POSTZILLA: Or Alex Hand Over The Crown

[ER]

Because of the 80,000 character limitation rule, I had to break it into three parts, but it's all the same post.

PART THE FIRST

Two score, ten months and twenty-seven days ago, my father brought forth on this continent a new bride, who ten months and one week later, brought forth me. Though it was some time before I learned what words were or heard the phrase “dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal,” like Lincoln’s America, I would eventually find myself in a number of civil wars, each testing whether my family, or any family, could long endure.

Spoiler: happily they could.

Which leaves me thinking, if Lincoln could compose the greatest speech of American letters on an envelope in a carriage in route to a battlefield, why can’t I with a keyboard and time on my hands compose the longest post ever produced here at our humble gathering place?

And that got me thinking of a road trip my husband and I took before we were married, a sort of history jaunt along the eastern seaboard, seeing many Civil and Revolutionary War sites, an undertaking he did for me (awww) since history doesn’t excite him, and ultimately our trip terminated in Savannah, Georgia, which our home state-raised psycho General Sherman obligingly neglected to burn at Christmastime 1864.

If you’ve never been there, go, since Savannah is a gaspingly lovely place whose 18th and 19th century squares argue eloquently (in languid low country syllables) for urban planning over our modern haphazard chaos.

There was one thing no one ever told me about Savannah by the Sea, and that is its serious problem with bugs. (I was a biology major and should say “insects”, since technically “bugs” fall in the order heteroptera.) Not only were there flies at a truly plague-of-Moses density in that subtropical stickiness, and not only were there mosquitos that decided any exposed skin was a buffet table, but there were these creepy flying beetles locals genteelly called palmetto bugs.

Yeah...no, those were winged roaches, folks.

These adversaries to calm conduct were all over Savannah by day and especially night, particularly under the shade of those grand old moss-encloaked oaks swaying in the breeze of the squares, and they were about as long as a woman’s pinkie finger, rusty brown-black, like a cottonmouth, and they flew with June bug craziness wobbling through the air between destinations, having no qualms about landing on the face of some visitor from the Mason-Dixon Line, like me.

Zoom-zap, right on my face.

“Ah nevah have got use to ‘em, sweetie,” I was told by a passing Tom Wolfe look-alike who may have been the ghost of Jim Williams, since the house where he was accused of murdering his bunk-buddy and where he died was just down the street.

Oh, plus with a whiff of Bay Rum and brimstone he vanished into thin air while whistling Dixie. (I may be kidding about the Dixie part.)

Otherwise a lovely place is Savannah, though I’d say “brutally lovely” since there was a rawness that was hard to describe but discernable, like an open wound on the flank of a beautiful horse. I got the feeling knife fights still happened in back alleys, where sweating onlookers crowded in to place bets on who would bleed first, the mean-spirited sailor, or the local ghetto tough recently emerged from prison for slaying a man….in a knife fight.

 It reminded me if you went off the beaten path in Savannah, you might never be heard of again.

New Orleans can be like that, but New Orleans is more openly brutal, even otherworldly, as if reality there has been worn thin over time, like the surface of a basketball dribbled above the broiling asphalt of a public playground through a second hot summer. The thing about New Orleans is the place behind the worn spot in reality probably isn’t somewhere you’d want to visit, and I suspect Buffy might even sense a Hellmouth under Bourbon Street.

Voodoo reigns there, you know, and there are dwellers in the French Quarter who swear Mary Laveau still holds court in the wee hours at Saint Louis’ Cemetery, where beloved bones of yesteryear’s denizens bake in crypts that lie above the seeping ground, because someone thought it was a good idea to build a major city below sea level. (Vampires according to The Originals. Anybody else watch that? Loves me them teen vampire shows, man, though I’ll go to my grave never admitting it.)

I went looking for Madame Laveau at midnight and didn’t find her in her cemetery, but then again I’m crazy for even looking, as the police officer who shooed me away, swearing he’d give me two tickets next time if he caught me back there, didn’t scruple to tell me.

 “Get your throat cut in there, young lady,” he said, more scolding in disbelief than true pique, thinking no doubt of the Jamaican gangs said to hold the area in their hand.

He was a tall portly black man, sweating in the humidity of the night, quick to laugh and friendly for a cop who’d caught someone trespassing red-handed.

As we were walking out I asked him if he believed in voodoo and he said, “If you believe in something and give it power of you, sure you can hurt yourself even if nobody else can, but mostly voodoo is there to get money out of the gullible and help those who got no place else to turn think they got hope in a hopeless life.”

Wise man.

My Texas….friend----the one you described as having sleep paralysis? Yes, him---used to abscond to New Orleans during the Hill Country’s red cedar season (misery beyond description for that poor man, not native to Texas and lacking all immunity to that invasive species) and in the Crescent City he’d see the D-Day Museum and spend nights long distance trying to talk me into coming to him, telling me what I said a moment ago: “Reality is thin down here, El.”

He also said: “You more than anyone I know would feel it, with one foot in that realm anyway.”

He was a Connecticut Yankee who went totally native in the Texas Hill Country in the ‘90s and talked me down to Austin, but he never coaxed me to New Orleans. Not with him anyhow.

But actually I did know what he meant because I used to go to a place like that, where reality was thin and the unseen in all its madness and might lay just as close. My uncle used to take us there every summer, me, his children, however many cousins were on hand to pack in his van, and we’d drive down the M18 from Galway to the Burrens, to a place he knew there, wild and lonely and sad, where the soil was an inch thick above the stone spine of Eire itself, and yet somehow a thousand generations who lived there til the Famine scratched out a starvation existence on those hillsides, wrestling with the soil and winning year after year until they didn’t anymore.

Ireland was a Third World place then, and failure could mean death.

He’d tell us, but me especially, being a good audience, how the area was once more populated (no one in sight nowadays) but between the potato famine and emigrations to Australia and England and New Zealand and Canada and most of all the US, where his sister went with a man he never liked, the landscape was suddenly deserted and even the sad songs no longer echoed off the rocks, just emptiness in a landscape that bordered the fairy world.

There in that cold bleak place even the keening ghosts had died and taken their meek whispers with them.

“People vanish without a trace here,” he told me, speaking truthfully. “They come, park and set off on a hike, people with every reason to return home, yet they’re never found. The Garda bring search-dogs and the trails will end in mid-step, they’re just…gone, Ellie.”

It was the Emerald Isle’s own Bermuda Triangle, but on solid ground.

If you ever go to Ireland, make your way to the Burrens and stand there in the total windswept silence above eternal Mother Ocean, amid ruined stone walls where families once lived, their chimneys still standing among spills of stone, no one to repair them each spring, no one to care, only a footnote in one chapter of the tale of that sad, contentious island that once had two or three times as many people, a green rise above the ocean before it was allowed to be a nation, divided even now, a country that sent its best and brightest out into the world, a gift unappreciated for far too long, til by wrestling and struggling and never surrendering its sons and daughters took their places among the peoples of all corners of the globe: the White House even.

Yes, stand there and you’ll feel it too, this conflict to the senses, this world around you, another right there beyond you, unseen but felt. You’ll walk away changed in your outlook if you doubt there is more to reality than what we see or hear, smell or touch, a place we sometimes if we are lucky/unlucky, feel.

A place where people vanish.

Lots of places can be otherworldly like that, maybe places near you. Why is that, you suppose?

I knew these things, felt these places, even had odd moments and heard of more from others I trusted, yet as I’ve told before, I went into my teens trying hard to discount it all, making it my mission to accept only the empirical, making a trophy of my soul and giving it to science, that noble endeavor of endless discovery, that collective term for where we store the thimbleful of what we know concerning the grand multiverse.

Did you know there was a time when universities granted men degrees in science and thought bestowing the award mean that man knew all there was to know about….all there was to know? Like the chains of many metals the maesters wear in Mr. Martin’s books to show their own expertise in various subjects, these scholars were told, you are now masters.

Truly, there was such a hubris-possessed time.

Even as late as the 1920s some in science were saying we have probably reached a wall and come to know all that is worth knowing of physics and chemistry. Geographers lamented reaching the last empty spots on the globe, erasing “Here be Dragons” and filling them in with new names. Then we began to look up and out and in doing so felt our limitations.

At least there is more humility today, a greater feeling that much remains to understand, and that humility keeps our ken elastic, like yoga for the brain, an admission that we are no longer total idiots, true, but we’re just toddlers in the face of the totality of knowledge. We stand, as Carl Sagan once said, “on the shore of the cosmic ocean.”

Does anyone “out there” know more than we do? Offhand you’d think yes, of course, two to four-hundred billion suns in our little galaxy alone? Most with planets? Some planets probably with life, some life probably bright indeed? Surely that many opportunities would yield some greatness exceeding our own, right?

But maybe not, and here is why: We may be the first.

Yes, really. You see, we lie on the edge of the galaxy, its spiral arm, in the grand(er) Goldilocks zone of things, distant enough to be cooled, not bombarded by radiation, by ever-blinding brightness of a compaction of stars, and some thinkers have ventured to posit that just maybe the reason we do not see our heavens teeming with other life forms coming to tea is because their planets have not yet had the time, as we have, to reach those conditions said to generate life. Give them a few more billion years to firm up as we on the rim did first, long ago.

A disturbing theory but one that elucidates that our specialness is not merely an illusion of our own chauvinism. Maybe we actually are God’s favorite, eh?

If we are alone and we are the first, it stills something in me to ponder then that we will also likely be so long gone as to be unremembered when the great galactic core cools and life becomes more abundant “in the neighborhood.” That’s assuming there is anything to that theory at all, and there may not be, since why, if life evolves in specific conditions to which it adapts, could not species arise who are nourished by the spills of celestial radiation that would fry us all to glowing ash?

Amazing thing galactic star stuff, that sort of pre-cum of God’s creation (did that get your attention?), it is in us all, in everything, irreducibly caught up in unending cycles of creation and re-creation, today a molecule of your hand, tomorrow a glistening mineral in a meteorite, in another eon returning to the core of a star blazing in its corner of a universe so vast all the numbers ever written cannot describe its sprawl, or the sprawl of the infinite other universes just like/nothing like it that are also somewhere out there. To envision the totality of the “dark vast” as an Irish playwright once put it (most of us would have written “vast dark”), simply takes us beyond our capabilities, as well it should, ‘lest we shed our biological shells and become divine.

And what is divine? The sacred? No, the sacred is not the divine, though the divine may be sacred.

Case in point, in twelfth grade theology class, one of the Jesuits they had speak to us in a revolving line, a new priest each week, told us that while Popes may be revered they’re not worshiped, and he illustrated the difference by telling of how the Dalai Lama (14 of them so far compared to 266 successors to Saint Peter—in your face, Tibetan Buddhists) was traditionally seen as so divine that Tibetans did not let his bodily fluids touch the ground, they were collected in various jars and either buried with the sealed jars intact, or distributed as holy relics.

“Fiffy cent for some Lama spittle? Do I hear fiffy cent?”

This priest, I remember him as a short, merry sort of man with a Rust Belt accent, said there was a story of a time long ago when one of the supposed incarnations of this great spirit, the Dalai Lama, was out giving a ceremonial blessing in Tibet, and he suddenly took ill and began to vomit, and there was such a rush forward the Dalai Lama was nearly crushed by monks and peasants alike who outstretched their cupped hands to catch the vomit before it struck defiling earth, and many among those gathered then shoved the vomit into their own mouths, even just specks of it, not for safe keeping but because it was surely a blessing to consume something that came forth from this divine person, even his sickness.

“No Pope ever knew veneration to that degree, even our present Holy Father, John Paul the Second, certain to be a saint one day.”

And he was right, no Pope ever found that kind of reception, I’m sure. He was also correct about the “saint” part, predicting today’s era when that canonized Pole of fond memory is dubbed “Pope Saint John Paul the Great.”

What a mouthful to speak by way of description of such a humble man. Would he approve, you think? I’m not sure I do either, because when you make a person an icon, you strip of his humanity, and our humanity is the heart of who we are. (See my thoughts on the cult of Martin Luther King for another example of this sad phenomenon.)

Veneration is why statues are there. If you want a form without human failings, seek one out and leave mortal beings alone, and let their greatness and flaws echo equally as a legacy. Read about legends in mythology books. To honor a real person, read his biography and select the best parts without forgetting the worst, for your subject was only human, same as you.

"So we finish eighteen and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, 'Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know???' And he says, 'Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.' So I got that going for me, which is nice."


---Bill Murray, Caddyshack


But yes, the story of the Dalai Lama came from my school days and I’ve written often here and elsewhere about my high school, and many times I have not flattered it in my descriptions, but you know, my stay there was not truly bad, and some of it I remember with the glow of happiness. Like how on the 10th of May of my 9th grade year,1994, we had the first solar eclipse visible in our region in my entire lifetime, and it happened to fall on the same day John Wayne Gacy met his fate in the Illinois Death House.

As we stood watching through tiny holes in leaves as the moon’ s intrusion reduced the sun from a disc to a crescent, my 15-year-old spirit felt sad that however evil his deeds may have been, that distant serial killer missed out seeing this astronomical miracle.

When I said as much, Roger Morgan, a cerebral boy I knew (he would go on to kiss me one Christmassy night years later), said, “So did his victims.”

Which was true, I supposed, but somehow it still bugged me, thinking that since it had kept Gacy on death row for fifteen years the state of Illinois could have waited just one more day. Perhaps he should have made it his Last Wish. I know I would have. (Unless I could have wished for a pardon, in which case I’d take one of those.)

But the experience of the 1994 eclipse was not only about my strangely morbid inner soul focusing on murderers given a legally sanctioned drug overdose, I also marveled at how birds chirped evening songs in the middle of the day and returned to their nests as the sky dimmed and breezes stirred amid the coolness of the cloaked sun, and I wondered aloud when the next such event might be.

“February 1998,” Roger Morgan, whose eyes and attention it seemed were always on me, spoke up, and being the most brilliant person at our school, teachers included, I did not doubt him.

“Wonder where we’ll be then?” I hazarded to ask.

“I know where I’ll be, but I bet where you are will be a surprise to you.”

“Think so?”

“I think your life will be nothing but surprises.”

Strangely the February 1998 eclipse made no impression on me like this one did (though I do happen to know that by then neither Roger Morgan nor I ended up being where we thought we’d be, so he was only halfway right) but the ’94 eclipse was such a big deal I remember that day in an almost photographic fashion, right down to the fact dark green was a popular color for cars in the parking lot, the music teacher had her brown hair in a bun, and that Roger Morgan stayed no more than about four feet from me outside that day, his strange, seldom-blinking stare always on me.

Yes, I knew he liked me, but by then, for a long time, I’d loved someone else.

I am not sure we’d have had the freedom to stand outside all morning to see a celestial event at just any school, and maybe I should give my educators more credit.

What I find myself wondering now is what I did when I came home that day. I could look it up in my diary, but I wonder that because as I was folding towels earlier I recognized I still fold them the way my grandma showed me many years ago, that tri-fold that makes them hang so nicely, and of course my grandma is gone now, left us too young, and I bet there was nothing I went on to do that day in 9th grade that I’d enjoy looking back on more than if I’d spent it seeing my grandma, who had almost exactly a year left with us then.  If only we’d known, huh? And yet the same could be said of all of us now, living daily lives, going on, getting caught up in trivialities while the important gets set aside, and if only we knew, if only we knew.

The only thing we can know, of course, is that one day we won’t all be together, we and our families.

Maybe life isn’t mean to be lived dwelling on impending loss, maybe we’re better off as we are, even if it does eventually generate regret, but maybe it’s not the worst idea to pause and realize how brief every second is, because while the present is eternal, we are not.

The present is eternal? I think so, and if it’s not, if reality is all a big ball of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimie stuff, I’m not sure I want to know. I like to think that time is the one solid pseudo-constant you can count on, even if it does move too fast and rends us every chance it gets.

With that thought in mind, do you ever stop to think how sunrise is not this daily event we think it is, this thing that comes along each morning and lasts a few minutes and returns like old faithful on the morrow? No! There has been one ongoing, unceasing sunrise on planet Earth, and it’s been going on for at least four and a third billion years.

One sunrise, one sunset, unpaused, unpausing, unpausable.

Unless you count that story in the Bible, and well, OK, if there’s God involved then stopping the planet and keeping western Asia focused on the sun, hey, that’s kid’s stuff for the almighty being that invented light, gravity, photosynthesis, and higher mathematics, and who made mammary glands both useful to babies and alluring to men.

But if you think the utility of breasts is worth contemplating--- and I hope at least half of you do--- then consider something even odder. I love maps, I am fascinated by maps, I collect maps, ergo I can more or less draw the entire globe from memory and by that I mean filling in every country even the swiggly little ones that change governments a lot, BUT one day a year ago I was looking at the map on my wall and I felt a chill go down my spine because Sri Lanka was not where it was supposed to be.

Sri Lanka had moved.

I don’t know what else to say but this island that until I was seven I thought was pronounced “Siri Lanka” was no longer where it was supposed to be. On every globe, map, in every atlas, it has somehow relocated from south of the Indian subcontinent to the east.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but I was also….worried. Not worried about my sanity, no, I don’t have enough faith in that to worry about it, I was worried because when I typed in “Sri Lanka has moved” what came up on Bing (you should try Bing) was hit after hit, site after site, message after message from others attesting to their convictions that they too seem to recall Sri Lanka being south of India (which it bloody was) and this worried me because every one of those people was a Mandela Effect aficionado.

Yes, I was among those people, practically flat earthers, and I felt like running for the exit, screaming. This was, after all, the same crowd that claims the Berenstain Bears used to be called the Bernstine Bears, and who say Elvis lived into his eighties, because they remember it.

But there I was facing a terrible choice, admit I was wrong about my beloved geography, or…. become one-of-them.

So as Sid the Buddha was fond of doing, I found a middle path: I shut the heck up and hoped the few people I mentioned my episode to would forget. (Um, did you, by the way?) I also vowed I’d never mention it again.

Well, at least I’ve kept my wedding vows a little better than my Sri Lanka has moved vow.

Yes, I have straight A’s in the wedding vow department, doing much better than Barry Lyndon did. Ever seen that movie, and he’s standing there in broad daylight making out with that other woman, and not caring when his wife and stepson come walking by and there he is, suckin’ face with another woman?

Just gross. It made me want to b***h slap him but he was such a psycho he’d likely have punched me back, and the man hit like a pile driver.

Thing about Barry Lyndon, I don’t consider it a movie, I think of it as a time machine, just as 2001: A Space Odyssey is a rocket that takes me on a jaunt into the cosmos. (Well done, Stanley!)

More than any film I can think of Barry Lyndon immerses me in the 18th.-century, the time when man seemed most intent on moving as far as possible from nature. Everything about the era seemed artificial, from the formal gardens to the appearance of those wealthy enough to have a “look” to them. From that lead-arsenic face powder, to their piled-on wigs and foppish men denying nature by acting like thirteen year old girls, and women in clothing that hid the form as often as it showcased it, with whalebone corsets smashing their insides and neo-farthingales that created the appearance of hips wider than doorways and derrieres the size of small sofas, it was all decidedly unnatural. (And they actually f**ked each other looking like that???)

Even their overuse of fake birthmarks was a turning from nature. They made our present-day fascination with cosmetic surgery seem like embracing our birth selves in comparison.

Order was everything in the 18th century, maybe a revolt from the chaos of the 17th century, and we see it in the remnants of the Baroque architecture and the structured music of Bach on through the early works of Mozart, before he went crazy with John and Ringo hanging with the Maharishi in India.

(Did you know like John F. Kennedy after him, Mozart was murdered by the Freemasons?)

Now that I’m thinking of the Maharishi, why do people feel the need to be told how to meditate? Saying OMMMMMM gets more boring than rosaries at Grandma’s house. Why seek formal instruction to reach a state of consciousness your brain already engineers for you during a certain portion of your waking day? Why do frogpondian types want to reach the shutdown effect of theta waves anyway? They’ll be stilled in death soon enough, so why not be wide awake enjoying life while they can?

You know what meditation I like best? The reverse of turning off, it’s when you try to notice everything around you, every bud on the trees, every cloud in the sky, every hair on a person’s arm. You smell the scents on the air, taste the day around you, invite your skin to feel. It’s uplifting and awakening and never fails to impress on me how intricate and vast and mighty the world is. That meditation enlarges my awareness, so why would I want to shut it down yogi-style?

Know where I first found out about that meditation? The Real World: New Orleans. No joke. It was the season where the Mormon girl from BYU had such star power she upstaged everyone else in the old mansion , and there was a scene where one of the housemates was seated on the front porch, trying that meditation out, and I said to my own roommate, “Hey, Jackie, let’s do that.”

I loved it, she was less impressed but she was always more earthbound than me.

Also bustier, the b***h.

I used to sit in my dark room at twilight and look past the beautiful pine trees and see the red taillights of cars coming down the distant hill, and I’d try to notice all that lay around me in this huge world of ours. It made me feel good.

Postscript to the story, that Mormon girl on TRW got expelled from BYU for being on MTV, and a couple years later was supposed to take one of the flights the louse-crotched toilet-licking Saudis steered into the Twin Towers, but she got delayed. Yeah. To quote Furious Styles, somebody musta been prayin’ for her ass.

What were you doing on September 11, 2001?

Before I tell you what I was doing, know a shocking fact? There are kids out there on the cusp of voting age who were not alive that day. Such a douchey thing to want to be able to vote in a Presidential election but you miss the deadline by a few weeks like I did in 1996, when I was itching to cast a vote for President Clinton (mea culpa) but wasn’t 18 til Christmas Eve.

My life, 9-11-01:

“Tuesday September 11, 2001


Keep thinking the FBI failed, and the CIA failed. Someone I know said he bets here has never been less sex had on a single night at any time in American history.”


And that’s it. Me, a writey type person prone to page-long entries before bed said just that much on that dismal day, and that probably tells more than a flood of words how it affected me. It was one of a small number of bookmarks dividing  my life, and sometimes the horror of it comes back to me, often in dreams.


And we’re likely overdue for another, don’t you think?


But jeez that’s dreary. Happier thoughts include the possibility the new Picard Star Trek series might be good, Halloween is only eleven months away, and dogs are still able to be distracted by a red light pointer.


Still not feeling the love? OK, how about this, it’s likely no matter who you are, your mother is probably not pregnant at this moment.


There, that did it, right?


A little funny, someone just sent me a text asking if I was going to watch The Blacklist on Netflix, only he spelled it “Blacklust”. Yeah, that sounds like Blaxploitation meets porno. Can’t you just see the tagline?


OUT OF THE HOOD AND UNDER THE SHEETS!


Joan Rivers would have liked that typo. I regret never meeting Joan Rivers because there was a humility to her I admired. Case in point, she was asked why Nazis hated Jews, and know what she said?


“Because Jews are f**king ugly.”


Humility, right?


Oh, boy.


And for any Millennials reading this, that generation born without a humor gland, she was making a j-o-k-e. Heck I know lots of attractive Jews, and even Joan Rivers wasn’t vile for her 80s. Heck, I’d have hit that for a million dollars and a bottle of Manischewitz, wouldn’t you? (Oh, you lie.)


Speaking of attractive Jews, the summer between my 10th and 11th grades Clueless was a blockbuster schmash of Star Wars-like proportions, and Alicia Silverstone was a goddess among teenage girls, who not only copied her hair and clothing, but started going around asking WWAD. “What Would Alicia Do?”  The answer, sadly, was make bad acting choices and let Reese Witherspoon steal her career, but we didn’t yet know that.


Am I going to move on? No, the ball of twine isn’t even halfway down Everest and I got more to say about Jewish people.


Know what I like about the Jewish religion? The emphasis it places on “righteousness” which is not the same as holiness, no, righteousness touches many areas and is definitely a “this-world/this-life” centered quality. To be righteous might even be more edifying from a humanitarian point of view than being holy, and of course righteousness is part of holiness and leads unavoidably to greater holiness.


Gotta love that.


That and bagels.


Best of both is striving to be righteous while eating bagels.


There are many famous Jews from my hometown, but two I admire a good deal are Rod Serling, who, well technically just lived here a while, and Steven Spielberg, who was actually born downtown. What, you didn’t know Mr. Twilight Zone was Jewish? Versatile people those Hebrews, as at home in Hollywood as they are a Brooklyn accounting firm.


When a bunch of my friends came down from New England to visit me the summer of 1999, I showed them the synagogue where the Spielberg family used to go for Friday services, and despite the fact that when the Jews high-tailed it half a county north to Roselawn after the 1967 Avondale riots and a black Baptist congregation by then occupied the building, you could clearly see the staggering majesty in the old structure with its massive half-dome, its thick turn-of-the-last century walls, its Star of David stained glass window above the quadruple doors facing Reading Road at the front. But what really dazzled me were the Hebrew letters still carved deeply on a mantel between the window and doors that translated to:


OPEN WIDE THE GATES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS


(That concept again, righteousness. I wasn’t lying, it’s big with the Tribe.)


We looked in the windows and the Baptists had done a better job inside of turning the temple into a church (complete with a black Jesus on a poster) but if you tried you could still imagine the future maker of Saving Private Ryan toddling through the place in a pint-sized yarmulke, and it warmed all our hearts to see how cuuuute he looked!


Then one of the locals tried to sell us drugs on the way back to our car, but that’s another story.


Two years later another series of riots shook the area and proved too much for even the African-American Baptists to stay there, so the congregation merged with another more northward on Reading Road, the grand old temple fell vacant and was, horror of horrors, razed early in this decade. The ‘00s were a bad time for our local historic churches, and we lost four grand examples of them about that time, one to fire, three to the wrecking ball, though still I have never seen a mid-sized US city have so much architecture to brag about. In that respect we, the Queen City, rule.


God above, this is feeling like a filibuster, so let’s get into sex, wanna?


Fine: even educated fleas do it. There, that’s all I know about sex, honestly, since every time I’ve been involved in the activity it’s either been in the dark or I kept my eyes closed thinking of England, and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get the leather choke collar around a guy’s neck with your eyes closed.


Thus ends the sexual portion of this ramble.


I like movies. Not as much as you guys seem to, but I like them, and in 1999 (that year again) I saw every single film Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, a feat of which I have not twice been able to brag, with me seeing zero of them most years since.


Jackie was behind that, my roommate for three years in college, and the girl who may or may not have saved my life when I was a homeless runaway, if one can actually run away at eighteen. She loved movies far more than maybe even any of you and would see anything and everything, being one of those types who’d stay all day at the multiplex, serially seeing The Mummy, The Thin Red Line, The Cider House Rules, and The Blair Witch Project, going in when the cinemas opened at noon and staying til closing, her pupil dilated from all that time in darkness.


I hated when she marathon-watched like that and made me come, but I admit I saw a lot of movies that way.


We did finally reach a sort of roommate agreement years before Leonard and Sheldon, that if she was seeing more than two films in one day she had to find her own way back, because I would leave, but I recall once seeing The Sixth Sense and American Beauty (featuring the girl-lusting Kevin Spacey) back to back with her and then sneaking off when she went to see something else. This was before many people had cell phones and that night she had to call me on our apartment’s land line from a pay phone, wanting to rip me a new one for leaving her there, but I told her she’d agreed to it and she kind of went oh, yeah, that’s true, and when I picked her up she even showed there were no hard feelings by only yanking my hair once and foregoing the dreaded and possibly cancer-causing boomsmagga altogether.


Then we got Taco Bell.


I could actually go for some Taco Bell now because I’m hungry, I’m always hungry, but then I don’t eat enough. Just the truth. Eating is mostly so weird and un-fun (unlike cooking for other people, which is a blast), and the only time I ever felt full on a regular basis was when I ate more than usual during my pregnancies since I didn’t want to give birth to famine victims, no matter how much my pelvic arch told me I should give it some thought.


One of the first things I intend to ask God, or my Mormon planetary representative, if my bud Mandy’s religion is right, is why we have to eat at all. Life would be simpler if we didn’t. No one would ever starve and farms could be left as forests and no one would have high cholesterol from diets (just heredity) and fast food places would give haircuts.


“I’ll take the Ronald McDonald look , please!”


When I read The High Cost of Living and Death was going on about how much she likes food during the one day per century she becomes mortal for the fun of it, and she described how people on other worlds get nutrition, like crystal baths and such, I thought oh, they are lucky.


I’ve skipped eating a bunch in my life. Not as long as some hard-core food disorder types, but I did four days once as a teenager stressing about life and love and etc. and in that case I’m talking about pure starvation, not responsible fasting, just self-destructive heart-damaging caloric nada, exacerbated by the fact I wasn’t exactly eating all that regularly before then. I’ve fasted a lot here and there, gone three days a few other times for various reasons, but those four days after extreme dieting beforehand takes the prize for making me feel like shambling death.


It wasn’t good for me.


When you do that to yourself, your body starts getting weird, it does odd things to you, and I was all upset, blahblahblah, the man I loved was with a smoking hot chick his own age who left me in the dust and who sang on stage and had a song called “Tell My Heart” that was Top-40 good, so yeah, El, let’s not eat. Sound good? Sounds good. (I HATED that that girl was so nice to me when I wanted to despise her!)


And we went to Lollapalooza that summer while I was not eating and my cousin and her friends with me were snacking on all this crazy stuff, from three-buck bags of Fritos to strange and wondrous fare from around the world like sheets of illustrated Japanese nori and fried locusts on a stick, and I kept saying no thanks I don’t want anything (especially to the fried locusts), and there is this way you can kind of look like you’re joining in but you’re not (Cassie on Skins showed it right) and my cousin caught on and hassled me but her heart wasn’t in it so I got away with keeping up my destructive little hunger fast til I decided I’d had enough of all the stress and told my parents the next day I was ready to do my annual summer visit to see my grandparents across the ocean, something I’d been resisting because all I wanted was to pursue that one guy, and so they sent me just about instantly and I flew there, still not eating, and when I got there my aunt who is about my age (the one who may or may not have swivvied my husband before we got married, yup, her, it’s not like I had other aunts who fit the description) had two English roommates and I finally felt like eating, I was really hungry again all at once after hunger had faded away like it had the previous couple days, and so I tried to eat with them and got SO SICK it was just insane how bad I felt, like car sickness combined with morning sickness combined with that one stomach ache you get if you gulp cold water after a hard workout in the summertime? Know it?


So never starve like that, especially if you were getting like 500 calories a day for weeks beforehand and if you do and are coming back from it don’t try to eat a normal meal.


A public service announcement. (See, there’s good will in my repeating that story.)


Hey, everything turned out OK, though, and I had a fine summer visit, before I came home and took up my old habits and had my little accident that October (a real accident, not a euphemism for a suicide attempt) and I even got the guy in the end, so I guess determination and perseverance combined with easy virtue does pay off.


You know what I wish for people in here? I wish RC Merchant’s drawings would get the audience they deserve. I wish Indy’s books would get out to more readers. I wish Paquita would come back, and bring Alan D. Hopewell with her. I wish lester really would paint his nails, and I wish Lenny Bruce’s ghost would rotate between everyone’s garages.


Never been sure if I like Lenny Bruce, and in a way isn’t that the effect he was aiming for? Are we really supposed to get a warm fuzzy feeling for the man? Oh, he was cool, abrasive, nihilistic, and he showed he knew how to suck free speech’s schlong, but is Lenny Bruce the kind of fellow you’d want to…. Well, maybe I shouldn’t wish him into our garages at that. OK, well then how about the pre-ghost of Bob Newhart ? Yes, that would work.

(CONTINUED BELOW)

[ER]

(Part the Second)

Is it snowing yet? Maybe half a foot is coming, maybe only rain (and floods!), don’t know yet. (Taking a look….no, nothing. Still charcoal-colored skies and dead calm.)


I ever tell you guys about the time….


Wait. Yes I have, not that that usually stops me.


How about….?


No, can’t tell that.


Ah, here’s one. Did you guys know I used to work in a cookie store when I was 13, and they thought I was older, and so they fired me for being too young? You’d think they’d admire my youthful enthusiasm for capitalism and honest effort, but, noooo, gotta follow those child labor laws.


That’s all right, their cookies were overpriced and sold by the pound, with one chocolate chunk macadamia nut specimen setting the buyer back about a buck-fifty in early 1990s prices! Whoa! And that’s not even factoring in the calories. (The thighs on some of those customers, woof!)


They liked me, my supervisors, because I was a punctual, hard worker, who not only never pilfered their cookies, I didn’t even want to take any home when they offered them to me.


“Don’t you like cookies?”


“I play tennis and have to watch what I eat.”


“Why don’t you take these to your family?”


“My dad’s off working and my mom almost never eats sweets.”


“Um, school friends?”


“I go to Catholic school. We suffer there.”


I’m still not sure if they thought I was too good to be true or just weird, turning down cookies with names like Goldie’s Scotchies, and Blue Ribbon Chocolate Chunk, and Fudge Ripple Inside-Outs.


You know who used to come in there a lot was people lining up to do The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Rep up on Race Street. They’d come in just before we closed all made up and in character, socks down their trousers and such, and whether they liked sweets or had the munchies, they’d buy us out. So my boss started making an extra “set of trays” (a dozen dozen) Friday evenings, and they were mostly gone by night’s end.


Later when I was nineteen I went to Rocky Horror (if it’s your first time there they call you a virgin and make you humiliate yourself, and no one told me) and learned something disturbing, that at least at the place I was it was the thing to throw cookies at the screen during one part, and that was the terrible solution to the mystery of our success. They weren’t eating our delicious overpriced baked goods, they were hurling them!


Why they didn’t run into the In-N-Out and get two-buck knockoff Oreos I don’t know, maybe the shop I was at was the only place within walking distance?


So anyway, yeah, she fired me but said come back in a couple years. I didn’t and in fact she was out of business by then but I guess it was nicer than her telling me to rot in darkness and never set foot there again, which on my job is what I tell interns I don’t like.


While the subject of not setting foot someplace is fresh in my thoughts, I hope none of my family or friends ever shows up here and becomes a regular, but that’s a fear I have. I can see some new arrival lurking and wiling away the time before leaping out, and it’ll turn out to be my mom or Tyler, and I’ll get a private message, “We read what you said about feet, and we’re telling everyone at the family reunion!”


Aw, jeesh, I mean this is my jumping off point, my crazy place where I free-associate in a mostly no-consequence zone among other abby-normal types, and I’d hate to have to have my mom snuffed if she happened upon this site one night. Bad deal, kill my mom and the Furies would get me, and not even a certain black-eyed fella with interesting siblings could quite sidestep them.


Those who know what I mean know what I mean, the rest of you, blah, get Endless-literate.


I was also noticing today that right-thumbed people seem to be more passive than left-thumb-dominant people. Wonder why?


I should see what thumb is dominant in my friend Clare, just for the heck of it. She is a super nice person but IF she has one icky flaw, it’s impatience. She is energetic and perpetually a teenager at heart and I think if she were made to wait for something, she might melt down like Sheldon Cooper does when someone messes with his OCD needs. Clare (whose brother was the guy I was so into in my teens I’d starve myself for reasons that made sense at the time) also really likes high-caffeine drinks and between that and her squirrel-like metabolism, I don’t see how she sleeps at night, but she says she falls asleep almost instantly. Grrr, considering my insomnia is public record, I am jealous of that.


Funny story about ol’ Clare that I bet she doesn’t know I know, but if she knew I knew that she doesn’t know, she’d then know that I know that she doesn’t know.


Anyway, her brother told me this about her almost twenty-five years ago.


He said one day Clare was setting up a lemonade stand with her friend from down the street, and it was June, warm out, they had a beach umbrella set up and a boom box playing, she and the other girl were maybe six….her birthday is in October, so 1984, let’s say, and a guy who lived down the road was a reporter, and he came and bought lemonade and said hey you girls wanna be on TV?


Clare and her friend absolutely did, heck yes, so the reporter called the station, hey I got a cute human interest piece we can run.


Yeah, two Midwestern kids with a lemonade stand on a hot summer afternoon, how Norman Rockwell.


Well, Clare knew people on TV were supposed to wear makeup, so she hightailed it inside and got her mom’s cosmetics (this was the part that shocked me, that her gargoyle mother actually owned any) and came back out ready for her closeup, Mr. DeMille, and the poor kid had never had a makeup lesson in her life and she looked like something from a freaky clown circus, too much rouge with foundation on top of it and two tones of lipstick and wow, I wish I could have seen this but it’s been described to me by two generations of men in that family and the news crew did come and tape them and put the segment on TV, and Clare was allowed to stay up and watch and her family sat there in shock at the sight of her on-air looking, I was told, like an Impressionist painting someone had dropped on the ground before it dried, and her parents kind of sat there in total shock and her dad reached over and pinched her ten-year-old brother’s arm, like don’t say anything, Brian.


And through it all little Clare sat there beaming proud to be on TV after doing her own makeup, and her family all said wow how cool, you’re famous now Clarey, but to this day I am not sure she knows how bizarre she supposedly looked. I think surely someone somewhere must have a VHS copy in an attic and one day a clip will show up on YouTube titled:



ZOMBIE GIRL FROM  REAGAN ERA



If there is such a thing as destiny or karma or a manipulating god moving us around like Zeus in Clash of the Titans, the universe must want me to invest my life interacting with that family, because they seem inextricably intertwined with me, and I’m OK with that, I’ve even mostly benefitted from it, and I figure Clare’s son, my godchild, is destined to grow up to be some sort of super villain, so there’s my retirement plan right there, since super villains take care of their aged godmothers, that’s a rule.


But, seriously, I have written about this before because it perplexes me but why are those people so much a part of my life? How did that happen? WHY did that happen? What’s it all about? Am I overthinking it and it’s just a logical organic outgrowth of circumstances that really aren’t as arcane as they seem?


Sure I spent a long time deeply mad at Clare’s father, yes, I spent years thinking my godson saw dead people and that’s why everything scared him (he’s outgrown it, praise be increased testosterone production in pre-adolescence), absolutely a time or two I’ve wondered if Clare’s mother doesn’t pray every Sunday for my death, but these are cool people I am glad I know.


That family is always around, but it’s been a struggle to stick close to my proclaimed best friend since age 10, Gina, whom I found out last month is moving to Los Angeles. Isn’t that sad? Her husband stands to make a lot more money if he takes a job there, so it’s a no-brainer (does anyone still use that term?) but I still wish they weren’t going.


I can tell myself in this day and age I might hang with her more online than I was in person here and I might say well, that’s life, people migrate, times change, but it still stings.


When we were tweenagers we’d slide under her bed and in that cave-like space between box springs and carpeted floor we’d look at magazines and talk about our lives and the future, she was going to be a horse vet and I was going to be a professor (or so my teachers told me, so I guessed I had to) and we’d swear we’d always be together.


Gina would say: “Let’s get married in the same service, your husband and mine.”


And I’d say, “OK! And when we die we’ll be buried next to each other.”


Gina would look back at me and blink her Bambi-like eyes two or three times and say, “….yeah….” And she’d scoot away from me a bit.


But that’s not weird, it’s an Irish thing! Do you know one of the traditional ways an Irishman used to propose to his girl was to ask: “Mary Kate O’Hara, will ye be buried among me people?”

The rose-tressed Mary Kate, I assure you, found that idea very romantic, but it did not translate well to American sensibilities circa 1990.


I have this reputation for hanging with the sisters of guys I used to go out with and I think the case is there to be made, can’t argue far against it. There’s Clare, and there’s this New Agey girl named Diana (not to be confused with my cousin-in-law by that name) but in Gina’s case it was like a reverse situation, not that Gina and I ever went out (though we did live together) and I have hung out with her younger brother Mark a lot over the years, especially when Gina was away in Mexico volunteering at a dentists without borders project, but then that’s not quite the same since I’ve known Mark  as long as I have her and he’s mostly always been my friend in his own right too.


Mark, who is almost precisely three years younger than I am, grew up with a crush on me, though, which went from cute when he was a bratty kid to annoying when he was a teenager, to problematic later on (by then he was a he-slut frat boy), and one night we were all swimming in my pool, me, my boyfriend, Mark, some others, I don’t think Gina was with us, and Mark, who nurtured this jealous hatred of my boyfriend kept acting like a choad toward him, splashing him in the pool, mouthing off, overtly being ridiculous, until finally my boyfriend, who was much older than Mark snatched him up in a headlock , kidding/not kidding, and kind of lifted Mark up and tossed him bodily across the pool, and poor Mark came up sputtering and coughing out water, embarrassed, poor boy, but he did bring it on himself, so when he got to the patio the look in his eye was like….ever see a cat get out of water, looking evil and mad? I am glad there were no weapons on hand, even a beach umbrella or shovel, because Mark was at homicide levels, but God it was so funny to see.


MANY years later he laughed about it re-telling the story to Clare as “your brother once kicked my ass,” but he was not laughing that night.


Even if I had been into Mark or into younger guys (I always seemed to go the other direction) he was silver rule banned anyway. You know the medal rules?


Gold Rule: No going out with your relatives.

Silver Rule: No going out with your friends’ relatives.

Bronze Rule: No going out with the ex-significant others of your relatives or friends


All righty, how far down Mount Everest is this ball of twine now?


Still rain outside, no snow.


I saw a video on YouTube about contemporary reactions to The Phantom Menace. The hate that worthy film engenders was a later development, since it was loved at first. I’ll let others speculate on why, but did you know Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars out of four, and its meta-rating on IMDB remained higher throughout 1999 than almost any other film?


I like the prequels myself and think they’ll age better than many suspect they will, while The Force Awakens will decline in critical regard.


Ready for an odd-fact about cheese? It’s been determined that we are unable to discern flavor differences in cheeses, and it’s our sense of smell that provides much of our ability to tell one variety from the next, which does not explain the popularity of limburger, which seemed to factor heavily into old Warner Brothers cartoons, if you notice.


You know, years ago I stumbled across a poem by Ezra Pound in a textbook, and liked it. Reading about Pound himself though became one of my early lessons in separating writings from a writer. Pound’s writing were fine, but Pound himself was a fascist fartsucker who committed treason against his nation and spent the post-wars years in a literal cage.

The poem was called The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, and was beautifully sad, because I felt hope was the only thing left sustaining its speaker, a wife who longs for the overdue return of her husband who left to travel far away.

Technically Pound translated the poem, and credit is given to a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty known as Li Po, but in my experience when translating from a source so ancient, the modern poet deserves the majority of credit, since a literal transcription seldom works, and the result is more properly a sort of recreation in spirit. (The Victorian scholar Edward Fitzgerald’s “translation” of the 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam being a good example.)

Why my scathing ire for Ezra Pound? During WWII he, a US citizen, made pro-Fascist radio broadcasts from foreign soil. Basically Pound was a complete dick, but he did make a statement that I find pretty cool, and that statement is this….


Once, when he was visited in prison, he was given a dictionary, which Pound received most graciously and added, “A dictionary is a beautiful present to offer another human being, even if that human being already knows every word in it.”


Now THAT is a seriously on-target thing for a poet to say!


So that was Ezra Pound, who deserved his incarceration, but I know of Irish-born Nazi supporters whom I think got shafted (in some cases hanged) and did not receive justice. Here’s how that came about….


The Nazis needed speakers for their propaganda broadcasts against England, and looked to Ireland, where most people spoke English and many had little love for the British, and since Ireland was a non-belligerent state in the war, there was nothing illegal about Irish citizens being jerks enough to go work in Germany, speaking out on the radio about England’s prosecution of the conflict, yet when the war ended, MI6 sought out these Irish radio actors, and though they were citizens of another country, arrested several for treason, basing the treason charges on the fact that when these men were born, the United Kingdom held hegemony over Ireland.


So while vile in loyalty these men may have been to lend support to the evil aims of Nazi Germany, what business was it of the English to charge another country’s citizens with treason, when technically they had broken no labor or sedition laws whatsoever? Whatever they may have felt about the combatants in WW2, many Irish were outraged at the sheer arrogance of the UK to do such an audacious thing, and protests erupted in front of the British embassy in Dublin.


That episode is the kind of thing they rarely teach you in US public schools.


For something they rarely teach you in US Catholic schools, there’s the Cadaver Synod, of the late 9th century. (Pay attention, this is good!)


The Cadaver Synod was a trial, held in January of 897, in which the maggoty corpse of Pope Formosus, nine months dead, was disinterred, dragged into court, and put on trial by his one-time foes.


The then-current Pope, Stephen VI, Formosus’ bitter enemy, trumped up charges that his dead rival had served as Pope while still head of another diocese, a violation of canon law, and during this ghastly hearing the remains of Pope Formosus were dressed in full Papal regalia and placed on a throne. A deacon whose name is lost to history spoke on Formosus’ behalf as Pope Stephen shouted insults at the putrefying face of his predecessor, while a jury of cardinals looked on, holding perfumed cloths to their faces.


In the end Formosus was convicted of crimes, his Papal reign, some eight years in duration, was declared null and void, his name was stricken from the list of successors to St. Peter, and his body was rudely stripped of its robes of state, leaving his naked before the eyes of men who’d once kissed his ring and in general sucked-up to him.


In a final act of macabre indignity, three semi-skeletal fingers on Formosus’ right hand were hacked away, symbolic of the fact he was no longer entitled to use them to grant blessings.


Stephen was not content to rest there, however, and had Formosus dragged thru the streets of the Eternal City and cast into the Tiber. So shocked were the citizens of Rome that public opinion greatly turned against Stephen. Furthermore, contrary to what should have happened, Formosus’ corpse washed onto a riverbank upstream, and locals claimed it began to work miracles of healing on those who approached it. In the summer of 897 a mob stormed the Vatican and Pope Stephen was imprisoned, soon to be strangled with a cord in his cell.


The next Pope, Theodore II, whose reign of twenty days was the shortest in Papal history, overturned the verdict of the Cadaver Synod and saw to it that Formosus, now again a Pope, was returned with dignity to his crypt under Saint Peter’s.


Things still didn’t end there, boys and girls!  Later Pope Sergius III, among the most villainous men ever to be dubbed “holy” ruled that Stephen had acted justly and re-affirmed Formosus’ conviction. Few paid attention, and Formosus remains on the list of Popes to this day.


Whew, ain’t Catholic history fun?


Perhaps some nicer news is in order to offset the ghastly entry up above? (Although admit it, you liked reading about zombie Popes…) OK, well, I’m proud to say that I woke up today and found out (a trumpet flourish, puleeeze) that my grandmother across the ocean got clean results on her health tests after her checkup earlier in the week! With luck she’ll be with us a long while yet, and in my 40s I can brag about still having a living grandparent.


Here is something I should post on the Daily Bible Verse thread but I’ll just unleash it here. (Try not to let it blow your minds…) There is a slight possibility that the 46th. Psalm in the King James’ Bible may have been translated by none other than William Shakespeare. The circumstantial evidence is thus: the KJV came out when Shakespeare was forty-six years of age. The forty-sixth word from the beginning of the forty-sixth Psalm is “shake” and the forty-sixth word from the end is “spear.” I don’t know if that really means our lad Bill translated it but what does amaze me is how closely some people pay attention to be able to have noticed something uber-obscure like that.

Still not impressed by my familiarity with trivial facts? Well, let’s see. Oh! Q is the only letter of the alphabet that is not used anyplace in the names of the fifty United States. Cool, huh?

No? OK, back to sex then.

Are you aware that sciurus carolinensis, otherwise known as the common gray squirrel, is one of the most promiscuous of all mammals, with the female typically mating with on average of four to nine males prior to each pregnancy, and with each copulatory act requiring perhaps as long as twenty minutes? Instead of the expressing for a certain sort of sexual intercourse being “rabbiting” it ought to be squirreling.

Squirrels are also among the most prolific masturbators in the animal kingdom, with both sexes engaging in this practice on a daily basis.

The philosopher Diogenes was really a cruder fellow than his most famous story, the lamp in the night while he went looking for an honest man, would suggest. Some of the things he did I can’t write about in case my late favorite grade school teacher, Ssster is reading over my shoulder from Heaven, but one I will venture out into it is the story that Diogenes spanked his trouser snake in public in broad daylight in ancient Corinth one time, and when angrily confronted about his conduct, Diogenes explained flogging his frontal philosopher by saying, “Would that I could cure my hunger by rubbing my stomach, as I have cured my lust by rubbing elsewhere.”

Gross.

Hope Ssster didn’t see me writing that.

Ssster was cool as well as nice, and I came to know her socially years after I left her class. I think everyone here would have liked her. She was into baseball and King of the Hill, and going to Olive Garden, where I’d take her when we’d go out every month for our get-togethers that went on from the time I was about twenty-seven and she eighty-two, til her health and mental state declined early in this decade. She was the sort of nun who made you forget she was a nun and put you at ease right up til she pulled rank about something in order to try to put you back on the straight ‘n narrow. She was also the only nun I ever had for a full-time teacher, though I did have retired nuns come in as subs sometimes, and that contrasts with the educational experience of my dad, for instance, who had nuns teaching every class through middle school, and even a few in high school. And my mom, well, over there was Ssster city, nuns a-plenty, unlike here where nuns are more or less extinct now.

My dad used to tell me stories about the nuns who taught him and when I was young these would always be cute stores, but later they’d somehow morph into cautionary tales that ranged from “make good grades so you won’t have to work at Rite-Aid when you grow up and have nuns laughing at you,” to “say no to drugs or I’ll send you to a nunnery.”

The last one worked wonders on me.

His philosophy on raising me after my mom left boiled down to a sort of deal we arrived at when I was sixteen: don’t break laws, don’t drink or do drugs, don’t starve yourself, keep your grades up, and beyond that I’ll let you do almost anything you want.

Not bad, huh?

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always had a good relationship with my dad, who, as much as he loves me, sees all of life as a vast chess match that he must stay several moves ahead on: me included. The result of that was that he was almost always ready in advance for anything I might do.

I guess raising me, however challenging it could occasionally be, was nothing compared to his day job when I was a child, which was outthinking the Stasi, something I did not know about until I was a teenager and East Germany defunct, and even after that was not allowed to tell people about it for many more years. I used to have to say to my friends that my dad was a “consultant” which he was, but honestly a better job title might have been “strategist.”

Try growing up with a father like that looking after you. It wasn’t that it was hard to get away with things, Dad was a lenient father in most ways, but it was nearly impossible to surprise him or fool him, so after he effortlessly caught me in a series of lies I told thinking I was protecting someone, and seeing the genuine hurt in his eyes that I lied and forced him to tell me he knew I was lying, I quit dissembling and just told the truth about anything he asked, warts and all, and I think he respected that.

On the subject of telling the truth, here, what I am going to write next is chillingly real. In the ‘80s the Stasi threatened to hurt the families of US personnel who worked against them, something neither I nor my mother were told til many years after the fact. A good tactic, actually, it got them what they wanted, which was for some of the pressure on their operatives in the West to be eased off. My dad confessed to me after all that was over that he didn’t know whether the threats made him madder or more frightened, but his opinion “we need to back off” was listened to, and his footnote in the Cold War was thereby earned.

After that evil agency----so terrible it made the Gestapo look like Boy Scouts---- was (supposedly) dissolved in the German reunification and my Dad was doing other work for his employers, he took me to Washington DC in the summer of 1995, and I, who had only just come to know deeper things about this work than I used to, asked him if the ‘other side’ knew about me, and he said, “Of course they do. I’m sure they know my wife has left me and I’m sure they know my mother recently died. Knowing things like that is vital.”

And he was absolutely serious.

Holy Mother of God! Who was I? A nobody, a high school kid who never mated the socks in her drawer and who hit tennis balls against the side of her house all afternoon, and the idea that I was listed in a folder somewhere in another country, maybe filed away for some future use to compromise my father’s integrity, that wasn’t fun, it was terrifying.

And though my dad tried to give Mom and me a normal life as I was growing up, that’s the burden we had on us for years and years. His times away, visits from men who’d ask us a lot of questions, the worrying.

Always us worrying about him.

It got to my mom.

For anyone whose instinct at this moment may be to sneer BS at what I just confided, consider that our side had people opposing their side, right? And is it far-fetched that a hyper-intelligent man who studied at Columbia through half his undergraduate career might have been on his future employer’s radar screen as a candidate for eventual employment? There is nothing glamorous about living that life, I promise you that.

I have often found there is a dichotomy to people’s thoughts on matters of the shadow world. On one hand they try to sound sage and knowing by saying in this self-confident I-am-in-the-know tone, “Yeah our own government is everywhere, watching, listening all the time.” Yet when confronted with information that a person actually was involved in making this supposed omniscience happen, their kneejerk response is to dismiss the truth as self-aggrandizement, which is actually something the Three-Lettered Beast of Langley counts on as a way of protecting itself. It’s really very funny how truth can be a great camouflage. The devil’s greatest trick is making the world think he doesn’t exist, after all.

Anyway, back to him raising me.

Sometimes I’d think there was no way Dad could know about something I was up to, but I’d invariably find out he did know and had been waiting to see how things played out before he reacted: usually gently. You’d think that would have eroded my confidence, but in a way it pushed me on, inspiring me to keep trying to find some deed that would earn me an admission I spent years wanting to hear:

“Ellie, I hadn’t expected that.”

My dad was great, I wouldn’t trade him for any father on Earth, not even a cool gay dad like Mike Brady, which every teenage girl who grew up watching Brady Bunch reruns secretly wanted. We had a lot of fun together and he was and is a blast to talk to, being able to converse with expertise on I think any subject in the Library of Congress classification system, from the dating rituals of Greenland’s Inuits, to where the largest T-rex fossil ever was found, and since he was only twenty-one when I was born, he wasn’t old, so he could play basketball with me (better than I played it) and we’d go jogging together sometimes in the morning, and when he’d go out with women in the years after my mother departed in a haze of fairy dust back from whence she’d come (poor kid married at seventeen and left her family behind to come to a life that was often stressful), the women he brought around were young and hot, not the old crones some divorced dads hooked up with to the shame of their kids.

(Swear to God, one of them , Gillie, could have been Charlize Theron’s long lost twin sister.)

So, I was lucky in the dad department. Great guy. Owe him a lot.

Except for once. Just once. That being the time he put me on lockdown and used what to this day I think were mind control techniques to get me to see how far I’d spun, and while I actually knew he was right, at the time it made me mad at him.

Oddly, though, while all this was going on he was never more polite or patient with me, just bluntly honest and direct and never letting me have one inch in my power plays. This went on for about six weeks a the end of 10th grade but felt longer, and finally on the day we buried my grandma, I was lying on my bed, horribly sad, wearing the shoes I’d had on in the cemetery, grave dirt literally on them, and my dad abruptly walked into my room and said I knew the last thing my grandma would ever have wanted was for us to be sad about her, right? I said I knew but I was still sad, and he said he’d be more worried about me if I wasn’t.

Then without a another word he gave me back my car keys and said I could have everything else he’d taken away (a bed and one light and a nine o’ clock bedtime was about he left me) because he thought he could trust me to think about where I was in my life and where I had been through most of that spring, and suddenly….it was like life regained normality and I was the better for having gone through the close confinement I did because I felt like I’d found myself after having been lost without realizing it.

Odd time… Without ever raising his voice or saying anything to me in anger, my father reprogrammed me away from the self-pitying selfish jerk I’d drifted into being sometime between my brush with death the previous fall and my mom’s abandonment of us, and my grandma’s illness.

I still can’t exactly put my finger on how he achieved this as seamlessly as he did but I don’t think I could ever replicate it if I had to with my own children.

My dad is a master of comprehending situations and figuring out how to best deal with them.

And me….I’m definitely not.

Dancing is also not a skill of mine. On the tennis court I am greased lighting (or used to be, though I’m still fast) but dancing….no. 


I’m not as bad at dancing as I kid around and say that I am, but I’ll never earn a paycheck doing it.


Heck, I’m in good company because Golden Age movie icon Clark Gable couldn’t dance either.  Legend has it Gable was such a bad dancer that close-ups of him dancing in Gone with the Wind, were reportedly shot while he stood on a small platform that revolved under him.  How about them apples?

One of the delights of my life IS to lock myself in my room and dance like crazy in my bare feet, just as lost to the music as I want to be without anyone seeing or judging or being there to impress. I admit again, I’m not all that good at it but it’s a great joy to dance.


I recall a night in February of The Year of Our Lord 1994, when I was home alone and wearing just my underwear and a little half-shirt and I danced myself into a frenzy in my bedroom listening to Green Day and Joy Division, and as I lay panting on the bed after twirling around to Radio Live Transmission, I suddenly conceived of the delightful idea to have some wine. So I went downstairs, poured a big glass of red vino, and drank it, feeling adult, sophisticated, and soon quite tipsy, with my face nicely warmed and a big giggle building inside me. Life was funny!


The next day my dad asked if by chance I’d perhaps helped myself to some wine while I was home alone, and I said yes, I did just that, and he said in effect, “OK, well, why don’t you not do that again?”


He didn’t seem upset, and said that he wasn’t unrealistic, he understood curiosity, and added the interesting tidbit that he did much more than that when he was my age, which left me wondering….what things?


Eventually, not too awfully far down the road, about a year I think it was, I asked him about that, and he told me exactly what he meant, and…


…and I think I’ll save his eye-widening revelations about his younger days in the ‘70s for another entry, but suffice to say my fifteen-year-old jaw was against my fifteen-year-old chest.


Long story short: my dad has lived quite a life.


As did Hieronymus Bosch.  Ever seen this guy’s paintings? They’re so disturbing, even after five-hundred years, that the term “Boschian” meaning something dark and twisted, is still applied today.

Bosch was imaginative and skilled, no denying, but his work is like Poe committed to canvas. One of his pieces, Paradise And Hell, vividly contrasts the joys of Heaven with the depravities of Hell, and I dare anyone to look into the Hell side of that painting and not think, “Man, I’m glad I’m not there…”


Another noted Boschian work is The Extraction of the Stone of Madness. It depicts a hole being drilled into a man’s skull so that a “stone of madness” in this case a flower (!) can be withdrawn. Bosch lingers in the mind’s eye and has a way of peeing on your happiness.


Sort of like the entire post-famous life of Amy Winehouse.

Back to Black was one of the greatest albums in recent history, and I was really pulling for this lost soul, hoping she’d beat the odds and make it as she seemed to be doing up until the end. When in the summer of 2011 I heard of her death, it struck me as terribly sad.


Anymore I can’t even listen to her old songs that I used to love. Still too much emotion there. It was completely senseless for that poor woman to die like she did. I don’t know what’s wrong with people.


I don’t think the housemates I briefly had in 2001 were in the same league as Ms. Winehouse when it came to substance abuse, but sober nights were few in that house for which I was such a bad fit.

What WAS I thinking?

I don’t know whatever made a scholarly sort like me think it would be a good idea to move into a big house shared by a bunch of others roughly my age and apparently known for their parties, but I gave it a try and lasted two weeks. I don’t think I fully understood the extent to which the house, a mile from a state university, was home to partying and wildness, but when I mentioned it to my future husband after I met him later in the summer, even he’d heard of its reputation.


“You lived there?” he asked, amused and aghast.


“Yeah, for a second,” I confessed.


“I have seriously underestimated you…”


There were nine people living in this large Victorian on a tree-scaped avenue, no one over twenty-four, most pulling decent GPAs, and since I’d just moved back from a college town I figured it’d seem familiar to me, but nothing I experienced out east compared to this den of sin, where the late Bluto Blutarsky would’ve felt right at home, and while I knew a couple people, one an education major who was mouse-ish every place but there, I was a bad fit for the type of roommate they wanted as I was clued-in that first afternoon when one of the guys sharing the place, Denver, who weighted 300 pounds, came running into my room yelling at the top of his lungs and did a body slide through the air and landed on my bed, bounced off and grabbed me by the hands, then started boogying by way of introduction. Next he whacked me on the behind as he left and declared the party that night would be in my honor.


Um, thanks, Denny.


Actually there’d have been a party anyway but the theme was an effort at politeness. Oh, I mean these were nice folks who all no doubt grew up to work for Krogers’ corporate HQ, and P&G and the like, but they were on the other end of the party scale from me. Literally all night the music blared, laughter rolled, beer cans were crushed and their version of good times was in progress, often with a great many extended friends and their friends and their friends’ friends invited to join in.


I got the heck out of that house and hoped I wasn’t hurting any feelings doing so, but turns out it was days before most of them noticed I’d left.


Yup, what had I been thinking? It’s said the key to mastery is to know yourself, so no wonder I’m still in the bush leagues.

[ER]

(Part the Last)


I used that line about thirteen and a half years ago, in Logan Airport, talking to a young man I met there and knew for less than one day, but who sticks out in my mind to the point that ever since I’ve thought about him probably at least once a week in some fleeting fashion.

I had a long layover ahead of me in Boston and was sitting in the terminal reading a copy of a Buddhist work called The Diamond Sutra, a book of many small and delightful wisdoms which address an eastern view on the keys to happiness. (Fortunately grabbing the Dalai Lama’s puke wasn’t of them.)


It was as I was reading that I noticed someone take a seat one row across from me. He was about my age or maybe just a little younger, about six feet, blue-eyed, athletic but strangely his head was shaved. We made eye contact and in due time started talking.


“It’s not to be confused with the Kama Sutra,” I broke the ice by joking, holding up the cover on my obscure little paperback.


He chuckled. “Nah, I know what the Diamond Sutra is.” And as a point of evidence he summarized it, surprising me because it’s a little-known work.


Over the hours in which I would come to know him he would surprise me many times, as his story was not what I’d expected. As it happens, he was a Lance Corporal in the Marines who’d come home on special leave from Iraq because his stepfather had passed away.


He was departing Boston to go to Buffalo, where his real father lived, and was then returning overseas. I was awed. He was in street clothes, didn’t seem like a Marine, and had in fact spent two years majoring in Literature before leaving to do four years in the Corps. 


Our conversation alternated from him saying Mark Twain was his favorite author, to him knowing a bit about my own then-favorite, Joyce Carol Oates, to telling me about a sniper in Anbar Province near-fatally shooting a squad member six feet away from him. (“The faster the corpsmen got blood in him, the faster it leaked out, but they saved him, and we took down the sniper.”)


He also told me his father’s health was not good, that three months before he’d been diagnosed with emphysema, the same disease that had just killed his two-pack-a-day stepfather.


“So,” he said, “since I may not get to see him again after this, the Colonel got my sympathy leave extended by three days.”


The loss of my own grandpa to a smoker’s illness in August 2000 was recent enough for me to have some idea of what this Marine was going through, but to have to deal with one death plus a dying loved-one and still face combat….that was harsh.


“You put home in a box, and you close the lid,” he told me. “Every time you open the lid, it’s harder to close it. Sure, you send emails, make phone calls, but you wouldn’t believe how many Marines break down in tears after they get done with those calls.” There was even a term for that reaction, he said, “home-frying” because reaching out toward home fries your brain.


“We all talk about how we’re going to tell our families we love them once we get back. Will we? I don’t know. It’s a lot different here than over there. Over there it’s all amplified. Here people break up, get divorced, move away.”


(Like my mom, I thought.)


“Families fight,” he told me. “In Iraq we can’t keep family out of our heads. When we get back we’ll probably take them for granted too but we swear to ourselves we won’t. Time will tell. As for tomorrow, I’m going to tell my dad thanks for about a hundred things, and let him know I love him, even if it pains him to hear it.”


He sat there telling me all this, our conversation going from books to roadside bombs to his longing for absent family, and yet while it clearly affected him, he seemed calmly resigned, not even depressed, just like he knew what he had to do in the Marines and was doing it, putting everything on hold. This acceptance that business must be taken care of was a quality I’d seen many times in military people but it made it no less touching to see it in him.


“You might think I’m saying all this to hit on you,” he said, “but I mean every word.”


Yeah, I knew he did.


He pulled out his wallet and showed me pictures of Iraq, this tan, dusty country where in one photo he and four other Marines were drinking beer in front of a mosque that had a minivan-size crater in its ornate blue-glazed roof.


“That was a fun day,” he commented. “Nothing whatsoever happened except we got drunk.”


Since we both had hours to wait, we got dinner together, just airport food, my treat, and then walked around Logan, talking. To hear about the ground war on the news was one thing but to be standing next to someone who was heading back in a few days was a different order of intensity. He might die there, I thought. Any words I could have said felt like they’d come up short.


“You know the guys who blew up the World Trade Center came through Logan that morning?” he asked.


I said I did.


“Stood right over there,” he pointed at an airline counter and stared at it like it held some dark energy from the mass murderers who’d once stepped past it. He finally broke his silence and said, “Well I signed up because of them. I wish they knew that and knew what they brought down on their people.”


Then just like that the conversation switched back to books, Charles Dickens and Clive Barker, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, and his The Years of Rice and Salt, and we didn’t talk about Iraq again all evening.


I ended up knowing him a total of seven hours, just seven hours, but like I said, I think about him to this day.


We didn’t stay in touch the way you’d imagine we might have considering everything that went on between us, but for over a year I looked for his name on a website that listed USMC casualties, and never saw it, so I hope he survived his deployment, and I’d like to think he finished out that degree in literature, a subject that meant much to him, I could tell. Hopefully he’s out there at this moment, writing, teaching, or at least reading something good, healthy, happy, and with the dust of God-forsaken Anbar province left far behind.


Boy George was right in the ‘80s: war is stupid.


Sigh.

Here are some things you likely don’t know about me.

I have recurring dreams about empty cities and tall buildings. (Fun but sinister sometimes.)


I like to fall asleep in the dark with my eyes open.


Once in high school, on a dare, I went into the notoriously cold chapel for morning Mass without wearing a bra. Only girls noticed.


When I go outside at night and look into the sky, I always hear the same neo-baroque music in my head.


Graveyards activate a sense of finding my place in time.


Once when I was walking home after tennis and a mosquito landed on my wrist, I let it drink my blood and tried to stretch my skin around it because I’d heard that traps them and they drink til they pop. (This didn’t work and I got a big welt for my effort.)


Once my family was at some peoples’ house and I went upstairs and laid in the empty bed of their slightly older and easy-on-the-eyes son.


As much as I spent the ‘90s professing to hate Courtney Love, I did get used to hearing that song about Miss World.


In high school when my cousin let me hold her sleeping baby and her back was turned, I lifted the baby’s eyelid to see what her eye looked like when she was asleep.


When I hear about a disaster that doesn’t involve anyone I know, something in a dark corner of my soul hopes it’s worse than they think it is.


In Vermont while I was in college, I was kneeling down tying my friend Greg’s shoe for him while he held my and his Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cones, and as I raised up I saw a woman on a bench filming us. “She probably thought you were my slave,” Greg told me. “She probably thought you were too lame to tie your own shoe,” I corrected.

Enough!

My celebrity spirit guide, Oscar Wilde, who could resist everything except temptation, said the only difference in a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. I wonder if there’s a way to put his theory to the test?


As I’ve reflected on my life, I’ve decided I must have more sinning to do because I’m definitely not yet a saint. Perhaps if I sin more prolifically I’ll reach sainthood faster?


Which sins shall I practice in order to attain saintliness?


Gluttony I’ll skip.


Lust, no, I’m already maxed out.


Anger, nah, not that’s me, though it did puzzle me when two people recently told me they perceive me as an angry type.


Envy, hmm.


Sloth, nah.


Hey, I could blaspheme a bit. Let me see. Oh! Here. “Why did God cross the road? To get to the other side!” There, do I feel any closer to sainthood? Not one bit.


Stupid Oscar Wilde, you are so swishingly busted, dude…


“How utter, Evelyn!”


“Yes, Hoskar, how utter.”


New topic. Notice I alternate between calling myself Evelyn and Ellie? It’s another schitzy thing about me that a lot of people call me one name, while others call me another.


My birth name is Evelyn, which is what Clare and her family call me and my mom calls me when she’s telling me I messed something up, but to most people I am Ellie, and I came to have that name because when I was two I could not pronounce my own name and when I said it it came out as “Ellie”. Don’t ask me why, maybe they thought my speech handicap was cute, but for most of my life thereafter my parents and grandparents and cousins and most of my friends have used that name, (I even sign some of my emails ‘LE’ which is short for Ellie), but my name is Evelyn.


Evelyn Morgan.


Brian, Clare’s brother, who called me Evelyn (and sometimes phonetically FLN) was an English major and used to have to read a lot for school, and so enjoyed a good gushy-juicy horror novel in his spare time. He used to read Peter Straub a lot, and got me to scramble my mind by reading Straub’s exercise in a mind-f**k, If You Could See Me Now, but his favorite was Ghost Story, a novel that left us both wondering why Mr. Straub changed the name of Alma Mobley’s mysterious cult-like group from Ordo Templi Orientis, to Xala Xalier Xlati.


Years in the future, I decided to find out, so I wrote Peter Straub a letter care of his publishers, and he was gracious enough to answer.


The glorious Mr. Straub simply said his publishers were asked to make the alteration as there really had been an OTO, founded by Aleister Crowley, and there were still active members whose feathers were ruffled by a depiction of them in an unflattering fictional context.


Mystery solved.


Now anyone got a Ouija board so I can tell Brian? (Oh, trust me, he’d have laughed.)


A thought: Did you know it’s estimated that more than 1,500 varieties of yeast are thought to exist? Considering anthropology tells us only one species of human is alive right now, it’s sort of humbling that we’re all getting outperformed by fungus.

Let’s skip from yeast to the funeral trade. Yes, let’s.

Ever stopped to think about the craft of embalming? Just as there are good shoemakers and bad, I suppose there are good and bad embalmers. You’d think a king or a pope would merit the best post-mortem preservation, but that does not always seem to be so, since both William the Conqueror and Pope Pius XII own footnotes in the story of unpleasant funerals.

It seems that after a freakish 1087 AD spill against the pommel of his saddle sent him to that great castle in the sky, William the Conqueror, in later life a corpulent Hutt-like figure, burst open in his coffin, right in front of the assembled blue bloods of the realm, sending even the bravest retching and fleeing, and leaving the Saxons snickering under their hats. Bad embalming was blamed, though the hand of God was also suspected.


871 years later in 1958, Pope Pius XII, knowing his health was failing, became impressed with an Italian chemist who claimed he could keep a body so perfectly preserved it would stay lifelike forever. Whether the scientist was a charlatan has been debated, but what no one can argue is his technique for preserving the Pontiff’s remains was unsuccessful. So deteriorated did Pius become that at his requiem Mass a plastic sheet had to be laid over his body. Dignitaries spoke about hearing hissing, popping sounds coming from the late Pope throughout the services, and so much incense was burned that asthmatics were warned to keep inhalers on hand.


By the way, don’t read this entry if you’re eating. Oh, was I supposed to put a disclaimer at the beginning? My bad!


Where to now? How about I give my mom her due?


Remember I said my mother calls me Evelyn when she is serious about something? Here are some bits of advice she’s offered over the years that I mostly ignored and later found out she knew a thing or two.


“You wash your hair too much.”
(I know I do but I just like how it feels afterward.)


“Don’t brush your hair when it’s wet.”
(I always did and suffered the consequences.)


“If you don’t turn down that stereo you’re going to go deaf.”
(I do have a significant hearing loss in my right ear today, but probably not from that.)


“If you keep trying to make a point that you don’t believe in God by skipping communion, people are going to assume you’re the only fifteen year old in a permanent state of mortal sin.”
(I’m sure it was figured I was some sort of harlot.)


“Red isn’t your color.”
(Agreed, but the effect gets the job done when I want to make a point.)


 “Eat something!”
(No, I thought starvation was the key to happiness.)


“Laugh at the old days if you want but the style of my wedding dress will never be out of fashion.”
(True, it looked a lot like Kate Middleton’s did.)


“If you’re going to stay out all night looking for UFOs, lie back on the lounger, or you’ll get a stiff neck.”
(I could barely move my head the next day.)


“Honey, those heels are going to make you twist your ankle, and you won’t be able to play tennis.”
(I was off the courts for a week.)


 “That swimsuit is too big on you. Wear something else when you jump off the board while your friends are there.”
(That was the summer a couple neighborhood girls nicknamed me the Flash.)

“You worry too much about your grades. Are they going to matter when you’re thirty?”
(Why didn’t I listen…?)


 “No, I get the joke, but are you sure everyone at her baby shower will find plus-size lingerie a funny gift?”
(I have no comment.)


“Just make sure you can live down anything you write for other people to read.”
(D’oh!)


OK, enough Mom for now.

I been thinking that since astronomers tell us that in a mere five billion years the sun will become a red giant and consign the earth to fiery oblivion, it seems to me the only sane solution is for us to preemptively target the sun before it gets that chance.

Second contemplation: don’t eat Jello with fuzz growing on top.

Nocturnal endorsement: The early bird never catches nightcrawlers.


Want to read a strictly pathetic true story? Seriously, this account is just absolutely terrible, so if you want sunshine, ya might want to skip past this.

Still with me?

Well, OK. Where we lived in the ‘80s there was a man whose heroism in WW2 came at a staggering personal cost.

It seems this man whom we’d see limping along sidewalks was known locally because in some Pacific battle the Japanese tossed a grenade into his foxhole and he dove on it to save his buddies. The grenade though was defective and instead of blowing him apart it just mangled him and left him to spend years facing surgeries before coming home long after the war was over.


That’s hard enough, but the story that filtered down even to me as a child was that since the grenade had been defective, had it just gone off and he not thrown himself on it, it’s likely everyone in the foxhole would have come out in a lot better shape than he did with his bravery.


Imagine living with the knowledge that you destroyed your life for almost no reason.


The man’s face seemed fine but I saw he had a sort of padded belt tightened around his mid-section and walked with a cane.


Mom used to tell me, “Don’t stare at him…”


The fact he never married or had children leaves one involuntarily wondering exactly what areas of him took much of the blast.


I guess he’s dead now, that was 30 years ago, but sometimes that poor man comes back to haunt me, and I hope the fact that he did something heroic sustained him all those years.


Christie eleison.


By the way, did you know Jesus is thought to be the subject of more hours of film than any other human being?


Oh, me, oh, my.


Have you noticed how conspiracy-minded people are anymore? It’s like the inmates have taken over the asylum. There’s a video called ‘the note’ getting lots of views on YouTube that shows a note being passed around among Bush family members at the senior President Bush’s funeral, and some claim it is from the Illuminate promising Bush junior he’s to die next.


Why do they think this?


Me, I bet it says, “Hey, Laura, let’s get some Laotian tam after the funeral.”


More logical.


But I’m not going to tell the crazies they’re crazy, I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie. In fact the other day my dog was slumbering on the couch and I heard her say, “2+2=5.” I let it go.


How about I close with something no one else except you will likely ever read?


I recently tried to write a first-person “autobiography” about my grandpa, something I recently did to my satisfaction with two other men, and I failed utterly. There’s just something defeating in writing about your ancestors and I couldn’t get that Spruce Goose of an idea off the runway, though I did like the opening chapter out of the four or five I managed to compose, which read:


I never met the man who tried to kill me.

No, I never met him, never knew his name, never saw his face, just the human-shaped form of his rope-thin body as he sprang back through the blowing grass on a hillside in the middle of Korea. The bullet he fired passed above my left ear by the distance of a hand, maybe less, and though I hit the ground in a reflexive motion as unthought-out as the blinking of an eye, he was apparently not tempted to draw a bead and fire a second time. Others from my squad were around me, so no matter how bold my would-be killer was, he clearly weighed the odds and decided one shot fired for Mao and duty was enough, and he vanished back uphill in the chest-high growth that looked like wild wheat. Several of those around me fired uphill toward the spot where the Chinese man had been and where his flight was likely taking him, but when I rose again and together we low-crawled to the hill’s crest, we found neither our foe’s body nor a blood trail as evidence our return of fire drove home.

In a way I was glad, mostly later back home amid the safety of normal life was when I was glad, that day I didn’t spend time dwelling on the matter, just felt a vicious anger about the situation that gradually dulled that night in my sleeping bag and on many later nights there in Korea, to shock at how close it had been to the end of me, how I had been the one man out of all of us my unknown foe had sighted on, how he, probably without any deep-set malice in his heart, had tried to place a bullet in my head.

I don’t know when I first gave that nameless Chinese soldier the moniker Chang-wu, or even know what Chang-wu really means, but as my tour rolled on, days spent on the march down ancient muddy roads between villages, towns, nights behind lines in tent barracks taking our R&R, I found that at some point I had constructed an entire biography for that “yella fella” who had tried to snuff my life out so early. I figured he was not a bad sort, and didn’t give a flying damn about Communism, just one day he was tromping barefoot through some little hamlet beside a swampy rice field, and soldiers came and told him he was now in the army and was called on to fight for Chairman Mao, Socialism, and Mother China. Some months of misery and fear later, months in which he watched our side kill people he knew on his side, he found himself atop a hill and was startled to see a squad of US soldiers advancing with wary slowness toward him. Sick with adrenaline, Chang-wu dropped to a knee, pointed his decades-old rifle at the figure of one of the Americans---me—and as sweat leaked down his brow toward his squinting eyes, he clicked off a shot that very nearly took the life of a twenty-two-year-old from Cincinnati, Ohio: me.

Chang-wu felt the sting of spent adrenaline burning out and knew the danger he was in, so he ran back up the hillside of tall yellow weeds, and heard the flat smack of M1 bullets planting around him, kicking up the tan dirt, and with all his vigor he rushed down the hill’s far side, then crawled like a snake across the ground, probably praying to his ancestors that he remain unseen, and finally lay flat under some manner of cover maybe a few hundred yards beyond.

He’d have seen us looking for him, seen us scanning the surrounding valley with binoculars, so he would have held his breath, and barely blinked. He would have wondered how it was his round-eyed adversaries could not hear the slamming of his heart above his empty, concave belly. When we cussed and kicked the dirt and went on our way, one of us pausing to give an infamous one-finger gesture back behind him, he would have felt limp with relief that he would live at least that one more hour.

Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Chang-wu was no peasant conscript, maybe he was one of Mao’s professionals. The fact he eluded us hinted there may have been truth to that. As did the fact he seemed to go for a head shot when he popped off a round at me, not taking the safer target of the mid-section. Maybe instead of cringing and praying under whatever cover he found, he was glaring at us with eyes bright with hatred, wishing badly for the chance to fire at us and hoping we might divide and he’d have that chance, that chance to strike out against more Imperialist westerners, we capitalist goats who blocked Communism’s worldwide domination.

I’ll really never know any more than I’ll know his name or where he was from or what made him single me out instead of Douglas or Washington or any of the others I marched and bunked and messed with each day.

I do know how my version of Chang-wu’s story ends, and that is he returns home at war’s end, to his village in the marshy river bottom, greeted by his grandmother and parents and siblings, that he vows never to wear boots again, but to go barefoot so the gods of his valley might smile upon him and give him many sons, and there as he sloshes through his rice patties he finds a local girl whose shy attraction to him blossoms into love, that they marry and have those many sons together, and live to old ages, in peace.

Why would I hate an unknown soldier enough to wish it otherwise?


And there, having just put part of my failed “Grandpa’s Life Story Project” out there in his voice, retelling a tale he used to tell me, I’ll end this long post.

Namaste.

[Alex]

You do recall that I've already done a post that I'd to break up into three parts already (my Falklands opus).

But well done on your post. I promise I will read through it all.

[ER]

You do recall that I've already done a post that I'd to break up into three parts already (my Falklands opus).

But well done on your post. I promise I will read through it all.

Back to the drawing board. I'll write a longer one.

[Alex]

Lol, you can have the crown my dear. It is more of a tiara anyway.

[Allhallowsday]

Lol, you can have the crown my dear. It is more of a tiara anyway.

 ...and you look GREAT in it!    

I always admired the way Pope JOHN PAUL II honored the fugitive Pope before him.  

[ER]

Thanks for reading, John, however much you did read.

Which goes for anyone else as well.

[Trevor]

Thesepostsarestilltooshort 

[ER]

Thesepostsarestilltooshort 

Ithinksotoo.

[ER]

459 views for this Goliath of a post? Just wanted to say thank you.