny (“Those pants make you look fat!” .....Uproarious, prolonged laughter. “Yeah, well you ain’t so skinny youself!” Absolute pandemonium, screams and shouts and applause and guffaws that go on endlessly and reduce the amount of time and effort the writers would otherwise need to try to write something that is even vaguely amusing.)
TV programs like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (the show’s title itself an oxymoron) often feature hilariously funny clips which are so obviously set up and staged you can see them coming a mile away…often enhanced by the cause of the cuteness glancing at the camera just prior to stepping on the rake or tripping into the swimming pool as if to assure the cameraman doesn’t miss it.
Ya’ can’t fake “cute.” Those velvet paintings of the little kids with the enormous eyes (usually with a tear at the corner), or those of the dogs playing poker, or those little “I wuv you” statuettes tend to induce projectile vomiting in me.
A puppy being a puppy, a kitten being a kitten, or a baby being a baby. Now those are the real thing, and you don’t have to grab me in a choke hold for me to recognize it. “Cute”, like any form of “beauty” is in the eye of the beholder, and I’ll decide for myself, thank you.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Life
Yeah, like you saw the subject line and thought I was going to cram all of life into a one page blog. I’m good (he says modestly), but I ain’t that good. So I’ll just do my usual hop-skip-and-jump routine on some random observations on the subject.
I’ve always liked the quote: “When people say ‘life is hard,’ I’m always tempted to ask: ‘Compared to what?’”
Perhaps the biggest difference between Man and all other animals is that ours is the only species who is aware of the future, and which expects. The problem with expectations is that they are seldom met to the degree we want them to be. (Another favorite expression, which I’ve quoted before, is a line from the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown…or, as I insist upon calling it, The Unbrownable Molly Sink: “You say your prayers weren’t answered? That’s just not so! Your prayers were answered: The answer was ‘No.’”)
There are at least two sides to everything in life. Stoicism…simple acceptance of whatever happens…is an admirable and comforting attitude, but stoicism stifles the human urge to make things better. I read a fascinating study that points out that Western cultures are as a rule more technologically advanced than many isolated Eastern societies primarily because we do not accept things the way they are.
There is no statement that can be made that cannot be countered and disputed, often with great vehemence and a good deal of justification. “Life is good” is a truth which can be countered by just reading a newspaper or watching a TV program, or walking down the street with your eyes open. “Life sucks” is also a truth, but is countered by the same methods as in the previous sentence.
Life is a game we all play, but in which the rules are both unclear and constantly changing. It’s a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. It is a map drawn on a weather vane. It is confusing to the point of being maddening; sad and discouraging to the point of despair; joyous as ten thousand brightly colored balloons released to soar into the sky. It is all these things and infinitely more. But what it is, above all else, is a gift…an all-to-brief nanosecond of existence in the nothingness of eternity from which we somehow emerge and into which we too-quickly return.
Within the gift of life are innumerable other gifts which we too seldom recognize or appreciate. Principle among these is the gift of choice. Circumstances may limit us, but even within those limits we have the ability to make choices which allow us to change, to grow, and to seek happiness…or at the very least, contentment.
Life is also blank canvas presented to us at birth. The tools provided with which to create something on it vary from person to person. Some are given dozens of brushes and a full palette of colors, some a handful or less of crayons or pastels, some merely a single pencil. What we do with what we are given is up to us.
Robert Merrick, the “elephant man” whose life had meaning far beyond the incomprehensibly difficult circumstances he endured with amazing dignity, summed up the point of this entry. “I think my head is so large,” he said, “because it is so full of dreams.” And what more can be said of life than that?
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
I’ve always liked the quote: “When people say ‘life is hard,’ I’m always tempted to ask: ‘Compared to what?’”
Perhaps the biggest difference between Man and all other animals is that ours is the only species who is aware of the future, and which expects. The problem with expectations is that they are seldom met to the degree we want them to be. (Another favorite expression, which I’ve quoted before, is a line from the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown…or, as I insist upon calling it, The Unbrownable Molly Sink: “You say your prayers weren’t answered? That’s just not so! Your prayers were answered: The answer was ‘No.’”)
There are at least two sides to everything in life. Stoicism…simple acceptance of whatever happens…is an admirable and comforting attitude, but stoicism stifles the human urge to make things better. I read a fascinating study that points out that Western cultures are as a rule more technologically advanced than many isolated Eastern societies primarily because we do not accept things the way they are.
There is no statement that can be made that cannot be countered and disputed, often with great vehemence and a good deal of justification. “Life is good” is a truth which can be countered by just reading a newspaper or watching a TV program, or walking down the street with your eyes open. “Life sucks” is also a truth, but is countered by the same methods as in the previous sentence.
Life is a game we all play, but in which the rules are both unclear and constantly changing. It’s a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. It is a map drawn on a weather vane. It is confusing to the point of being maddening; sad and discouraging to the point of despair; joyous as ten thousand brightly colored balloons released to soar into the sky. It is all these things and infinitely more. But what it is, above all else, is a gift…an all-to-brief nanosecond of existence in the nothingness of eternity from which we somehow emerge and into which we too-quickly return.
Within the gift of life are innumerable other gifts which we too seldom recognize or appreciate. Principle among these is the gift of choice. Circumstances may limit us, but even within those limits we have the ability to make choices which allow us to change, to grow, and to seek happiness…or at the very least, contentment.
Life is also blank canvas presented to us at birth. The tools provided with which to create something on it vary from person to person. Some are given dozens of brushes and a full palette of colors, some a handful or less of crayons or pastels, some merely a single pencil. What we do with what we are given is up to us.
Robert Merrick, the “elephant man” whose life had meaning far beyond the incomprehensibly difficult circumstances he endured with amazing dignity, summed up the point of this entry. “I think my head is so large,” he said, “because it is so full of dreams.” And what more can be said of life than that?
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Love
Love is one of the most basic, powerful, and admirable traits of our species…though humans cannot claim exclusivity on it, as anyone who has ever had a dog or a cat can attest. Like so many things in life, love has an infinite number of shadings and varieties and intensities, as does its balance between the two individuals involved..
The love between parents and children is quite different than the love between friends, and that indescribably unique love between two people which includes and transcends the others.
Love feeds us and sustains us, and without it we wither and die. It is essential for our survival and our emotional development, and we seem able to store it up, like some animals store up body fat for use during periods of deprivation. Science has shown babies need to be touched and held and fondled as much as they need physical nourishment. Deprivation of love and attention warps the individual forever. (I have seen experiments conducted on baby monkeys denied of any contact with their mothers, and it horrified and devastated me. Such experiments may further science, but their effect on the individual monkeys is unconscionable.
As we grow older, our sources of love grow fewer. Our parents die as do, over the years, our partners and our friends, until we find ourselves like newborns once again, desperately needing love and attention and touch, and receiving less and less of it.
I am comfortable in my life. I am blessed with supportive, caring friends who provide emotional nourishment the human soul requires, and I try to reciprocate it, though I am far less adept at it than they. I still have some family left, and they remain my anchors to the past. I am fortunate, too, to have friends I’ve never met but who know and seem to appreciate me through my writing..
But what I do not have, and miss with a true sense of longing, is a romantic-love partner with whom to share my life. I used to joke that the one thing that separates friend from lovers is sex and, at the risk of eliciting a scrinched-face “eeeeee-eeewwww!!” from those under 40, I can assure you that probably most people, sex remains a strong factor even after one’s sexual appeal is totally lost on others.
For the most part, people tend to be pretty selfish when it comes to any form of love. They want it, need it, and even expect it as their due, though they are…like me…somewhat loath to express it as frequently as they should.
I have never met or even heard of a single person who, claiming with or without justification, that they are unloved, ever claims they are happy. It is a tragic fact that far, far too many people in our increasingly self-isolated world, are deprived of love, of affection, of kindness, of the even casual genuine touch on the arm from someone who cares about them.
Our society, unfortunately, even the most innocent and casual physical contact with anyone other than one’s own immediate family is discouraged, and we are rapidly becoming a nation of paranoids. That teachers are forbidden to hug a troubled student for fear of official reprimand or dismissal is a sign of just how far down the path of dehumanization we have traveled. That a kind, well-intentioned stranger cannot reach out and casually touch a child without being suspected of being a child molester is disgusting.
As elemental as it sounds, the fact remains: the best way to get positive attention is to give it without really expecting it to be returned; the best way to make a friend is to be a friend. The best way to be loved is to love unconditionally.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
The love between parents and children is quite different than the love between friends, and that indescribably unique love between two people which includes and transcends the others.
Love feeds us and sustains us, and without it we wither and die. It is essential for our survival and our emotional development, and we seem able to store it up, like some animals store up body fat for use during periods of deprivation. Science has shown babies need to be touched and held and fondled as much as they need physical nourishment. Deprivation of love and attention warps the individual forever. (I have seen experiments conducted on baby monkeys denied of any contact with their mothers, and it horrified and devastated me. Such experiments may further science, but their effect on the individual monkeys is unconscionable.
As we grow older, our sources of love grow fewer. Our parents die as do, over the years, our partners and our friends, until we find ourselves like newborns once again, desperately needing love and attention and touch, and receiving less and less of it.
I am comfortable in my life. I am blessed with supportive, caring friends who provide emotional nourishment the human soul requires, and I try to reciprocate it, though I am far less adept at it than they. I still have some family left, and they remain my anchors to the past. I am fortunate, too, to have friends I’ve never met but who know and seem to appreciate me through my writing..
But what I do not have, and miss with a true sense of longing, is a romantic-love partner with whom to share my life. I used to joke that the one thing that separates friend from lovers is sex and, at the risk of eliciting a scrinched-face “eeeeee-eeewwww!!” from those under 40, I can assure you that probably most people, sex remains a strong factor even after one’s sexual appeal is totally lost on others.
For the most part, people tend to be pretty selfish when it comes to any form of love. They want it, need it, and even expect it as their due, though they are…like me…somewhat loath to express it as frequently as they should.
I have never met or even heard of a single person who, claiming with or without justification, that they are unloved, ever claims they are happy. It is a tragic fact that far, far too many people in our increasingly self-isolated world, are deprived of love, of affection, of kindness, of the even casual genuine touch on the arm from someone who cares about them.
Our society, unfortunately, even the most innocent and casual physical contact with anyone other than one’s own immediate family is discouraged, and we are rapidly becoming a nation of paranoids. That teachers are forbidden to hug a troubled student for fear of official reprimand or dismissal is a sign of just how far down the path of dehumanization we have traveled. That a kind, well-intentioned stranger cannot reach out and casually touch a child without being suspected of being a child molester is disgusting.
As elemental as it sounds, the fact remains: the best way to get positive attention is to give it without really expecting it to be returned; the best way to make a friend is to be a friend. The best way to be loved is to love unconditionally.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Ophelia
As I was sitting here trying to think of a topic for this blog, my mind…I suspect with some ulterior motive of its own…presented me with the picture of Jean Simmons as Ophelia in the 1948 movie of Hamlet (Laurence Olivier played Hamlet). Gone utterly mad, she wanders beside a stream, idly picking flowers, her eyes indicating that no one is home.Singing little snatches of song, she makes a garland of flowers for her hair, then, totally unaware, she falls into the water and floats gently downstream on her back, oblivious to her fate. But she’s happy.
Knowing my mind as I do, I took the scene as a clear metaphor for my blog-writing. There are as many topics for a blog as there were flowers along Ohpelia's stream, and I pick them as randomly as she did.
I seem at the moment to be in a small patch of lovely little 1940s (they come in a variety of shades). I don’t even have to bend over to pick one. It is of our tiny house on Blackhawk Avenue on Rockford’s far-from-fashionable south side. (Of course it was my parents’, but I always thought of everything they had as mine, and they never dissuaded me from that belief.) The front door of the house led into a small, narrow living room, painted green as I recall, with only one window, other than the one in the door. On the right-side wall of the room, about three-quarters of the way down….maybe eight feet…were two doors; the first to my parents’ bedroom, the other to mine.
My room was only large enough for a single bed and a dresser. I don’t think there was a closet. Across from my room, in the living room, was a large brown metal oil heater with a stove pipe running from the back to close to the ceiling, where it bent and vented to the outside. This was the primary source of heat for the house. The oil was kept in two large drums behind the garage, and I assume there were pipes which ran between them and the house to supply fuel to the heater. Between the oil heater and my room was a large opening into the kitchen. We got our water from a well equipped with an electric pump which, when it elected to go out, necessitated my dad crawling down into a wood-covered pit outside the living room’s only window. This usually happened in winter, of course.
For the first couple of years we lived there, we had no bathroom. There was an outhouse in the back yard. It simply never occurred to me that we might be considered either deprived or poor. It is simply the way things were, and much of the nation lived as we did.
When my folks could afford it, they built a room off the side of the kitchen which became my bedroom. My former bedroom became a bathroom.
I remember lying in my bedroom with my comic books when my folks weren’t home, tracing pictures of Superman and Captain Marvel and Batman and Robin, only I would trace them as being naked (easy enough to do, since they always wore skin-tight uniforms anyway), which provided an early-teen boy with far more heat than the living room oil burner could ever have produced. To avoid being caught, when I finished with them, I would slide them into a crack under my window sill, where they would usually fall between the walls. I often wondered what might have happened if, in the course of the house’s eventually being demolished, someone had found them all. Unfortunately, that speculation was never realized, since the house burned several years later.
We lived there from the time I entered third grade through seventh or eighth grade. I learned to ride a bike there, and we planted a tree which is still, to the best of my knowledge there though the house is gone and only an empty lot remains.
And you see? I’ve picked only one flower! There are fields and fields of them, just waiting to be picked. If I can only avoid falling into that stream…
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Knowing my mind as I do, I took the scene as a clear metaphor for my blog-writing. There are as many topics for a blog as there were flowers along Ohpelia's stream, and I pick them as randomly as she did.
I seem at the moment to be in a small patch of lovely little 1940s (they come in a variety of shades). I don’t even have to bend over to pick one. It is of our tiny house on Blackhawk Avenue on Rockford’s far-from-fashionable south side. (Of course it was my parents’, but I always thought of everything they had as mine, and they never dissuaded me from that belief.) The front door of the house led into a small, narrow living room, painted green as I recall, with only one window, other than the one in the door. On the right-side wall of the room, about three-quarters of the way down….maybe eight feet…were two doors; the first to my parents’ bedroom, the other to mine.
My room was only large enough for a single bed and a dresser. I don’t think there was a closet. Across from my room, in the living room, was a large brown metal oil heater with a stove pipe running from the back to close to the ceiling, where it bent and vented to the outside. This was the primary source of heat for the house. The oil was kept in two large drums behind the garage, and I assume there were pipes which ran between them and the house to supply fuel to the heater. Between the oil heater and my room was a large opening into the kitchen. We got our water from a well equipped with an electric pump which, when it elected to go out, necessitated my dad crawling down into a wood-covered pit outside the living room’s only window. This usually happened in winter, of course.
For the first couple of years we lived there, we had no bathroom. There was an outhouse in the back yard. It simply never occurred to me that we might be considered either deprived or poor. It is simply the way things were, and much of the nation lived as we did.
When my folks could afford it, they built a room off the side of the kitchen which became my bedroom. My former bedroom became a bathroom.
I remember lying in my bedroom with my comic books when my folks weren’t home, tracing pictures of Superman and Captain Marvel and Batman and Robin, only I would trace them as being naked (easy enough to do, since they always wore skin-tight uniforms anyway), which provided an early-teen boy with far more heat than the living room oil burner could ever have produced. To avoid being caught, when I finished with them, I would slide them into a crack under my window sill, where they would usually fall between the walls. I often wondered what might have happened if, in the course of the house’s eventually being demolished, someone had found them all. Unfortunately, that speculation was never realized, since the house burned several years later.
We lived there from the time I entered third grade through seventh or eighth grade. I learned to ride a bike there, and we planted a tree which is still, to the best of my knowledge there though the house is gone and only an empty lot remains.
And you see? I’ve picked only one flower! There are fields and fields of them, just waiting to be picked. If I can only avoid falling into that stream…
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Who IS that man?
As you undoubtedly have noticed, I often share the average two-year-old child’s firm conviction that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around me—which is hardly an attitude conducive to a writer expecting to attract or hold readers. However, I suspect, since you have been so loyal in following these blogs, that while observing me rummaging through the dusty corners of my psyche, you have caught occasional glimpses of yourself. The major difference between me and you might be that while we share probably more things than either of us realizes, I tend to think and talk more about things you may be too polite to mention, or (rightly) consider to be nobody else’s business..
Human beings are, by nature and necessity, a complacent lot. We accept things without much thought, which is logical, for if we gave thought to our every action, we wouldn’t be able to do much else. We are assumptive. When we walk, we give not an instant’s thought to what we’re doing…of the infinitely complex coordination between our mind and our body. We operate on the unspoken but totally accepted assumption that what is, is, and what is will always be.
I spend an inordinate amount of time and space, I know, in reflecting on my physical and social shortcomings, real and imagined, and the horrified fascination with which I view the effects of the rapidly accelerating passage of time. I look in the mirror (but only when absolutely necessary) and the right half of my brain turns to the left half and asks, quite sincerely: “Who is that man? Surely it is not me! It can’t be me!” I use self-delusion as a cloak of invisibility that everyone but myself can readily see through.
And I’m fully aware that my constant bewailing of my physical limitations and the utter unfairness of it all is shameful in light of how many people with problems far more serious than my own maintain their silence with grace and dignity. I have never suffered in silence. When I outline in far greater detail than probably is necessary the perceived indignities fate inflicts on me, I know that small boy within me is, in effect, running up to my mother displaying a tiny scratch or cut on my finger, hoping she’ll praise me for being so very brave, and then kiss it and make it all better.
But I like to think that the reason I parade my losses in front of you is primarily as a cautionary tale: to encourage you to be aware of exactly how much you have and take for granted that other people would give anything to have. When is the last time you thought for an instant of how wonderful it is to eat a hot dog on a bun; to be able to open your mouth wide enough to get it all in and once having taken a bite, to be able to chew and savor and swallow it without a thought, and without having to accompany every swallow with some artificial liquid to allow the food to go down? Just stop for a brief second, the next time you are doing so, and consider just how very lucky you are.
My greatest problem, other than the realization that I always took everything I can no longer do totally for granted, is that I still cannot fully comprehend that I will not somehow wake up tomorrow and be able to do everything I could do ten years ago. I consider myself to be like someone who sees a roadside sign that says: “Caution: Bridge Out Ahead” but barrels straight ahead, sure the sign was not meant for me.
People with physical disabilities, or who are suffering or have recovered from serious illness and physical trauma of one sort or another can understand these things, in their own terms and as their traumas affected them. But there are so very many people out there…and I hope you are one of them…who, in their youth and/or perfect health are oblivious to their good fortune.
Just as you should never pass up the opportunity to let those you love know that you love them, you should never pass up the opportunity to stop to think just how very lucky you are. Now go have a hot dog for me.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Human beings are, by nature and necessity, a complacent lot. We accept things without much thought, which is logical, for if we gave thought to our every action, we wouldn’t be able to do much else. We are assumptive. When we walk, we give not an instant’s thought to what we’re doing…of the infinitely complex coordination between our mind and our body. We operate on the unspoken but totally accepted assumption that what is, is, and what is will always be.
I spend an inordinate amount of time and space, I know, in reflecting on my physical and social shortcomings, real and imagined, and the horrified fascination with which I view the effects of the rapidly accelerating passage of time. I look in the mirror (but only when absolutely necessary) and the right half of my brain turns to the left half and asks, quite sincerely: “Who is that man? Surely it is not me! It can’t be me!” I use self-delusion as a cloak of invisibility that everyone but myself can readily see through.
And I’m fully aware that my constant bewailing of my physical limitations and the utter unfairness of it all is shameful in light of how many people with problems far more serious than my own maintain their silence with grace and dignity. I have never suffered in silence. When I outline in far greater detail than probably is necessary the perceived indignities fate inflicts on me, I know that small boy within me is, in effect, running up to my mother displaying a tiny scratch or cut on my finger, hoping she’ll praise me for being so very brave, and then kiss it and make it all better.
But I like to think that the reason I parade my losses in front of you is primarily as a cautionary tale: to encourage you to be aware of exactly how much you have and take for granted that other people would give anything to have. When is the last time you thought for an instant of how wonderful it is to eat a hot dog on a bun; to be able to open your mouth wide enough to get it all in and once having taken a bite, to be able to chew and savor and swallow it without a thought, and without having to accompany every swallow with some artificial liquid to allow the food to go down? Just stop for a brief second, the next time you are doing so, and consider just how very lucky you are.
My greatest problem, other than the realization that I always took everything I can no longer do totally for granted, is that I still cannot fully comprehend that I will not somehow wake up tomorrow and be able to do everything I could do ten years ago. I consider myself to be like someone who sees a roadside sign that says: “Caution: Bridge Out Ahead” but barrels straight ahead, sure the sign was not meant for me.
People with physical disabilities, or who are suffering or have recovered from serious illness and physical trauma of one sort or another can understand these things, in their own terms and as their traumas affected them. But there are so very many people out there…and I hope you are one of them…who, in their youth and/or perfect health are oblivious to their good fortune.
Just as you should never pass up the opportunity to let those you love know that you love them, you should never pass up the opportunity to stop to think just how very lucky you are. Now go have a hot dog for me.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Idiots
I know full well that I frequently think of myself, and present myself to others, as an idiot. But I can do it; it’s my right. I don’t like it, but I can live with it. What I cannot tolerate is other people—total strangers who have never even heard of me and have no interest in doing so except as the signature on a check or a credit card number—automatically making that assumption. Their numbers are, unfortunately, legion. The assumption that everyone is an idiot seems, in fact, to be a fundamental tenet of nearly everyone with a product to sell or a cause to promote.
Probably 95 percent of all advertisers and 99.6 percent of all politicians consider the American public to be severely mentally retarded. Either they treat us with infuriating condescension (“See the pretty new car? Wouldn’t you like to have it? It’s got a horn and it goes really, really fast, and everything!....No, no, don’t bother looking at the price tag or reading the teensy-weensy print at the bottom of the screen/page. It’s nothing important.”), or believe that figuratively grabbing us by the shoulders, screaming at the top of their lungs and speaking as fast as they possibly can we will be convinced and become a bobble-head doll ("Oh, yeah! Sounds wonderful! A limited time offer, you say? Wow! I don't want to lose out on such a great opportunity. I'll take it!"). And, sadly, it works far more often than it fails.
I love glancing quickly through the subject lines in my Spam folder before I hit “Delete.” My current favorite is “Update your Penis.” I assume this involved downloading an attachment. But sometimes I merely stare at the subject lines in total awe. “Film Extras Wanted!” “Make $20,000 a month!” “Cure all Diseases”! Please! How can anyone… anyone …possibly, possibly be so stupid or gullible to fall for these scams? What do people use for brains? Have they never heard of logic? Have they never asked a question?
But the tragic, infinitely sad fact is that people DO believe this crap. Sweet little old ladies sign their life savings away eagerly at the promise of getting something for nothing, then look tearfully into the camera of the newscast telling their story and say: “How could they have done this to me?” Well, dear, sweet lady, they did it to you because, sweet and good and kind as you are, you let them do it to you. You are, sad to say, an idiot. Harsh, I know, but true.
If people stopped falling for these scams, the scammers would eventually go away. But I’m not holding my breath.
I have a few friends and acquaintances who frequently send me political and religious diatribes, usually filled with such odiferously unbelievable garbage I grow ill from the stench. But it is a proven fact that Barak Obama is Osama ben Ladin’s third cousin twice removed, and that he plans to strap dynamite to his wife and small daughters and detonate them during his inaugural speech to congress, thus destroying our entire government. Either that or his first act as President will be to make Islam the official and only religion of the country. Who… who …in their right mind could conceivably in a million million years believe that crap? And I weep to think that so many actually do.
And I fall back yet again on one of my mantras: “If 50 million people believe a foolish thing (or an outright lie), it is still a foolish thing (or an outright lie).”
Which brings us back to my sense of anger, frustration and impending doom in expecting people to be what they so obviously are not. Please, feel free to prove me wrong.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Probably 95 percent of all advertisers and 99.6 percent of all politicians consider the American public to be severely mentally retarded. Either they treat us with infuriating condescension (“See the pretty new car? Wouldn’t you like to have it? It’s got a horn and it goes really, really fast, and everything!....No, no, don’t bother looking at the price tag or reading the teensy-weensy print at the bottom of the screen/page. It’s nothing important.”), or believe that figuratively grabbing us by the shoulders, screaming at the top of their lungs and speaking as fast as they possibly can we will be convinced and become a bobble-head doll ("Oh, yeah! Sounds wonderful! A limited time offer, you say? Wow! I don't want to lose out on such a great opportunity. I'll take it!"). And, sadly, it works far more often than it fails.
I love glancing quickly through the subject lines in my Spam folder before I hit “Delete.” My current favorite is “Update your Penis.” I assume this involved downloading an attachment. But sometimes I merely stare at the subject lines in total awe. “Film Extras Wanted!” “Make $20,000 a month!” “Cure all Diseases”! Please! How can anyone… anyone …possibly, possibly be so stupid or gullible to fall for these scams? What do people use for brains? Have they never heard of logic? Have they never asked a question?
But the tragic, infinitely sad fact is that people DO believe this crap. Sweet little old ladies sign their life savings away eagerly at the promise of getting something for nothing, then look tearfully into the camera of the newscast telling their story and say: “How could they have done this to me?” Well, dear, sweet lady, they did it to you because, sweet and good and kind as you are, you let them do it to you. You are, sad to say, an idiot. Harsh, I know, but true.
If people stopped falling for these scams, the scammers would eventually go away. But I’m not holding my breath.
I have a few friends and acquaintances who frequently send me political and religious diatribes, usually filled with such odiferously unbelievable garbage I grow ill from the stench. But it is a proven fact that Barak Obama is Osama ben Ladin’s third cousin twice removed, and that he plans to strap dynamite to his wife and small daughters and detonate them during his inaugural speech to congress, thus destroying our entire government. Either that or his first act as President will be to make Islam the official and only religion of the country. Who… who …in their right mind could conceivably in a million million years believe that crap? And I weep to think that so many actually do.
And I fall back yet again on one of my mantras: “If 50 million people believe a foolish thing (or an outright lie), it is still a foolish thing (or an outright lie).”
Which brings us back to my sense of anger, frustration and impending doom in expecting people to be what they so obviously are not. Please, feel free to prove me wrong.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Domesticity Redux
I scrubbed my bathroom floor today. Really, really, on-my-hands-and-knees scrubbed. I used Pine-Sol. I used Mop & Glo. I slipped and slid across the wet floor with a knife trying to clear away whatever it is that accumulates along the baseboard.
I tell you this, because were you to walk in to my apartment and make the foolish mistake of asking if you could use my bathroom, you would think it had not been touched since the Wilson administration.
My bathroom is very small. It is, at night, my cat Crickett’s bedroom. She sleeps on a folded blanket atop the closed toilet lid. Her food and water are placed on the floor against the wall between the toilet and the door. Her cat litter box (I really must invest in Kitty-Litter stock, since I sometimes think I am keeping them in business) is beneath the sink. Since the room has no storage space whatsoever other than the small medicine cabinet, I bought one of those white-metal, over-the-toilet storage shelves, which I had to bend slightly to get to fit. It has four legs which are impossible to reach, let alone clean around.
Being unable to lift my head above chin level, or turn it more than 15 degrees in either direction makes trying to reach behind the toilet an exercise in fun and futility. But I try. I really do.
Crickett is not messy, but some cat litter does get out of the box, and some small bits of dry kibble food also find their way out of the bowl, so I am constantly sweeping it up. You would think that might help keep it clean. You would be wrong.
So, deducting floor room for toilet, under the sink, and storage stand leaves an area 2 ½ feet by 4 feet. I bought a throw rug measuring 2 feet by 3 feet, hoping this would help keep the floor clean. Needless to say, it did not.
I suspect that someone has (or a large number of people have) duplicated a key to my apartment, and when I go out for coffee, or am otherwise occupied, use it for mud wrestling championship matches in my bathroom. (I also would not be surprised to learn they sometimes use the rest of the apartment for similar activities, but that’s another story.)
Most of the people I know, my friends and my family, consider—with total justification—their bathrooms to be showplaces; all sparkle and neatness and crisp, neatly folded guest towels and little bowls of pot pourri, and not so much as a gnat’s eyebrow to be found. (And if there were a gnat’s eyebrow anywhere around, it would have been picked up with a few squares of toilet paper and promptly flushed down the sparkling water of the toilet.). Were there room, they could hold state dinners in there. I stand in awe of their ability, and I am truly envious.
I clean my bathroom sink at least four times a day. But I can clean it to a shine, and come back ten minutes later to find it looking as though someone had dumped a 55 gallon drum of toxic waste into it. And we will not even mention my toilet bowl. No, we won’t. Seriously.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back
I tell you this, because were you to walk in to my apartment and make the foolish mistake of asking if you could use my bathroom, you would think it had not been touched since the Wilson administration.
My bathroom is very small. It is, at night, my cat Crickett’s bedroom. She sleeps on a folded blanket atop the closed toilet lid. Her food and water are placed on the floor against the wall between the toilet and the door. Her cat litter box (I really must invest in Kitty-Litter stock, since I sometimes think I am keeping them in business) is beneath the sink. Since the room has no storage space whatsoever other than the small medicine cabinet, I bought one of those white-metal, over-the-toilet storage shelves, which I had to bend slightly to get to fit. It has four legs which are impossible to reach, let alone clean around.
Being unable to lift my head above chin level, or turn it more than 15 degrees in either direction makes trying to reach behind the toilet an exercise in fun and futility. But I try. I really do.
Crickett is not messy, but some cat litter does get out of the box, and some small bits of dry kibble food also find their way out of the bowl, so I am constantly sweeping it up. You would think that might help keep it clean. You would be wrong.
So, deducting floor room for toilet, under the sink, and storage stand leaves an area 2 ½ feet by 4 feet. I bought a throw rug measuring 2 feet by 3 feet, hoping this would help keep the floor clean. Needless to say, it did not.
I suspect that someone has (or a large number of people have) duplicated a key to my apartment, and when I go out for coffee, or am otherwise occupied, use it for mud wrestling championship matches in my bathroom. (I also would not be surprised to learn they sometimes use the rest of the apartment for similar activities, but that’s another story.)
Most of the people I know, my friends and my family, consider—with total justification—their bathrooms to be showplaces; all sparkle and neatness and crisp, neatly folded guest towels and little bowls of pot pourri, and not so much as a gnat’s eyebrow to be found. (And if there were a gnat’s eyebrow anywhere around, it would have been picked up with a few squares of toilet paper and promptly flushed down the sparkling water of the toilet.). Were there room, they could hold state dinners in there. I stand in awe of their ability, and I am truly envious.
I clean my bathroom sink at least four times a day. But I can clean it to a shine, and come back ten minutes later to find it looking as though someone had dumped a 55 gallon drum of toxic waste into it. And we will not even mention my toilet bowl. No, we won’t. Seriously.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Press 1 for English
Not to worry: I’ll save my fury over being required to “Press 1" to hear my own language in my on country for another blog. This will be a kinder, gentler observation on my fascination with languages in general. I have always admired those who are multi-lingual. I have, at one time or another, studied Spanish (two years) and French (two years), with the result that I am fluent in neither but can begin a conversation in either. I know enough to get myself into a conversation, but not enough to get myself out, and I will happily begin speaking Spanish only to suddenly lapse into French. I generally realize this only when I see the look of utter confusion on the face of whomever I’m trying to talk to. Or, I will liberally sprinkle Spanish words into a conversation in French, or vice-versa. Worst…and most common of all, I will be talking along merrily and suddenly forget the next word. Its effect on the conversation is similar to driving a semi trailer into a concrete wall, and from that moment on, all is lost.
I began, after returning to college from the Navy, to audit a German course. I was fascinated by the instructor’s saying that German is the only language in which each word of a sentence can be written on block of wood, thrown on the floor in a jumble, and someone who’d not seen the original can pick up the blocks and put the sentence together perfectly. That certainly can’t be said for English. But I was too busy with other things like having a good time, and dropped out after about two weeks. I am, however, able to say, should a German tourist ask me a question:
Shadeh, aber ich spreche nicht Deutsch” (phonetic for “Sorry, but I don’t speak German.”)
While I was in the Navy I decided I wanted to learn Greek. I found, in the ship’s library, a book printed in English on the left-hand page, and Greek on the right . I worked at it diligently for some time trying to compare the two and make sense out of it, but didn’t get very far, and by the time the ship reached Athens, I had mastered two phrases…phonetics again…: “Poo-eenay gabinito?” (“Where is the bathroom?”) and “Efferisto” (“Please” I think…it’s been a while, after all.) Well, it was a start.
I did learn enough of both Spanish and French to realize that it is far easier to speak either one if you think in the language you’re trying to speak. That way you don’t have to fumble around doing mental translations before saying something.
I remember when I was a kid reading poetry which had been translated from another language, and being rather disgusted that it often didn’t rhyme. “It’s poetry,” I’d say with far more authority than I possessed. “It’s supposed to rhyme!” The fact that words which rhyme in one language do not rhyme in another escaped me for quite some time. But even with the translation of prose, there are inherent problems. The pacing and lilt of words selected to create an effect suffer seriously when dealing with another language in which a beautiful-sounding word in one sounds like someone coughing up phlegm in another (German has lots of phlegm words, I’ve noticed.) The poor translator has to struggle to find a way around the problem.
The difficulty of dealing with and making sense of languages is compounded when the alphabets of the two languages are totally different: Arabic, Cyrillic, English, Chinese, many others. And Armenia has an alphabet created by one monk, and therefore totally different from any other. I think I’ll study Armenian next.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
I began, after returning to college from the Navy, to audit a German course. I was fascinated by the instructor’s saying that German is the only language in which each word of a sentence can be written on block of wood, thrown on the floor in a jumble, and someone who’d not seen the original can pick up the blocks and put the sentence together perfectly. That certainly can’t be said for English. But I was too busy with other things like having a good time, and dropped out after about two weeks. I am, however, able to say, should a German tourist ask me a question:
Shadeh, aber ich spreche nicht Deutsch” (phonetic for “Sorry, but I don’t speak German.”)
While I was in the Navy I decided I wanted to learn Greek. I found, in the ship’s library, a book printed in English on the left-hand page, and Greek on the right . I worked at it diligently for some time trying to compare the two and make sense out of it, but didn’t get very far, and by the time the ship reached Athens, I had mastered two phrases…phonetics again…: “Poo-eenay gabinito?” (“Where is the bathroom?”) and “Efferisto” (“Please” I think…it’s been a while, after all.) Well, it was a start.
I did learn enough of both Spanish and French to realize that it is far easier to speak either one if you think in the language you’re trying to speak. That way you don’t have to fumble around doing mental translations before saying something.
I remember when I was a kid reading poetry which had been translated from another language, and being rather disgusted that it often didn’t rhyme. “It’s poetry,” I’d say with far more authority than I possessed. “It’s supposed to rhyme!” The fact that words which rhyme in one language do not rhyme in another escaped me for quite some time. But even with the translation of prose, there are inherent problems. The pacing and lilt of words selected to create an effect suffer seriously when dealing with another language in which a beautiful-sounding word in one sounds like someone coughing up phlegm in another (German has lots of phlegm words, I’ve noticed.) The poor translator has to struggle to find a way around the problem.
The difficulty of dealing with and making sense of languages is compounded when the alphabets of the two languages are totally different: Arabic, Cyrillic, English, Chinese, many others. And Armenia has an alphabet created by one monk, and therefore totally different from any other. I think I’ll study Armenian next.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Movies
Ah, simple pleasures for simple minds. I went to a movie yesterday afternoon…the first in-a-theater film I’ve seen in quite some time, not because I don’t love movies, but because Chicago has relatively few, and the huge chain theaters have effectively driven out the smaller neighborhood houses. (The city of Chicago taxes a single-screen Mom-and-Pop-run theater at the same rate it taxes the 42-screen multiplexes. Hardly fair, of course, but who cares? Certainly neither the city nor the chains.)
At any rate, Gary and I took the bus to the Loop and finally found the multiplex, tucked on the upper floors of a building on Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile. We paid the low, low matinee rate of only $8.50. We eschewed the snack stand both because I can no longer eat popcorn and the fact that a small (and they do mean small) box of the stuff goes for $3.75.
As we sat in the 200-seat not-all-that-comfortable theater (the seats are all on one level, making it difficult to see if you’re behind someone tall), I reflected on the time when movie-going was a national pastime, and most people went at least once a week. Tickets cost a quarter for kids and, I think, eighty-five cents for adults. There were no such thing as a multiplex, and the “better” theaters were gigantic, ornate palaces, which gave people still reeling from the Depression the illusion that things were not quite so bad as they appeared.
I remember hearing, too, that at the height of the Depression, theaters were kept afloat not on ticket sales, but on the sales of popcorn. More than nine cents of every dime bag of popcorn was pure profit, as I suspect is $3.70 of every $3.75 box sold today.
At the time I was growing up in Rockford, Illinois (population then around 90,000—today probably near 200,000), there were nine theaters: the dowager empress of them all was the Coronado, a true “movie palace” with blue, starry-sky ceiling and an interior designed to look like a Moroccan village. Lots of gilt, and velvet curtains which pulled majestically back at the start of every show. Plush carpets throughout, and huge, sweeping stairways leading to the enormous balcony. All the best of the first-runs came to the Coronado. It’s still there, saved from the wrecking ball in the nick of time, and is now, I understand, used as a performing arts center.
The Midway, on the East side of downtown, was not quite as ornate, but still large, and also played first-runs. In the block south of the Coronado was the Times: a very nice but much smaller theatre that offered the lesser-grade first runs and a lot of second-runs. Directly beside it was a small shop selling Carmel Corn which you could smell half a block away.
The Palace, on the same street as the Coronado and Times, was a cavernous second-and-C-movie place that had seen better times and ran Vaudeville between movie showings on weekends. The bottom of the barrel in theaters were the Rialto and the Capitol, located within a block of one another on the grimy south side of town. The Rex, the Auburn, and the Park (basically a Quonset hut) rounded out the list.
Every one of them served fresh-popped Manley Popcorn in tall, cylindrical bags, which featured an elephant with one leg on a large red ball. Each bag cost ten cents, and I always got two bags. While waiting for the show to start, I would be careful to eat only one kernel at a time to make it last. I honestly don’t remember theaters serving soft drinks at the time: if you were thirsty, you went to the water coolers in the lobby.
So much more that could be said about those days, not to mention the films that fed the theaters’ tills and the dreams and imaginations of their patrons. I miss them all.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
At any rate, Gary and I took the bus to the Loop and finally found the multiplex, tucked on the upper floors of a building on Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile. We paid the low, low matinee rate of only $8.50. We eschewed the snack stand both because I can no longer eat popcorn and the fact that a small (and they do mean small) box of the stuff goes for $3.75.
As we sat in the 200-seat not-all-that-comfortable theater (the seats are all on one level, making it difficult to see if you’re behind someone tall), I reflected on the time when movie-going was a national pastime, and most people went at least once a week. Tickets cost a quarter for kids and, I think, eighty-five cents for adults. There were no such thing as a multiplex, and the “better” theaters were gigantic, ornate palaces, which gave people still reeling from the Depression the illusion that things were not quite so bad as they appeared.
I remember hearing, too, that at the height of the Depression, theaters were kept afloat not on ticket sales, but on the sales of popcorn. More than nine cents of every dime bag of popcorn was pure profit, as I suspect is $3.70 of every $3.75 box sold today.
At the time I was growing up in Rockford, Illinois (population then around 90,000—today probably near 200,000), there were nine theaters: the dowager empress of them all was the Coronado, a true “movie palace” with blue, starry-sky ceiling and an interior designed to look like a Moroccan village. Lots of gilt, and velvet curtains which pulled majestically back at the start of every show. Plush carpets throughout, and huge, sweeping stairways leading to the enormous balcony. All the best of the first-runs came to the Coronado. It’s still there, saved from the wrecking ball in the nick of time, and is now, I understand, used as a performing arts center.
The Midway, on the East side of downtown, was not quite as ornate, but still large, and also played first-runs. In the block south of the Coronado was the Times: a very nice but much smaller theatre that offered the lesser-grade first runs and a lot of second-runs. Directly beside it was a small shop selling Carmel Corn which you could smell half a block away.
The Palace, on the same street as the Coronado and Times, was a cavernous second-and-C-movie place that had seen better times and ran Vaudeville between movie showings on weekends. The bottom of the barrel in theaters were the Rialto and the Capitol, located within a block of one another on the grimy south side of town. The Rex, the Auburn, and the Park (basically a Quonset hut) rounded out the list.
Every one of them served fresh-popped Manley Popcorn in tall, cylindrical bags, which featured an elephant with one leg on a large red ball. Each bag cost ten cents, and I always got two bags. While waiting for the show to start, I would be careful to eat only one kernel at a time to make it last. I honestly don’t remember theaters serving soft drinks at the time: if you were thirsty, you went to the water coolers in the lobby.
So much more that could be said about those days, not to mention the films that fed the theaters’ tills and the dreams and imaginations of their patrons. I miss them all.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Kittens and Puppies
My alter-ego, Dorien, observed the other day that so many of these blogs are rants and raves and dwell on idiocies and frustrations and other not-nice things. Why don’t I, he wondered, devote more time to pleasant things, like kittens and puppies (and his personal all-time favorite, bunnies). He has a very valid point, as always . Dorien has the objectivity, sound judgement, and good sense that Roger too often lacks.
I pondered the question and reached the conclusion that kittens and puppies and bunnies and all other good, gentle, kind things represent the world as it should be, and as I so desperately want things to be. While I am amply aware that the world is not what I want it to be—I’ve spent far too much time trying to walk into the spray of a full-force fire hose—, I still refuse to concede that it cannot be. And as a result I spend admittedly too much blog time on railing against the world as it is, hoping somehow that there might come a “DUH” moment when everyone will stop dead in their tracks and say “You know, he’s right! Let’s try harder to be who and what we should be.”
As you probably have noticed, under all my self-deprecation there lies an enormous granite-like chunk of ego and the soul-deep belief that I am right in my convictions that we all—myself included—have far more power to change ourselves and by extension the world, than we give ourselves credit for.
That there is hope for humanity is evident everywhere in the kindness of our friends and family, and in the incredible courage and nobility so often seen in disasters, in people sacrificing their own lives (the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades, the firefighters who risk their lives saving those trapped in burning buildings, and so many others). Even the fact that, as so many people complain, there is so little good news on television and in the media. That is, I believe, simply that we all expect that good is the norm …and there is little news value in reporting the norm. It’s like running a headline saying “Sun Rises in East!”
It’s just that, with 6 billion people now on earth, and billions more expected within a decade or so, there are proportionately more rotten eggs in the barrel…more psychopaths and general scum it truly seems as though we are doomed. And all because God told people a couple thousand years ago when the life expectancy was about 30 years, that they had to go forth and multiply to prevent the race from dying out. And we cling to that edict even in face of the danger of running out of space to live or food to eat. God forbid we should encourage people NOT to have children, or give gay and lesbian couples the rights of heterosexuals. One of the major cannons in the arsenal of nonsense about homosexuality still to this day is “Well they can’t have children.” Well, thank God we can’t. There are far too many kids out there in desperate need of people to love them, and so many gays and lesbians who would, if it were made easier, be willing to take them.
Well, I’m definitely getting off course here, but am quite sure I’ll return to this particular subject soon.
Meanwhile, let’s all go out and pet a kitten and think of a world without bigotry and intolerance.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
I pondered the question and reached the conclusion that kittens and puppies and bunnies and all other good, gentle, kind things represent the world as it should be, and as I so desperately want things to be. While I am amply aware that the world is not what I want it to be—I’ve spent far too much time trying to walk into the spray of a full-force fire hose—, I still refuse to concede that it cannot be. And as a result I spend admittedly too much blog time on railing against the world as it is, hoping somehow that there might come a “DUH” moment when everyone will stop dead in their tracks and say “You know, he’s right! Let’s try harder to be who and what we should be.”
As you probably have noticed, under all my self-deprecation there lies an enormous granite-like chunk of ego and the soul-deep belief that I am right in my convictions that we all—myself included—have far more power to change ourselves and by extension the world, than we give ourselves credit for.
That there is hope for humanity is evident everywhere in the kindness of our friends and family, and in the incredible courage and nobility so often seen in disasters, in people sacrificing their own lives (the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades, the firefighters who risk their lives saving those trapped in burning buildings, and so many others). Even the fact that, as so many people complain, there is so little good news on television and in the media. That is, I believe, simply that we all expect that good is the norm …and there is little news value in reporting the norm. It’s like running a headline saying “Sun Rises in East!”
It’s just that, with 6 billion people now on earth, and billions more expected within a decade or so, there are proportionately more rotten eggs in the barrel…more psychopaths and general scum it truly seems as though we are doomed. And all because God told people a couple thousand years ago when the life expectancy was about 30 years, that they had to go forth and multiply to prevent the race from dying out. And we cling to that edict even in face of the danger of running out of space to live or food to eat. God forbid we should encourage people NOT to have children, or give gay and lesbian couples the rights of heterosexuals. One of the major cannons in the arsenal of nonsense about homosexuality still to this day is “Well they can’t have children.” Well, thank God we can’t. There are far too many kids out there in desperate need of people to love them, and so many gays and lesbians who would, if it were made easier, be willing to take them.
Well, I’m definitely getting off course here, but am quite sure I’ll return to this particular subject soon.
Meanwhile, let’s all go out and pet a kitten and think of a world without bigotry and intolerance.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Losing it
There are times when I truly fear for my sanity. There is so very, very much I simply do not comprehend.
The other day, my good friend Gary, a former English teacher, was trying to explain to me the differences between and uses of the colon and semicolon which I am almost totally consistent in getting wrong 99 percent of the time.
Now, Gary is an excellent teacher, and very patient. But what I got from his detailed explanation was this: “When using the semi-colon, the framatizer must always, always modify the blasisneker. The colon, on the other hand muzzuzikates the ninimuker only when.........” And of course the fact that I always walk the thinnest of lines of comprehension suspended over the bottomless chasm of utter frustration doesn’t help.
I listen to songs and TV commercials and hear/see them 19,000 times and have no idea what they are saying. (The Enterprise car commercial, for example, where the mother with the two kids rents a car to get them to their soccer game. The kids get out of the car and one of them says: “Nice sspryyzmis, mom!”) I listen closely. I really do. I strain my ears to try to hear what he’s saying. I try to read the kid’s lips. I crane my head forward and squint at the screen, hoping maybe the extra concentration will help. It does not. I watch it over and over and over again (not through choice, I can assure you, but simply because it plays every thirty seconds day and night), and I STILL do not have the slightest clue as to what he’s saying. Finally, while spewing my frustrations to Gary, he looked at me (the pity clear in his eyes), and said: “He’s saying, ‘Nice save, Mom.”
“Nice save, Mom”??? How the hell was I supposed to know that? I have no idea what a “save” is or is supposed to be. Something related to soccer, I assume, but I neither know nor care. Utter frustration.
Instruction manuals should, I am firmly convinced, be printed in Swahili. I still wouldn’t have a clue what they’re saying, but I’d have an excuse for it (“Sorry, I don’t speak Swahili.” Apparently, since they are supposedly written in English, I don’t speak English either.)
How many times have I been so stupid as to buy something requiring “some assembly”? Whatever it might be always comes with simple, detailed instructions which, I am assured by the salesperson, a baby squirrel could follow while blindfolded with one little paw tied behind its back. I spread the instructions out on the floor. I read them carefully. Carefully, I say. I get to step 3 of an 8-step instruction and am totally, utterly lost. I have either put something together upside down, or backwards, or tried to “Insert Tab A into Slot B” to find that Tab A will not fit into Slot B. There may be only one Tab A and one Slot B, but will they fit together? For you, of course. For everyone else in the world, of course. For me? Guess.
“Easy Open” or “Easy Re-seal” bags of potato chips. Boxes of cookies. “Pull tab to open.” Really?
I have a list of names and email addresses, which I want to transcribe to somewhere that requires my leaving the original window. No problem. “Patricia Smith: patsmith@aol.com.” Got it. I switch to the new window and type—if I haven’t already forgotten by the time I get there— “Pat....” and have no idea what comes next. Or I type “patsmith@hotmail.com” or “patricia@aol.net” or God knows what. I carry the concept of “short-term memory” to its ultimate extreme, and am disgusted with myself for it. And does that help? Uh...does what help?
Sigh.
New entries are posted by 10:00 Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back
The other day, my good friend Gary, a former English teacher, was trying to explain to me the differences between and uses of the colon and semicolon which I am almost totally consistent in getting wrong 99 percent of the time.
Now, Gary is an excellent teacher, and very patient. But what I got from his detailed explanation was this: “When using the semi-colon, the framatizer must always, always modify the blasisneker. The colon, on the other hand muzzuzikates the ninimuker only when.........” And of course the fact that I always walk the thinnest of lines of comprehension suspended over the bottomless chasm of utter frustration doesn’t help.
I listen to songs and TV commercials and hear/see them 19,000 times and have no idea what they are saying. (The Enterprise car commercial, for example, where the mother with the two kids rents a car to get them to their soccer game. The kids get out of the car and one of them says: “Nice sspryyzmis, mom!”) I listen closely. I really do. I strain my ears to try to hear what he’s saying. I try to read the kid’s lips. I crane my head forward and squint at the screen, hoping maybe the extra concentration will help. It does not. I watch it over and over and over again (not through choice, I can assure you, but simply because it plays every thirty seconds day and night), and I STILL do not have the slightest clue as to what he’s saying. Finally, while spewing my frustrations to Gary, he looked at me (the pity clear in his eyes), and said: “He’s saying, ‘Nice save, Mom.”
“Nice save, Mom”??? How the hell was I supposed to know that? I have no idea what a “save” is or is supposed to be. Something related to soccer, I assume, but I neither know nor care. Utter frustration.
Instruction manuals should, I am firmly convinced, be printed in Swahili. I still wouldn’t have a clue what they’re saying, but I’d have an excuse for it (“Sorry, I don’t speak Swahili.” Apparently, since they are supposedly written in English, I don’t speak English either.)
How many times have I been so stupid as to buy something requiring “some assembly”? Whatever it might be always comes with simple, detailed instructions which, I am assured by the salesperson, a baby squirrel could follow while blindfolded with one little paw tied behind its back. I spread the instructions out on the floor. I read them carefully. Carefully, I say. I get to step 3 of an 8-step instruction and am totally, utterly lost. I have either put something together upside down, or backwards, or tried to “Insert Tab A into Slot B” to find that Tab A will not fit into Slot B. There may be only one Tab A and one Slot B, but will they fit together? For you, of course. For everyone else in the world, of course. For me? Guess.
“Easy Open” or “Easy Re-seal” bags of potato chips. Boxes of cookies. “Pull tab to open.” Really?
I have a list of names and email addresses, which I want to transcribe to somewhere that requires my leaving the original window. No problem. “Patricia Smith: patsmith@aol.com.” Got it. I switch to the new window and type—if I haven’t already forgotten by the time I get there— “Pat....” and have no idea what comes next. Or I type “patsmith@hotmail.com” or “patricia@aol.net” or God knows what. I carry the concept of “short-term memory” to its ultimate extreme, and am disgusted with myself for it. And does that help? Uh...does what help?
Sigh.
New entries are posted by 10:00 Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back
Friday, May 30, 2008
K'neesheshawna By Any Other Name
I like names, and find it interesting that people say “a name tells a lot about a person,” since the person carrying the name had nothing whatever to do with choosing it. There are books written on the meaning of names. Roger, for example, means “the spear carrier,” though I haven’t a clue as to how that came about. Granted I do a lot of windmill-tilting, but don’t think I’ve ever held let alone carried a spear.
First names, like dog breeds, tend to surge and ebb in popularity. Would you care to make a guess as to how many cribs and playpens full of "Brittany" there are out there at the moment as the "Ashleys" flood our school system? Boys names are a little less trend-driven, but consider “Lance”. Ethnic groups favor ethnic names. It used-to-was that just hearing a name revealed ethnicity. Rastus, Hymie, Sol, Reginald, Gino, Francis. But that has faded over time. Only, it seems, African Americans seem to go out of their way to give their children names which may well reflect their parents’ pride in being black, but may very well tend to haunt the kid for the rest of his or (most specifically, her) life if they have any hope of blending into the mainstream. Of course, Condoleezza Rice hasn’t done too badly for herself, but I do feel, overall, that in-your-face ethnic names are more detrimental than helpful over the long haul. (I am seriously curious as to how many of these names are based in history, and how many simply made up because they sounded exotic. I think of one of our insured when I worked for an insurance company: “Placenta Palmer”.)
For a confirmed Agnostic, I’m very fond of Biblical names and use them frequently for names of characters in my books…especially, I was rather surprised to realize, those beginning with “J”: Jonathan, Joshua, Jared, Jake (the only abbreviated Biblical ”J” name I am comfortable with, since I just can’t picture calling him “Jacob.”) I find I seem to prefer full names to contractions or nicknames, though obviously the first name of my main protagonist in the Dick Hardesty mysteries is a nickname for Richard. I have a good friend I’ve known for more than 50 years whom I…nor anyone else…would ever dream of calling anything but Franklin. The protagonist of my new Elliott Smith mysteries only allows one person to use anything but his full first name.
There’s not much one can do with “Roger”, though some people do occasionally call me “Roge” and I’m okay with that. Both my step-grandmother Anne and my dear friend Uncle Bob always called me “Roggie” and were the only people in my life to do so, I think. To my Uncle Buck, I was “Guggenheimer,” to my mom, I was “Punkin’” or “Beaner.” My dad infrequently called me “Butch”....probably a case of wishful thinking.
Many people use their nicknames throughout life: Chuck, Bob, Brad, Clif, Jack, Frank, Dick, Phil, Don, Rob, Rich, Tom, Mike—though I often tend to prefer the full name: Thomas, Michael, Robert . Most are variations on or contractions of their given name, but some, like my cousins Fat and Cork (Charles and Donald, somewhere in childhood picked up nicknames having no relation to their real names, and carry them through life.
In our egalitarian society where everyone seems to be on a first-name basis, it has reached the point where people who in fact prefer their full name to a contraction or variation or nickname—who prefer to be called “Benjamin” instead of “Ben”, for example—are considered a bit odd, or elitist. So I suppose it is not so much a case of what our names do for us, as what we do with our names.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
First names, like dog breeds, tend to surge and ebb in popularity. Would you care to make a guess as to how many cribs and playpens full of "Brittany" there are out there at the moment as the "Ashleys" flood our school system? Boys names are a little less trend-driven, but consider “Lance”. Ethnic groups favor ethnic names. It used-to-was that just hearing a name revealed ethnicity. Rastus, Hymie, Sol, Reginald, Gino, Francis. But that has faded over time. Only, it seems, African Americans seem to go out of their way to give their children names which may well reflect their parents’ pride in being black, but may very well tend to haunt the kid for the rest of his or (most specifically, her) life if they have any hope of blending into the mainstream. Of course, Condoleezza Rice hasn’t done too badly for herself, but I do feel, overall, that in-your-face ethnic names are more detrimental than helpful over the long haul. (I am seriously curious as to how many of these names are based in history, and how many simply made up because they sounded exotic. I think of one of our insured when I worked for an insurance company: “Placenta Palmer”.)
For a confirmed Agnostic, I’m very fond of Biblical names and use them frequently for names of characters in my books…especially, I was rather surprised to realize, those beginning with “J”: Jonathan, Joshua, Jared, Jake (the only abbreviated Biblical ”J” name I am comfortable with, since I just can’t picture calling him “Jacob.”) I find I seem to prefer full names to contractions or nicknames, though obviously the first name of my main protagonist in the Dick Hardesty mysteries is a nickname for Richard. I have a good friend I’ve known for more than 50 years whom I…nor anyone else…would ever dream of calling anything but Franklin. The protagonist of my new Elliott Smith mysteries only allows one person to use anything but his full first name.
There’s not much one can do with “Roger”, though some people do occasionally call me “Roge” and I’m okay with that. Both my step-grandmother Anne and my dear friend Uncle Bob always called me “Roggie” and were the only people in my life to do so, I think. To my Uncle Buck, I was “Guggenheimer,” to my mom, I was “Punkin’” or “Beaner.” My dad infrequently called me “Butch”....probably a case of wishful thinking.
Many people use their nicknames throughout life: Chuck, Bob, Brad, Clif, Jack, Frank, Dick, Phil, Don, Rob, Rich, Tom, Mike—though I often tend to prefer the full name: Thomas, Michael, Robert . Most are variations on or contractions of their given name, but some, like my cousins Fat and Cork (Charles and Donald, somewhere in childhood picked up nicknames having no relation to their real names, and carry them through life.
In our egalitarian society where everyone seems to be on a first-name basis, it has reached the point where people who in fact prefer their full name to a contraction or variation or nickname—who prefer to be called “Benjamin” instead of “Ben”, for example—are considered a bit odd, or elitist. So I suppose it is not so much a case of what our names do for us, as what we do with our names.
New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.
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