Friday, August 28, 2009
Bama Rapture
One grand day, there will be a Bama Rapture, and everyone who is wearing any kind of an officially licensed Alabama Crimson Tide shirt (or outerwear) will mysteriously disappear, and be raised up bodily to heaven, to sit at the right hand of Bear Bryant.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Me and Jobs, Part 2
I am sometimes asked why I continue working for the State of Alabama, which has not been very friendly toward me as an employer. The fact is that in over seventeen years, they have been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to fire me on a whim.
I have worked at a place where I was fired because somebody's girlfriend needed a job. I have worked at a place where I was fired in order to cover up the fact that I was at work and someone else, who was supposed to be in charge, wasn't. I worked at a place where I insisted I was not going to work on Easter, and that they could not make me do so. I had big plans for the annual reverent double-feature of Jesus Christ Superstar and Monty Python's Life of Brian, with bread and red wine. Anyway, I didn't work, but I found out later that they had called in a coworker who had come straight in from the hospital emergency room, where she had been treated for a severe headache and double vision, and still had one pupil larger than the other at the time she went to work. And they made her work. And she went to work. I quit.
I worked for the United States Postal Service for eighty-nine days. I was what they called "probationary," meaning that I was only hired for ninety days, after which time they either rehired me on a permanent basis, or not. I was put straight to work as a front window clerk, apparently due to my history of dealing with a hostile public at the food stamp office, which I had quit to work for USPS. I was told that I had one of the highest scores ever recorded for the window clerk's exam. I was also evaluated about once a week, and the evaluations I got were uniformly laudatory in the highest degree, although I was assigned a station with no postage meter and no money order machine, which slowed my performance considerably. I was also not required to work more than 6 hours in a two-week pay period, other than my training period, since the position was technically "part-time." I had been told that everyone in this position nevertheless worked forty-hour weeks, and, other than myself, everyone did. I worked six hours one time. I would have been in trouble if I hadn't withdrawn my retirement from the food stamp office, as I was living on it. My final evaluation stated that I did not like the job, had no interest in doing it, and was unable to do it. I was literally escorted out the back door when it was discovered that if I came to work one more day, I would be hired permanently. I eventually came to the conclusion that there was more than one political faction at work there, and that I had become caught between them. You could call me a disgruntled former postal worker. Unlike some of the breed, I subsumed my anger by refusing to pass within blocks of the post office at which I had worked for the next four or five years.
Following my exit from the USPS, unemployment benefits until they ran out, and a desperate search for work, I was contacted by a friend who offered me a job he said he knew I wouldn't like. It was telemarketing, cold-calling unsuspecting companies and trying to sell them advertising in a publication that did not yet exist. He was right; I did not want it, but desperation won out. The operation was bankrolled on such a shoestring that, every payday, all the employees were in a race to the bank that the paychecks were drawn on, knowing that the last few to get there were as likely as not to be holding a worthless check. I was laid off in a round of belt-tightening, and didn't much mind.
A stint with Kelly Temporary Services, for whose local office I have nothing but praise (at least in the late Eighties), led to my working for the State of Alabama again. This is not what you would call an employee-friendly workplace, but seventeen years of steady paychecks - and raises! - tell the story. There may be many private employers out there who would hire me in a minute, treat me like a valuable commodity, pay me well, and keep me working for them until we cried in each others' arms at parting. But the odds just don't look that good from here.
I have worked at a place where I was fired because somebody's girlfriend needed a job. I have worked at a place where I was fired in order to cover up the fact that I was at work and someone else, who was supposed to be in charge, wasn't. I worked at a place where I insisted I was not going to work on Easter, and that they could not make me do so. I had big plans for the annual reverent double-feature of Jesus Christ Superstar and Monty Python's Life of Brian, with bread and red wine. Anyway, I didn't work, but I found out later that they had called in a coworker who had come straight in from the hospital emergency room, where she had been treated for a severe headache and double vision, and still had one pupil larger than the other at the time she went to work. And they made her work. And she went to work. I quit.
I worked for the United States Postal Service for eighty-nine days. I was what they called "probationary," meaning that I was only hired for ninety days, after which time they either rehired me on a permanent basis, or not. I was put straight to work as a front window clerk, apparently due to my history of dealing with a hostile public at the food stamp office, which I had quit to work for USPS. I was told that I had one of the highest scores ever recorded for the window clerk's exam. I was also evaluated about once a week, and the evaluations I got were uniformly laudatory in the highest degree, although I was assigned a station with no postage meter and no money order machine, which slowed my performance considerably. I was also not required to work more than 6 hours in a two-week pay period, other than my training period, since the position was technically "part-time." I had been told that everyone in this position nevertheless worked forty-hour weeks, and, other than myself, everyone did. I worked six hours one time. I would have been in trouble if I hadn't withdrawn my retirement from the food stamp office, as I was living on it. My final evaluation stated that I did not like the job, had no interest in doing it, and was unable to do it. I was literally escorted out the back door when it was discovered that if I came to work one more day, I would be hired permanently. I eventually came to the conclusion that there was more than one political faction at work there, and that I had become caught between them. You could call me a disgruntled former postal worker. Unlike some of the breed, I subsumed my anger by refusing to pass within blocks of the post office at which I had worked for the next four or five years.
Following my exit from the USPS, unemployment benefits until they ran out, and a desperate search for work, I was contacted by a friend who offered me a job he said he knew I wouldn't like. It was telemarketing, cold-calling unsuspecting companies and trying to sell them advertising in a publication that did not yet exist. He was right; I did not want it, but desperation won out. The operation was bankrolled on such a shoestring that, every payday, all the employees were in a race to the bank that the paychecks were drawn on, knowing that the last few to get there were as likely as not to be holding a worthless check. I was laid off in a round of belt-tightening, and didn't much mind.
A stint with Kelly Temporary Services, for whose local office I have nothing but praise (at least in the late Eighties), led to my working for the State of Alabama again. This is not what you would call an employee-friendly workplace, but seventeen years of steady paychecks - and raises! - tell the story. There may be many private employers out there who would hire me in a minute, treat me like a valuable commodity, pay me well, and keep me working for them until we cried in each others' arms at parting. But the odds just don't look that good from here.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Sheer Pottery II
Poor fool, I
To throw my soul upon the beach
Beyond reach of the waves,
To look hope into the sky
And get blue in my eyes.
Why catch fireflies?
They only glow, and die away
Cold and green and a little weird.
Best not to jar them.
Leave them starring the night,
Black and cold and a little weird,
Distant as the fixed stars,
Frigid as the moon.
Poor fool, I
Following footsteps out the door
And across the grass,
To look dark into the sky
And get stars in my eyes.
To throw my soul upon the beach
Beyond reach of the waves,
To look hope into the sky
And get blue in my eyes.
Why catch fireflies?
They only glow, and die away
Cold and green and a little weird.
Best not to jar them.
Leave them starring the night,
Black and cold and a little weird,
Distant as the fixed stars,
Frigid as the moon.
Poor fool, I
Following footsteps out the door
And across the grass,
To look dark into the sky
And get stars in my eyes.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Sheer Pottery I
Enchanted moon,
I should have known that very soon
You and I would be no more.
No bond between us, no one had seen us
Dance beneath the old enchanted moon.
Enchanted moon,
Lighting up the rain, never hinting of the pain
Filling up the days and weeks like water in the lakes and creeks
Illumined by the old enchanted moon.
Enchanted moon
Hanging in the sky forlorn
I realized when I cried alone
In the southwest sky sits a cold white stone
In place of the old enchanted moon.
I should have known that very soon
You and I would be no more.
No bond between us, no one had seen us
Dance beneath the old enchanted moon.
Enchanted moon,
Lighting up the rain, never hinting of the pain
Filling up the days and weeks like water in the lakes and creeks
Illumined by the old enchanted moon.
Enchanted moon
Hanging in the sky forlorn
I realized when I cried alone
In the southwest sky sits a cold white stone
In place of the old enchanted moon.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Jesus and The Joint Commission
I work at a state mental hospital, which means that we are chronically underfunded, short of staff and behind the state of the art. I am in the medical records department, known as Health Information Management, apparently to throw people off. (This is, though, an industry-wide title.) At the moment, the requirements by The Joint Commission (formerly known as the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Care Organizations) for monitoring of medical records has become so onerous that it is increasingly difficult for the traditional, routine and necessary work of the medical records department to be done efficiently and on time. There is simply not enough staff or time for both horribly complicated and arcane businesses to be done by this one department. The atmosphere is increasingly desperate, proportionate to the desperation of the situation, and it seems that the only solution hoped for by now is that Jesus Christ will come back before things become impossible.
There is a parking space in front of our building which reads, "Reserved for HIM." One day, my dad brought me back from lunch, and asked, "reserved for him? Who's he?" I told my dad that most of the people I worked with were true believers and thought that He would be coming back any minute. Apparently. He would be needing a spot to park His SUV.
One can only hope Gabriel's trumpet sounds before TJC's does.
There is a parking space in front of our building which reads, "Reserved for HIM." One day, my dad brought me back from lunch, and asked, "reserved for him? Who's he?" I told my dad that most of the people I worked with were true believers and thought that He would be coming back any minute. Apparently. He would be needing a spot to park His SUV.
One can only hope Gabriel's trumpet sounds before TJC's does.
Friday, June 19, 2009
What I Learned In School
One of the most important things I learned in school, and one that it took all the way through elementary school to get through my head, was not to get ahead. Reading ahead in the book to learn what was coming next was strictly forbidden. Even next week's arithmetic problems and spelling words were dangerous territory. Pages or chapters were assigned, and the end of the assignment meant you stopped there, or else.
Even more of a horror was to learn things that weren't even part of the curriculum for theentire school year. This was a major problem for me, with my sister who was over a year older than I was, and who was a year, and, later, two years ahead of me in school. The problem with my sister was that she liked to teach me what she knew, presumably so we'd both know it. I enjoyed learning what she knew and soaked it up as fast as she could put it out there. I'm told she taught herself to read at the age of three, and taught me when I was no older than four. This caused me no end of problems when I was supposed to have been learning to read and would rather have been reading, which was not on the agenda.
I was very proud of what I knew for the first several years, and I didn't know any better than to march right into the classroom and demonstrate my new knowledge for all to see. The connection between said demonstrations and the time I spent sitting on the bench in the hallway of my elementary school remains vague to me, even now.
Another thing I learned in school was that my word was good for absolutely nothing, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the statement of a peer. This lesson was learned early and painfully, as part of the general "Life is not fair" lesson that I'm still trying without success to find a way around.
Having moved some six hundred miles away from my parents' hometown and all our relatives, I did not see much of my grandparents, and I felt this lack keenly as a child. One year at Christmas, my mother's parents drove down and stayed for several days, bringing what in memory seem to be some rather odd Christmas presents. Anything from my beloved relatives was a treasure, however, and when I found that a missing pencil I had received from my grandparents had turned up in the possession of some kid in my class, I knew that I had to have it back. I pointed out to the teacher that the kid had my pencil, which in retrospect must not have seemed like such a big deal to her. I was not at all articulate and unable to express the overwhelming feelings I had at times; much less to make rational, Perry Mason-like legal arguments back in those days, and I can't recall what I said to the teacher; but she was not impressed. The kid, for whatever reason, claimed the pencil as his. "He says it's his," the teacher said, and that was the end of that. It was useless, had I done it, to point out that the pencil in question was gaily decorated with red, white and blue elephants and the legend, "McLean County Republican Committee," and that Alabama has no McLean County. My gift had left my possession forever.
This lesson has been reinforced again and again, as my best arguments and my most logical reasoning have been put forth against the flimsiest of excuses for withholding from me what I have earned. It doesn't matter what I say, what evidence I have, what obvious lies have been set against me. "It's the pencil all over again," I think.
Even more of a horror was to learn things that weren't even part of the curriculum for theentire school year. This was a major problem for me, with my sister who was over a year older than I was, and who was a year, and, later, two years ahead of me in school. The problem with my sister was that she liked to teach me what she knew, presumably so we'd both know it. I enjoyed learning what she knew and soaked it up as fast as she could put it out there. I'm told she taught herself to read at the age of three, and taught me when I was no older than four. This caused me no end of problems when I was supposed to have been learning to read and would rather have been reading, which was not on the agenda.
I was very proud of what I knew for the first several years, and I didn't know any better than to march right into the classroom and demonstrate my new knowledge for all to see. The connection between said demonstrations and the time I spent sitting on the bench in the hallway of my elementary school remains vague to me, even now.
Another thing I learned in school was that my word was good for absolutely nothing, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the statement of a peer. This lesson was learned early and painfully, as part of the general "Life is not fair" lesson that I'm still trying without success to find a way around.
Having moved some six hundred miles away from my parents' hometown and all our relatives, I did not see much of my grandparents, and I felt this lack keenly as a child. One year at Christmas, my mother's parents drove down and stayed for several days, bringing what in memory seem to be some rather odd Christmas presents. Anything from my beloved relatives was a treasure, however, and when I found that a missing pencil I had received from my grandparents had turned up in the possession of some kid in my class, I knew that I had to have it back. I pointed out to the teacher that the kid had my pencil, which in retrospect must not have seemed like such a big deal to her. I was not at all articulate and unable to express the overwhelming feelings I had at times; much less to make rational, Perry Mason-like legal arguments back in those days, and I can't recall what I said to the teacher; but she was not impressed. The kid, for whatever reason, claimed the pencil as his. "He says it's his," the teacher said, and that was the end of that. It was useless, had I done it, to point out that the pencil in question was gaily decorated with red, white and blue elephants and the legend, "McLean County Republican Committee," and that Alabama has no McLean County. My gift had left my possession forever.
This lesson has been reinforced again and again, as my best arguments and my most logical reasoning have been put forth against the flimsiest of excuses for withholding from me what I have earned. It doesn't matter what I say, what evidence I have, what obvious lies have been set against me. "It's the pencil all over again," I think.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Genius
I have given a lot of thought to genius, since I am commonly thought to possess it. There are two kinds of genius ordinarily recognized: scientific/mathematical genius (the "Rain Man" type of idiot-savant genius falls into this category, as well), and the artistic genius. Mad, or evil geniuses who conceive of brilliant plots to overtake the world will be dealt with in comic books and unreasonably popular novels. (This reminds me of the animal known as the political genius, but if that's considered genius, I'll lump it with the artistic category, since politics is an art, like any other form of theater.)
My claim to genius is based on a Stanford-Binet IQ test which I took at the age of seven years and some months, on which I achieved a frighteningly high score. Neither my parents nor I, nor probably my school, was given the result at the time, and it was twenty years before I got the result. However, I contend that my score is just another example of my talent for taking tests, which served me well all the way through college, and kept me from flunking out on more than one occasion, due to my refusal to do homework or to turn in any papers with which I wasn't completely satisfied. Another example I like to use is the advanced-placement math test I took at the beginning of my freshman year at the University of Alabama. Back at that time, I was still able to recognize the first problem on the test as a quadratic equation, although for the life of me, I couldn't remember what one was supposed to do with it. Looking forward, I could see that the math problems just got harder from there - and I had quite sensibly quit math completely after Algebra I. So I entertained myself by using the #2 pencil to fill in the A, B, C and D answers in a nice, aesthetic pattern, and turned in the test. I ended up with a percentile somewhere in the low nineties. I conclude that there is just no way I can miss with tests, which is how I ended up working as a flunky in a State job, where a high test score was at least supposed to help give one preference for a job.
So much for genius. And so much for genius, a brilliant education and a well-paying job.
It's hard to be humble about being a genius when you have nothing you could have bragged about if you had chosen to do so. If I'm told how smart I am (which I am all the time, sometimes as a dire threat), I don't go immediately into blushing, aw-shucks, toe-kicking-at-the-dirt mode. After all, what's the rest of the sentence? If you so smart, why ain't you rich? Look, folks, it's not all that entertaining to sit around thinking about how brilliant you are. It tends to always lead back to, "so what?" Genius + talent, good. Genius + entreprenurial drive, good. Genius + an overwhelming desire to take over the world for evil purposes? Well, it might get you a movie, at least.
I have to admit, I do have a very good brain. I get a lot of answers on Jeopardy. Before various medications started in with their side effects, I had a prodigious memory. I have an innate sense of systems. That is, I can figure out with a very few clues patterns in how things are set up, and understand why they are set up that way, which helps a lot with clerical work. It's not really a talent that is easily described to a potential employer.
I have also worked for small businessmen who were very happy to have me working for them, because I am flexible enough that I was able to take care of all their business for them. Unfortunately, I also knew about all their business, and if there's anything a businessman doesn't want, it's some woman he doesn't even know, knowing everything about his business.
It probably takes a certain kind of talent for a woman to be smart and dumb at the same time. I suspect it's something that Southern women may have been taught better than their sisters from the north were, Scarlett O'Hara being somehow my mental picture of a woman talented at being both.
So, what is genius if it is not scientific or artistic? Does it count? Is the concept too vague even to grasp? And is it significant that genius has the masculine Latin ending? Close your eyes, and when I say, "Genius," what does he look like? Whatever happened to all the geniae out there? If I called myself a genia, nobody would know what I meant. I don't think it's a silly feminist point, either; I think it's telling.
When I was in elementary school and had my IQ tested, I thought it would be great to be an astronaut. The space race was on, and the astronaut program was all over the news. I don't think I ever thought seriously it could happen to me, though. I didn't have any particular ambition toward any kind of career, and none was encouraged by the schools i went to. In fact, I was punished for reading ahead in my school books when I got bored, reading books for pleasure when I was supposed to be back with the rest of the class, or letting on that my older sister was teaching me what she learned in her class.
When I was in seventh grade, we had some kind of independent-reading program introduced. Students would read certain essays and answer questions, and when their answers had been approved by the teachers, they would get to go on to reading essays at the next grade level. Of course, I flew through all the levels and had to wait for a teacher's attention so that I could get passed and be handed the work for the next grade. I still remember the disappointment I felt when the program ended and I could not get a teacher to pass me on the 12th-grade level, so that I could say I had run the entire program. It was such a small thing, but it was so important to me, and entirely meaningless to them.
I suppose I could say the same lack of encouragement continued all through my career as a student; when I was at the University of Alabama, I often cut classes (which were generally so large or run by graduate students so uninterested that no one knew whether I was supposed to be there), and graduated with a B average. An unstructured curriculum left me to wander by myself, but I'm still convinced that a structured one would have seen me drop out, rather than being lined up like a good little magnetized iron filing and sent into a willing job market.
Genius is only worth what it's worth. A pretty face or a membership in "the lucky sperm club" might get you farther. It might keep you warm at night if you are the kind of person who's kept warm by something like that. In today's world, the more brains you have and the more attention you pay, the more cynical you're likely to become. The ability to be philosophical may be worth more than anything else.
My claim to genius is based on a Stanford-Binet IQ test which I took at the age of seven years and some months, on which I achieved a frighteningly high score. Neither my parents nor I, nor probably my school, was given the result at the time, and it was twenty years before I got the result. However, I contend that my score is just another example of my talent for taking tests, which served me well all the way through college, and kept me from flunking out on more than one occasion, due to my refusal to do homework or to turn in any papers with which I wasn't completely satisfied. Another example I like to use is the advanced-placement math test I took at the beginning of my freshman year at the University of Alabama. Back at that time, I was still able to recognize the first problem on the test as a quadratic equation, although for the life of me, I couldn't remember what one was supposed to do with it. Looking forward, I could see that the math problems just got harder from there - and I had quite sensibly quit math completely after Algebra I. So I entertained myself by using the #2 pencil to fill in the A, B, C and D answers in a nice, aesthetic pattern, and turned in the test. I ended up with a percentile somewhere in the low nineties. I conclude that there is just no way I can miss with tests, which is how I ended up working as a flunky in a State job, where a high test score was at least supposed to help give one preference for a job.
So much for genius. And so much for genius, a brilliant education and a well-paying job.
It's hard to be humble about being a genius when you have nothing you could have bragged about if you had chosen to do so. If I'm told how smart I am (which I am all the time, sometimes as a dire threat), I don't go immediately into blushing, aw-shucks, toe-kicking-at-the-dirt mode. After all, what's the rest of the sentence? If you so smart, why ain't you rich? Look, folks, it's not all that entertaining to sit around thinking about how brilliant you are. It tends to always lead back to, "so what?" Genius + talent, good. Genius + entreprenurial drive, good. Genius + an overwhelming desire to take over the world for evil purposes? Well, it might get you a movie, at least.
I have to admit, I do have a very good brain. I get a lot of answers on Jeopardy. Before various medications started in with their side effects, I had a prodigious memory. I have an innate sense of systems. That is, I can figure out with a very few clues patterns in how things are set up, and understand why they are set up that way, which helps a lot with clerical work. It's not really a talent that is easily described to a potential employer.
I have also worked for small businessmen who were very happy to have me working for them, because I am flexible enough that I was able to take care of all their business for them. Unfortunately, I also knew about all their business, and if there's anything a businessman doesn't want, it's some woman he doesn't even know, knowing everything about his business.
It probably takes a certain kind of talent for a woman to be smart and dumb at the same time. I suspect it's something that Southern women may have been taught better than their sisters from the north were, Scarlett O'Hara being somehow my mental picture of a woman talented at being both.
So, what is genius if it is not scientific or artistic? Does it count? Is the concept too vague even to grasp? And is it significant that genius has the masculine Latin ending? Close your eyes, and when I say, "Genius," what does he look like? Whatever happened to all the geniae out there? If I called myself a genia, nobody would know what I meant. I don't think it's a silly feminist point, either; I think it's telling.
When I was in elementary school and had my IQ tested, I thought it would be great to be an astronaut. The space race was on, and the astronaut program was all over the news. I don't think I ever thought seriously it could happen to me, though. I didn't have any particular ambition toward any kind of career, and none was encouraged by the schools i went to. In fact, I was punished for reading ahead in my school books when I got bored, reading books for pleasure when I was supposed to be back with the rest of the class, or letting on that my older sister was teaching me what she learned in her class.
When I was in seventh grade, we had some kind of independent-reading program introduced. Students would read certain essays and answer questions, and when their answers had been approved by the teachers, they would get to go on to reading essays at the next grade level. Of course, I flew through all the levels and had to wait for a teacher's attention so that I could get passed and be handed the work for the next grade. I still remember the disappointment I felt when the program ended and I could not get a teacher to pass me on the 12th-grade level, so that I could say I had run the entire program. It was such a small thing, but it was so important to me, and entirely meaningless to them.
I suppose I could say the same lack of encouragement continued all through my career as a student; when I was at the University of Alabama, I often cut classes (which were generally so large or run by graduate students so uninterested that no one knew whether I was supposed to be there), and graduated with a B average. An unstructured curriculum left me to wander by myself, but I'm still convinced that a structured one would have seen me drop out, rather than being lined up like a good little magnetized iron filing and sent into a willing job market.
Genius is only worth what it's worth. A pretty face or a membership in "the lucky sperm club" might get you farther. It might keep you warm at night if you are the kind of person who's kept warm by something like that. In today's world, the more brains you have and the more attention you pay, the more cynical you're likely to become. The ability to be philosophical may be worth more than anything else.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Me and The Kinks
I always liked the Kinks, although I didn't realize it until later. I was seven when "You Really Got Me" came out on the radio, going on eight, and I already loved pop music, paid attention to it, and remembered what I liked. I noticed the Beatles much more than the Kinks at the time, naturally. Everybody did, after all. Their songs were bigger, and they were all over the TV. And I loved the Beatles. I remember going to the movie theater in August (I think?) of 1965, when I was eight, with my Beatles-worshipping friend Debbie, to see Help, and sitting through the whole magical experience twice! Not only that, but Debbie had a little record player, and got enough money from her parents to buy 45's. She had some Beatles singles, a copy of the Stones' "Get Off My Cloud," and even an album, the Beatles' Second Album, which she slept with under her pillow. I swear, though, that I read a magazine article in LIFE, or LOOK, or one of the magazines that everyone in America subscribed to at the time that amazed me. It told of a pop group in England that was more popular there than the Beatles were, and was headed by a pair of brothers whose name I couldn't remember (Davis?). What intrigued me was that our two cultures could be so different that with Beatlemania in full swing here, somebody could be even more popular back in England, the very home of the Beatles. I wanted to hear what these guys sounded like. But I didn't pursue it at the time.
This is the point in the story where years pass.
It was in 1970 or 1971 that the Kinks re-entered my life, in a big way. I knew that "Lola" was by the Kinks, and I liked that song a lot. But I don't remember where its period of heavy radio play fell in relation to my introduction to Timothy Ray Reed (later to be known in music circles as the Reverend Fred Lane and art circles as T.R. Reed, Artiste Deluxe). Tim was at that time the significant other of a close friend of mine, and we ended up at his house one evening, an interesting experience in itself. Tim not only played The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society while we were there, but also Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot, which I surprised myself by finding I kinda liked. (Creepy organ music here, foreshadowing the re-entrance of the Captain into my life several years later, at the hands of the person with whom I would have a 30-year relationship, ultimately disastrous.)
Anyway, the next day at school, I could not get the songs from VGPS, which I had heard once, out of my mind. They played over and over until I had to buy the album for relief. Later, Mr. Reed graciously lent me his own copy of Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part 1, allowing the even more infectious songs on that album to take over my mind completely. I treated that LP like gold. It was no small thing to be trusted with a disc from Tim's bizarre and varied collection.
Lola vs. Powerman. I learned about the Kinks from that album. After I got my own copy, I played it as much as my sister allowed. (Only her records in her hearing when she was at home.) Listening to it today, I accept that the songs are in my DNA. I realized for the first time that there were two different people singing on this record, for instance; one lower and one higher voice. Usually they sang in harmony, but sometimes Higher Voice would sing lead, and I particularly liked those songs. Kinda like George Harrison with the Beatles.
I had no social life when I was in junior high and high school; I did my homework or produced massive art projects for my own satisfaction while listening to records which I bought with the scanty proceeds from occasional babysitting jobs. I took a trip to Mexico with my 10th grade Spanish class early in 1972 (also fairly disastrous); the first day or so was spent on a bus. Being isolated, I sat back with my eyes closed and played L vs. P, note for note, lick for lick, in my head. Over and over, in fact. Repetition and memory are said by neurological science to create new pathways in your brain; there is a Lola versus Powerman Boulevard in mine. It remains my favorite Kinks album by a small margin, and not just for the fond memories, though they can't be separated. It's the strength of the songs and the way they flow together.
Naturally, the next thing I did was to buy up the Kinks back catalogue and the new albums as they came out. I found one or two of the very oldest albums in the original mono, in clearance bins, at clearance prices. It took me the longest to find Face to Face. I guess it was scarce because "Sunny Afternoon" was a big enough hit that the pressing almost sold out, but not a big enough hit to justify pressing any more copies. It wasn't me, but the same older sister who located it in a 25-cent clearance box at a store somewhere and bought the only copy. Naturally, she couldn't sell it to me for that price, or even give it to me; no, she held out for the current price for a new album, the total four dollars. She knew she had me over a barrel. I think she was egged on by her evil boyfriend of the time; it was he who, in 1973, told me that Ray Davies had quit the Kinks (by which time he had probably already come back), and left me dangling, wondering if Preservation was ever going to have a Part 2, and not knowing what ultimately had happened until many years later!
I was turning into a serious fanatic by this time. I lurked in magazine stores and record shops, searching for articles, or even a mention, of the Kinks, or anything remotely related. I confused all my high-school classmates by writing "God Save the Village Green" in their yearbooks. I hung out in the University of Alabama library, using their state-of-the-art research facilities (don't laugh, children): the card catalogue for books, and the set of booklets that came out every year indexing magazine articles; looking for past mentions of the Kinks. I was looking for that article I had read about the band more popular in England than the Beatles, but it proved to be a chimera. I Xeroxed article after article when I did locate them: Billboard, Variety, the BBC Listener. (I did run across some great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bits that way, too.) I began writing letters to the Kinks, although I didn't have any reliable addresses, and I never got any replies, not so much as a returned letter.
Meanwhile, back at radio station WTBC, 1230 AM in Tuscaloosa, I was making myself a reputation as the Kinks Lady of Northport (Northport being the suburb where I lived with my parents.) When I got tired of sitting by myself and listening to my records, late at night, I turned on the radio, and (pop AM radio still being listenable back then, and DJs in person still sitting by the phone), I called up the station and talk to whatever jock was on the air, asking them to play something by the Kinks. I began to notice, after a while, that they enjoyed talking to me, usually about music. I figured that I probably had more brains and better taste than the average teenybopper, but I figure being a young female who had a nice voice probably didn't hurt, either, when the guys were out there at night. Pretty soon, they all were calling me the Kinks Lady. WTBC had an Oldies hour at lunchtime with a particular favorite DJ of mine, and I'd call him on a pay phone (no cells!!!), and of course he had more latitude to play old records during that hour. He was reliable about playing old Kinks singles between noon and one. And when Schoolboys In Disgrace came out, I even caught a DJ playing the single "for the Kinks Lady" when I happened to have the radio on.
Now, remember: I was in college by this time, but I did not drive a car. I had barely enough money for records, stamps and copies. I lived in Alabama, and the Kinks did not play here. They didn't even wave as they passed by. I had no way of knowing where they will be playing, or when. I could't say I was the biggest Kinks fan in the world because I had been to all their concerts, because I hadn't the resources. However. I was by this time caught up in an extremely serious undiagnosed case of depression. I was not going to class; sometimes I didn't even recognize what class I was supposed to be in. Preservation Act 2 had come out, and this is what I did: I would stack the two LPs on my record player. I played them, turned them over, played them and turned them over again. I listened to Act 2 all the time. I have it better memorized than Lola vs. Powerman, even.
I talked to the disk jockeys. I mailed letters. One day, I found the address for Konk studios. Aha! I wrote a letter care of Konk, and got back a nice letter from a Kinks assistant, with a promotional Act 2 button enclosed. This is the closest I ever got to making contact by mail.
Since the last time I turned over the two LPs of Preservation Act 2, I've been afraid to hear it again. The Kinks have truly been the background music of my life for 40 years, but, like the particularly evocative background music for a movie that so shocked or moved you that you just can't watch it again, I just can't bear to find out what hearing that album would do to me today.
In the spring of 1975, I learned that the Kinks were going to play in Memphis, Tennessee. Of the few tour dates I'd managed to find out about, this was far and away the closest to me. I began to cook up a plot with my buddy and Kinks Konvert, Arlene. She was away at 2-year college with a sympathetic music fan who had a car and drove (which neither of us did), and relatives she wanted to visit in Corinth, Mississippi. We scraped together enough cash for round-trip bus fare from Corinth to Memphis, and for a cheap motel.
Upon arriving, we checked in at the across-from-the-bus-station seedy motel and hiked through the worst part of downtown, to the few renovated blocks where the concert venue was located. Along the way, we encountered a colorful group of the Children of God religious cult, who heard our story and informed us that our dedication to a cause would make us valuable members of their congregation. Amazingly, on the day of the show, we bought tickets at the window and landed on the 11th row on the floor. The Kinks were touring with A Soap Opera, with half the show the amazing theatrical from that album, and half of it a regular Kinks concert. It was unreal, one of the most incredible, happiest experiences of my life. My hands were red and swollen, and my throat was sore from screaming and singing along, the next day. We even managed to get a hamburger between us at the bus station cafe, with the key deposit we'd had to pay at the seedy motel since we'd had no luggage.
It had been especially enlightening to walk back through deepest downtown Memphis late, when the concert was over. Arlene and I hesitated for a moment, deciding which way to turn, and were stopped by a vision. A golden car, carrying golden ladies, dressed in gold, with gold makeup and fingernails and hair. The nearest one spoke to us and said, "Y'all workin' girls?" "No!" we said, and immediately chose a direction in which to stride off purposefully, which fortunately happened to be the correct one. Certainly not any competition for you, honey! I seem to recall that we had hesitated in front of an X-rated theater, so it was just as well that the ladies in gold had come along when they had.
(Thirty-one years almost to the month later, Arlene, my Kinks Kohort, and I went to see Ray Davies in Atlanta on his Other People's Lives tour. We enjoyed ourselves, and clapped and hollered and jumped up and down and whooped just as much as we had in Memphis in 1975. It was almost a flashback. And every bit as much fun.)
On the other hand, we went to Atlanta in my car.
I saw the Kinks again, in Atlanta in 1978, in the (fabulous) Fox Theater. They were touring behind Misfits at the time, and had both Blondie and Tom Petty opening for them. I don't remember this concert nearly as clearly nor as fondly as the earlier one. The sound was horrible. We were up in a far corner of the auditorium, and I don't know if that made it worse. A friend who was with me kept going down and begging the sound man to do something, to no avail. I can't even remember what the Kinks played, only that Debbie Harry kept pulling her dress up and Tom Petty kept tossing his hair. What you have to do to get attention when you're not the headliner!
I kept buying the Kinks' albums - and the 12" extended disco single of "Wish I Could Fly Like Superman" - for a while. I think the last LP I had was Give The People What They Want. But in the very late 70s and early 80s, I began to hear music that didn't sound like anything else I had ever heard: reggae, ska, New Wave. The Kinks were playing music by this time that not only sounded depressingly similar to what everybody else was playing, but not as good, as far as I could tell, as what they had played before. To someone who was just discovering their newer music, they might sound really innovative compared to, say, Journey; but to me, they weren't creating magical, fresh songs that stuck in my head and wouldn't go away. I couldn't tell you who played on their last few albums, what label they were on, what songs were on what album, or whether they only came out on cassette tape and 8-track. Elvis Costello has given Ray Davies great props as a songwriter - but, by that time, I had rather listen to Elvis Costello.
Whether or not I'm listening to Kinks music, it's in the back of my mind. Whatever other music I love, and I love a lot of music, the Kinks are the soundtrack to my life. It won't do just to say they are special or precious. They and their music, the whole concept of them, everything about them, has meant so much to me for so long, that it's impossible to think of how I as a person could exist without them, who I would be without them. They saturate my existence. I am no longer the obsessed fan that I once was; now, I and they are more like an old couple who have been married for untold years.
I first noticed Dave Davies singing, "Truly, oh, truly, there is nothing in this life without your love," and it sounded almost exactly as if he were saying, "Julie, oh, Julie." In one of my favorite songs of Dave's, he sings, "Truly, truly, trust your heart." My ex-husband heard that and said, "Is he saying 'Julie'?" I prefer to think so. That's why I always sign myself
Truly Julie
This is the point in the story where years pass.
It was in 1970 or 1971 that the Kinks re-entered my life, in a big way. I knew that "Lola" was by the Kinks, and I liked that song a lot. But I don't remember where its period of heavy radio play fell in relation to my introduction to Timothy Ray Reed (later to be known in music circles as the Reverend Fred Lane and art circles as T.R. Reed, Artiste Deluxe). Tim was at that time the significant other of a close friend of mine, and we ended up at his house one evening, an interesting experience in itself. Tim not only played The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society while we were there, but also Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot, which I surprised myself by finding I kinda liked. (Creepy organ music here, foreshadowing the re-entrance of the Captain into my life several years later, at the hands of the person with whom I would have a 30-year relationship, ultimately disastrous.)
Anyway, the next day at school, I could not get the songs from VGPS, which I had heard once, out of my mind. They played over and over until I had to buy the album for relief. Later, Mr. Reed graciously lent me his own copy of Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part 1, allowing the even more infectious songs on that album to take over my mind completely. I treated that LP like gold. It was no small thing to be trusted with a disc from Tim's bizarre and varied collection.
Lola vs. Powerman. I learned about the Kinks from that album. After I got my own copy, I played it as much as my sister allowed. (Only her records in her hearing when she was at home.) Listening to it today, I accept that the songs are in my DNA. I realized for the first time that there were two different people singing on this record, for instance; one lower and one higher voice. Usually they sang in harmony, but sometimes Higher Voice would sing lead, and I particularly liked those songs. Kinda like George Harrison with the Beatles.
I had no social life when I was in junior high and high school; I did my homework or produced massive art projects for my own satisfaction while listening to records which I bought with the scanty proceeds from occasional babysitting jobs. I took a trip to Mexico with my 10th grade Spanish class early in 1972 (also fairly disastrous); the first day or so was spent on a bus. Being isolated, I sat back with my eyes closed and played L vs. P, note for note, lick for lick, in my head. Over and over, in fact. Repetition and memory are said by neurological science to create new pathways in your brain; there is a Lola versus Powerman Boulevard in mine. It remains my favorite Kinks album by a small margin, and not just for the fond memories, though they can't be separated. It's the strength of the songs and the way they flow together.
Naturally, the next thing I did was to buy up the Kinks back catalogue and the new albums as they came out. I found one or two of the very oldest albums in the original mono, in clearance bins, at clearance prices. It took me the longest to find Face to Face. I guess it was scarce because "Sunny Afternoon" was a big enough hit that the pressing almost sold out, but not a big enough hit to justify pressing any more copies. It wasn't me, but the same older sister who located it in a 25-cent clearance box at a store somewhere and bought the only copy. Naturally, she couldn't sell it to me for that price, or even give it to me; no, she held out for the current price for a new album, the total four dollars. She knew she had me over a barrel. I think she was egged on by her evil boyfriend of the time; it was he who, in 1973, told me that Ray Davies had quit the Kinks (by which time he had probably already come back), and left me dangling, wondering if Preservation was ever going to have a Part 2, and not knowing what ultimately had happened until many years later!
I was turning into a serious fanatic by this time. I lurked in magazine stores and record shops, searching for articles, or even a mention, of the Kinks, or anything remotely related. I confused all my high-school classmates by writing "God Save the Village Green" in their yearbooks. I hung out in the University of Alabama library, using their state-of-the-art research facilities (don't laugh, children): the card catalogue for books, and the set of booklets that came out every year indexing magazine articles; looking for past mentions of the Kinks. I was looking for that article I had read about the band more popular in England than the Beatles, but it proved to be a chimera. I Xeroxed article after article when I did locate them: Billboard, Variety, the BBC Listener. (I did run across some great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bits that way, too.) I began writing letters to the Kinks, although I didn't have any reliable addresses, and I never got any replies, not so much as a returned letter.
Meanwhile, back at radio station WTBC, 1230 AM in Tuscaloosa, I was making myself a reputation as the Kinks Lady of Northport (Northport being the suburb where I lived with my parents.) When I got tired of sitting by myself and listening to my records, late at night, I turned on the radio, and (pop AM radio still being listenable back then, and DJs in person still sitting by the phone), I called up the station and talk to whatever jock was on the air, asking them to play something by the Kinks. I began to notice, after a while, that they enjoyed talking to me, usually about music. I figured that I probably had more brains and better taste than the average teenybopper, but I figure being a young female who had a nice voice probably didn't hurt, either, when the guys were out there at night. Pretty soon, they all were calling me the Kinks Lady. WTBC had an Oldies hour at lunchtime with a particular favorite DJ of mine, and I'd call him on a pay phone (no cells!!!), and of course he had more latitude to play old records during that hour. He was reliable about playing old Kinks singles between noon and one. And when Schoolboys In Disgrace came out, I even caught a DJ playing the single "for the Kinks Lady" when I happened to have the radio on.
Now, remember: I was in college by this time, but I did not drive a car. I had barely enough money for records, stamps and copies. I lived in Alabama, and the Kinks did not play here. They didn't even wave as they passed by. I had no way of knowing where they will be playing, or when. I could't say I was the biggest Kinks fan in the world because I had been to all their concerts, because I hadn't the resources. However. I was by this time caught up in an extremely serious undiagnosed case of depression. I was not going to class; sometimes I didn't even recognize what class I was supposed to be in. Preservation Act 2 had come out, and this is what I did: I would stack the two LPs on my record player. I played them, turned them over, played them and turned them over again. I listened to Act 2 all the time. I have it better memorized than Lola vs. Powerman, even.
I talked to the disk jockeys. I mailed letters. One day, I found the address for Konk studios. Aha! I wrote a letter care of Konk, and got back a nice letter from a Kinks assistant, with a promotional Act 2 button enclosed. This is the closest I ever got to making contact by mail.
Since the last time I turned over the two LPs of Preservation Act 2, I've been afraid to hear it again. The Kinks have truly been the background music of my life for 40 years, but, like the particularly evocative background music for a movie that so shocked or moved you that you just can't watch it again, I just can't bear to find out what hearing that album would do to me today.
In the spring of 1975, I learned that the Kinks were going to play in Memphis, Tennessee. Of the few tour dates I'd managed to find out about, this was far and away the closest to me. I began to cook up a plot with my buddy and Kinks Konvert, Arlene. She was away at 2-year college with a sympathetic music fan who had a car and drove (which neither of us did), and relatives she wanted to visit in Corinth, Mississippi. We scraped together enough cash for round-trip bus fare from Corinth to Memphis, and for a cheap motel.
Upon arriving, we checked in at the across-from-the-bus-station seedy motel and hiked through the worst part of downtown, to the few renovated blocks where the concert venue was located. Along the way, we encountered a colorful group of the Children of God religious cult, who heard our story and informed us that our dedication to a cause would make us valuable members of their congregation. Amazingly, on the day of the show, we bought tickets at the window and landed on the 11th row on the floor. The Kinks were touring with A Soap Opera, with half the show the amazing theatrical from that album, and half of it a regular Kinks concert. It was unreal, one of the most incredible, happiest experiences of my life. My hands were red and swollen, and my throat was sore from screaming and singing along, the next day. We even managed to get a hamburger between us at the bus station cafe, with the key deposit we'd had to pay at the seedy motel since we'd had no luggage.
It had been especially enlightening to walk back through deepest downtown Memphis late, when the concert was over. Arlene and I hesitated for a moment, deciding which way to turn, and were stopped by a vision. A golden car, carrying golden ladies, dressed in gold, with gold makeup and fingernails and hair. The nearest one spoke to us and said, "Y'all workin' girls?" "No!" we said, and immediately chose a direction in which to stride off purposefully, which fortunately happened to be the correct one. Certainly not any competition for you, honey! I seem to recall that we had hesitated in front of an X-rated theater, so it was just as well that the ladies in gold had come along when they had.
(Thirty-one years almost to the month later, Arlene, my Kinks Kohort, and I went to see Ray Davies in Atlanta on his Other People's Lives tour. We enjoyed ourselves, and clapped and hollered and jumped up and down and whooped just as much as we had in Memphis in 1975. It was almost a flashback. And every bit as much fun.)
On the other hand, we went to Atlanta in my car.
I saw the Kinks again, in Atlanta in 1978, in the (fabulous) Fox Theater. They were touring behind Misfits at the time, and had both Blondie and Tom Petty opening for them. I don't remember this concert nearly as clearly nor as fondly as the earlier one. The sound was horrible. We were up in a far corner of the auditorium, and I don't know if that made it worse. A friend who was with me kept going down and begging the sound man to do something, to no avail. I can't even remember what the Kinks played, only that Debbie Harry kept pulling her dress up and Tom Petty kept tossing his hair. What you have to do to get attention when you're not the headliner!
I kept buying the Kinks' albums - and the 12" extended disco single of "Wish I Could Fly Like Superman" - for a while. I think the last LP I had was Give The People What They Want. But in the very late 70s and early 80s, I began to hear music that didn't sound like anything else I had ever heard: reggae, ska, New Wave. The Kinks were playing music by this time that not only sounded depressingly similar to what everybody else was playing, but not as good, as far as I could tell, as what they had played before. To someone who was just discovering their newer music, they might sound really innovative compared to, say, Journey; but to me, they weren't creating magical, fresh songs that stuck in my head and wouldn't go away. I couldn't tell you who played on their last few albums, what label they were on, what songs were on what album, or whether they only came out on cassette tape and 8-track. Elvis Costello has given Ray Davies great props as a songwriter - but, by that time, I had rather listen to Elvis Costello.
Whether or not I'm listening to Kinks music, it's in the back of my mind. Whatever other music I love, and I love a lot of music, the Kinks are the soundtrack to my life. It won't do just to say they are special or precious. They and their music, the whole concept of them, everything about them, has meant so much to me for so long, that it's impossible to think of how I as a person could exist without them, who I would be without them. They saturate my existence. I am no longer the obsessed fan that I once was; now, I and they are more like an old couple who have been married for untold years.
I first noticed Dave Davies singing, "Truly, oh, truly, there is nothing in this life without your love," and it sounded almost exactly as if he were saying, "Julie, oh, Julie." In one of my favorite songs of Dave's, he sings, "Truly, truly, trust your heart." My ex-husband heard that and said, "Is he saying 'Julie'?" I prefer to think so. That's why I always sign myself
Truly Julie
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Me and Jobs, Part I
The first job I ever had was when I was in high school. A local company published a paper on antique collecting, and each issue was stuffed into a paper bag before being mailed. They hired kids for piecework to stuff the papers when a new issue came out, and my older sister and I found out about it and showed up to go to work. We collected some papers and bags and got them stuffed, and went back to collect some more, only to find that a line had formed. There wasn't a steady supply of papers and bags, for some reason. And, as it quickly became clear, our timing was fated to continue to be off. By a strange coincidence, the daughters of the publisher always turned up to collect more supplies right when large stacks of the raw materials came out, and it quickly became evident to my sister and me that we, and everybody else there, were there to sit around and waste time on our own dime until we were needed to pick up the slack on what was basically the publishers' daughters' job. As soon as we figured that one out, we went home.
After that, I didn't have a regular job until I was a senior in high school and in need of some spending money. I hadn't learned to drive, because I knew I didn't have enough money to get my hands on a car; much less to buy gasoline and pay for insurance and taxes and other related expenses. (Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me that someone else would pay for all this for me.) I did, however, sneak out of school on a regular basis with my friend Sylvia, who had a Ford Maverick, and we would go out to lunch or out to the mall. I needed a little bit of money. I got a job at the Waffle House in Northport, where another friend of mine was a cook. I waited tables after school a few nights a week.
I got paid a little over a dollar an hour, which was a high starting pay, since I was recommended by my friend. Anyway, I ended up working the shift which ran from after school to about 9 pm, which was when all the drunks in town hung out, drinking coffee until they left to hang out at the dive bars along the highway. I was seventeen, which made me the oldest person on the shift much of the time. We had another waitress, who was sixteen, and on some nights, a cook who was fifteen, but being the cook and male put him ex officio in charge. I was supposed to wear a dress, but since I was barely five feet tall and had to lean all the way across the counters and booths to wipe them down, and given the lecherous nature of the boozy good ol' boys who made up the afternoon Waffle House custom, I defied convention and wore pants. The first thing I learned was how to fend off friendly come-ons in a vague and breezy way. I was supposed to work half the restaurant, but if the other waitress didn't show up, I got to work the whole restaurant and run the cash register, for the same pay, and any shortage in the take came out of my pay. Any errors in the register's favor, of course, didn't go to me.
I worked there two months, under three managers. The third manager's girlfriend needed a job, so I was out. School was about to be out by that time, so that was okay by me.
After that, I didn't have a regular job until I was a senior in high school and in need of some spending money. I hadn't learned to drive, because I knew I didn't have enough money to get my hands on a car; much less to buy gasoline and pay for insurance and taxes and other related expenses. (Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me that someone else would pay for all this for me.) I did, however, sneak out of school on a regular basis with my friend Sylvia, who had a Ford Maverick, and we would go out to lunch or out to the mall. I needed a little bit of money. I got a job at the Waffle House in Northport, where another friend of mine was a cook. I waited tables after school a few nights a week.
I got paid a little over a dollar an hour, which was a high starting pay, since I was recommended by my friend. Anyway, I ended up working the shift which ran from after school to about 9 pm, which was when all the drunks in town hung out, drinking coffee until they left to hang out at the dive bars along the highway. I was seventeen, which made me the oldest person on the shift much of the time. We had another waitress, who was sixteen, and on some nights, a cook who was fifteen, but being the cook and male put him ex officio in charge. I was supposed to wear a dress, but since I was barely five feet tall and had to lean all the way across the counters and booths to wipe them down, and given the lecherous nature of the boozy good ol' boys who made up the afternoon Waffle House custom, I defied convention and wore pants. The first thing I learned was how to fend off friendly come-ons in a vague and breezy way. I was supposed to work half the restaurant, but if the other waitress didn't show up, I got to work the whole restaurant and run the cash register, for the same pay, and any shortage in the take came out of my pay. Any errors in the register's favor, of course, didn't go to me.
I worked there two months, under three managers. The third manager's girlfriend needed a job, so I was out. School was about to be out by that time, so that was okay by me.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Return of the Big Fish
Suffice it to say that the last entry took a lot out of me. I was not inclined to look at this page for some time. Busyness, laziness and stress have all played their part in my lack of attention to writing. And a good bit of thought has gone into the question of what a blog is supposed to be, anyway. The concept of a blog, a web log, is something written on an ongoing basis by somebody who is doing something interesting, or making interesting observations on something like politics, right?
I'm not any kind of a pundit or an insider. I'm not doing anything unusual or interesting. But there are two things that made me start writing on the Blogger. One was the slogan, "Push-button Publishing." Publishing! I could be published! And I wouldn't have to find an agent, send off a manuscript, and worry about whether I'd be rejected. Or, worse yet, whether anybody'd be interested in what I'd write.
You see, I'd been writing my "memoirs" for some time, in my head. I'd even written some on the computer and had it saved to a disk. I couldn't work out a chronological sequence, so I had been organizing my life experiences by subject. The working title was "Taking Up Space and Waiting to Die." Pretty good description of a life marked by long periods of severe depressive disorder. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to read it. I couldn't imagine why I would want anyone to. I had burned everything I'd written up to that point, for just those reasons. But I did want to write it.
The second reason for signing up on the Blogger was the encouragement of Kimbuck. "you should write." he said. "You should be a writer. You should be doing advertising for one of these big companies that does TV commercials. You are so creative. You are being wasted!" At least I know I'm in good company. So many geniuses and artists were clerical workers. Einstein, Melville, Cezanne, I can't remember who else.
So, what am I going to do? Just to keep my hand in, I'll post the chunks of my memoirs here, as I'd originally intended, along with whatever comes to mind. Anything that comes to mind, to keep in practice writing and thinking independently and practicing writing at an adult level and utilizing my vocabulary before it all disappears.
I'm not any kind of a pundit or an insider. I'm not doing anything unusual or interesting. But there are two things that made me start writing on the Blogger. One was the slogan, "Push-button Publishing." Publishing! I could be published! And I wouldn't have to find an agent, send off a manuscript, and worry about whether I'd be rejected. Or, worse yet, whether anybody'd be interested in what I'd write.
You see, I'd been writing my "memoirs" for some time, in my head. I'd even written some on the computer and had it saved to a disk. I couldn't work out a chronological sequence, so I had been organizing my life experiences by subject. The working title was "Taking Up Space and Waiting to Die." Pretty good description of a life marked by long periods of severe depressive disorder. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to read it. I couldn't imagine why I would want anyone to. I had burned everything I'd written up to that point, for just those reasons. But I did want to write it.
The second reason for signing up on the Blogger was the encouragement of Kimbuck. "you should write." he said. "You should be a writer. You should be doing advertising for one of these big companies that does TV commercials. You are so creative. You are being wasted!" At least I know I'm in good company. So many geniuses and artists were clerical workers. Einstein, Melville, Cezanne, I can't remember who else.
So, what am I going to do? Just to keep my hand in, I'll post the chunks of my memoirs here, as I'd originally intended, along with whatever comes to mind. Anything that comes to mind, to keep in practice writing and thinking independently and practicing writing at an adult level and utilizing my vocabulary before it all disappears.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Blog re: Blogs
It's January, and the cave is cold and dark. When it rains in the outside world, there's even water in the cave sometimes. Things can get pretty dismal. Even the playful antics of the Destructo Twins don't relieve the gloom of the atmosphere as they merrily turn everything in the house into a plaything and upend order into disarray. That last post must have been difficult. It put the old fish off writing completely. I heard that recently Mr. George Will himself said that almost all blogging was pointless anyway, because most of it was about people's personal experience rather than politics, and the Internet wasn't going to produce millions of Thomas Paines. What does Mr. Will know? He once said that the motto of Steak'nShake, "In Sight, It Must Be Right," was a meaningless advertising slogan. He obviously has not haunted as many Steak'nShakes as I have, watching the staff making the food in plain sight. So there, Mr. Pundit! I'll blog about anything I want to.
It doesn't seem as though it would do much good to make powerful political arguments and calls for change all over the Internet, as long as people inherently remain sheep. They want to be led, and they don't want to be faced with complicated ideas. If every blogger on the net WERE Thomas Paine, as long as the number one name in Net searches every day continued to be Britney Spears, what difference would it make? Everyone who preaches is preaching to the converted anyway.
I'm here to practise my writing skills and to ramble on about anything that comes to mind. What can't get published in multiple copies on paper can still be published on the ephemeral bandwidth of the Internet; all it needs is an address. The certain knowledge that nobody is reading it is an integral part of the experience. No grades, no criticism, no comments from the peanut gallery. What could be freer?
It doesn't seem as though it would do much good to make powerful political arguments and calls for change all over the Internet, as long as people inherently remain sheep. They want to be led, and they don't want to be faced with complicated ideas. If every blogger on the net WERE Thomas Paine, as long as the number one name in Net searches every day continued to be Britney Spears, what difference would it make? Everyone who preaches is preaching to the converted anyway.
I'm here to practise my writing skills and to ramble on about anything that comes to mind. What can't get published in multiple copies on paper can still be published on the ephemeral bandwidth of the Internet; all it needs is an address. The certain knowledge that nobody is reading it is an integral part of the experience. No grades, no criticism, no comments from the peanut gallery. What could be freer?
Friday, September 15, 2006
For JWB
I was determined not to fall in love with you, back in 1976, and I thought I was doing a good job. After all, my heart completely belonged to someone else, someone whom I thought of night and day, someone whose every word to me I memorized, someone whom I savored the slightest connection with. (I was nineteen.) I had no room for you.
I met you at a party that I attended with somebody else, another young man who mysteriously had to go home right afterwards, who dropped me off at my door and sped away in his early-70's Ford Maverick. That happened to me a lot; in fact, every time I went out with a guy, which wasn't often. I was not only lonely, like I had been all through high school; I was now also confused. I didn't pay particular attention to you at the time, but I must have noticed you, because I remember running into another person I hadn't met before that party, who I had thought was your friend, and asking after you, but he said he hadn't known you.
I saw you again at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store where you worked, and you gave me the key to your Maverick, and had me go out to the parking lot and bring in some pictures that were in your car. They were photos of me and my sister at the party, that you had taken and printed in your darkroom, and you gave me a print. After that, you slipped me free ice cream when I came in the store, and you brought ice cream to my family when you came and took me away in the Maverick. We rode around in the country, to places I had not been before, often to creeks, lakes or the riverside. I did not drive, and you had spent many hours alone, exploring in your car, and you seemed to know what lay down every dirt road. We would go somewhere and just sit, hardly talking at all, just watching the water for hours. I began to value silence.
I knew many people at the University who were supposed to be interesting, and some of them were. Some of them were fun and interesting, but so guarded, drugged, opaque or just strange that I couldn't get a sense of who they were. Some were intelligent and intellectual but had no depth or hidden places to their personalities. The first sort, I figured I could never know anything about, and the second sort, I figured I knew all about shortly after I met them. Of course, the vast majority of people I met were not even interesting or worthwhile at all. I could tell you were very different. I didn't know how yet, but the quality of your silence held an intriguing mystery. We spent more and more time together. You fed me crab soup and told me you loved me. You quit taking me home, and I moved in with you. You wanted me, after all.
It didn't matter that we weren't even speaking to each other two years later when we got married. By the time I realized I loved you, there was nothing that would change it. Our day-to-day life was on the surface, and had little to do with the underlying fact of our togetherness. There was no one but you for me. I intuitively understood your thinking, all those things you were unable to express. We enjoyed and wanted the same things, liked living the same way, thought about things the same way. There were things that we didn't agree on, but they didn't cause conflicts or prevent either of us from doing what we wanted. We were poor, but we were happy. As long as we were poor, we were happy.
I was so happy when you got a good job that took advantage of your unique talents. You could do anything. You could open something up, take a look at it, see how it was supposed to work, why it wasn't working, and fix it. You could build things, and create what wasn't there before. You could look at something really beat-up and ugly, unfinished, or trashed, and see what it would look like when it was restored or refinished. When you got an idea into your head, for whatever reason, I had to live with it, because you would do what you wanted. But the things you started out with and made beautiful and useful through your skill, when you decided to keep on until the finish, were amazing. Unfortunately, less and less of your projects got finished. Money and time would be invested in something that would keep your mind occupied for a short time, then would be dropped. You made more money and bought yourself toys you never had before. Things like sitting down and paying bills were not pleasant, something you would get around to later. And I was starting to get on your nerves: bitching about the electricity getting cut off again, bitching about not having enough money for the house payment when it wasn't even the end of the month yet, bitching about how I hated my job. All you really wanted was to sit down and watch a few hours of documentaries about World War II on TV, maybe have me curl up and watch it with you. I complained about everything, but I wouldn't do anything you liked, like go see your favorite band play in a bar on a Tuesday night about ten o'clock.
Soon, you started to disappear. At first, you would be gone one, maybe two nights a week. I would watch the door, listening for the sound of your car. I couldn't do anything but wait for you. The most important thing in my life was still looking into those very dark blue eyes and seeing a change come over them, a softening when you looked at me, that told me that you loved me. You asked me for everything I had, and I gave it to you. All I wanted was to give you more of myself, but you were fading away more and more. Sometimes you would come home and seem to be completely inhabiting your body, and we would do something we had always done together; look at antiques or eat at one of our favorite places. But mostly I went my way and you either were not around, or, when you were at home, you walked like a zombie or a ghost. I could no longer intuit what you were thinking. The magical connection was gone, and you were a stranger with the most familiar body and face in my life.
I waited for you again. I waited for three years. I did everything I could think of to bring your soul and your personality back to your body and back to me. I had never experienced such pain as I did when you were physically present and nothing I did could reach you. I called you a zombie. I called you a chindi, because it seemed that all the good in you had died and only a malevolent ghost remained. I was good to you, hoping you would respond and love me. I was vicious to you, hoping you would get angry enough to break out of your fog. I went to the strip club you frequented, where you introduced me to the woman you were obsessed with talking to, not having sex with. I left you once, and you said you would kill yourself. I left you again, and you said you would kill me. Both times, I wanted to call and beg you. I waited for you to call me. You were admitted to the no-shoelaces ward at the hospital, and I visited you every day and cried. I cried every day for three years. All I wanted was for you to love me even a little bit, and you could not do that. You broke my heart over and over again. I still loved you, but you were gone. I waited for you to come back. I had seen glimpses of you that told me you might not be dead.
The you that was was not like anyone else I have ever known, and I will never know anyone like him again. He still fascinates me. I have known of many men with his bad qualities, and some with some or another of his good qualities, but no one with the combination of unusual and mysterious personality quirks he had. He is dead, and I continue to mourn him. He visits my dreams. I think of him often, and I cry again. I am now a widow, and I long for the day I will be relieved of my grief.
I met you at a party that I attended with somebody else, another young man who mysteriously had to go home right afterwards, who dropped me off at my door and sped away in his early-70's Ford Maverick. That happened to me a lot; in fact, every time I went out with a guy, which wasn't often. I was not only lonely, like I had been all through high school; I was now also confused. I didn't pay particular attention to you at the time, but I must have noticed you, because I remember running into another person I hadn't met before that party, who I had thought was your friend, and asking after you, but he said he hadn't known you.
I saw you again at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store where you worked, and you gave me the key to your Maverick, and had me go out to the parking lot and bring in some pictures that were in your car. They were photos of me and my sister at the party, that you had taken and printed in your darkroom, and you gave me a print. After that, you slipped me free ice cream when I came in the store, and you brought ice cream to my family when you came and took me away in the Maverick. We rode around in the country, to places I had not been before, often to creeks, lakes or the riverside. I did not drive, and you had spent many hours alone, exploring in your car, and you seemed to know what lay down every dirt road. We would go somewhere and just sit, hardly talking at all, just watching the water for hours. I began to value silence.
I knew many people at the University who were supposed to be interesting, and some of them were. Some of them were fun and interesting, but so guarded, drugged, opaque or just strange that I couldn't get a sense of who they were. Some were intelligent and intellectual but had no depth or hidden places to their personalities. The first sort, I figured I could never know anything about, and the second sort, I figured I knew all about shortly after I met them. Of course, the vast majority of people I met were not even interesting or worthwhile at all. I could tell you were very different. I didn't know how yet, but the quality of your silence held an intriguing mystery. We spent more and more time together. You fed me crab soup and told me you loved me. You quit taking me home, and I moved in with you. You wanted me, after all.
It didn't matter that we weren't even speaking to each other two years later when we got married. By the time I realized I loved you, there was nothing that would change it. Our day-to-day life was on the surface, and had little to do with the underlying fact of our togetherness. There was no one but you for me. I intuitively understood your thinking, all those things you were unable to express. We enjoyed and wanted the same things, liked living the same way, thought about things the same way. There were things that we didn't agree on, but they didn't cause conflicts or prevent either of us from doing what we wanted. We were poor, but we were happy. As long as we were poor, we were happy.
I was so happy when you got a good job that took advantage of your unique talents. You could do anything. You could open something up, take a look at it, see how it was supposed to work, why it wasn't working, and fix it. You could build things, and create what wasn't there before. You could look at something really beat-up and ugly, unfinished, or trashed, and see what it would look like when it was restored or refinished. When you got an idea into your head, for whatever reason, I had to live with it, because you would do what you wanted. But the things you started out with and made beautiful and useful through your skill, when you decided to keep on until the finish, were amazing. Unfortunately, less and less of your projects got finished. Money and time would be invested in something that would keep your mind occupied for a short time, then would be dropped. You made more money and bought yourself toys you never had before. Things like sitting down and paying bills were not pleasant, something you would get around to later. And I was starting to get on your nerves: bitching about the electricity getting cut off again, bitching about not having enough money for the house payment when it wasn't even the end of the month yet, bitching about how I hated my job. All you really wanted was to sit down and watch a few hours of documentaries about World War II on TV, maybe have me curl up and watch it with you. I complained about everything, but I wouldn't do anything you liked, like go see your favorite band play in a bar on a Tuesday night about ten o'clock.
Soon, you started to disappear. At first, you would be gone one, maybe two nights a week. I would watch the door, listening for the sound of your car. I couldn't do anything but wait for you. The most important thing in my life was still looking into those very dark blue eyes and seeing a change come over them, a softening when you looked at me, that told me that you loved me. You asked me for everything I had, and I gave it to you. All I wanted was to give you more of myself, but you were fading away more and more. Sometimes you would come home and seem to be completely inhabiting your body, and we would do something we had always done together; look at antiques or eat at one of our favorite places. But mostly I went my way and you either were not around, or, when you were at home, you walked like a zombie or a ghost. I could no longer intuit what you were thinking. The magical connection was gone, and you were a stranger with the most familiar body and face in my life.
I waited for you again. I waited for three years. I did everything I could think of to bring your soul and your personality back to your body and back to me. I had never experienced such pain as I did when you were physically present and nothing I did could reach you. I called you a zombie. I called you a chindi, because it seemed that all the good in you had died and only a malevolent ghost remained. I was good to you, hoping you would respond and love me. I was vicious to you, hoping you would get angry enough to break out of your fog. I went to the strip club you frequented, where you introduced me to the woman you were obsessed with talking to, not having sex with. I left you once, and you said you would kill yourself. I left you again, and you said you would kill me. Both times, I wanted to call and beg you. I waited for you to call me. You were admitted to the no-shoelaces ward at the hospital, and I visited you every day and cried. I cried every day for three years. All I wanted was for you to love me even a little bit, and you could not do that. You broke my heart over and over again. I still loved you, but you were gone. I waited for you to come back. I had seen glimpses of you that told me you might not be dead.
The you that was was not like anyone else I have ever known, and I will never know anyone like him again. He still fascinates me. I have known of many men with his bad qualities, and some with some or another of his good qualities, but no one with the combination of unusual and mysterious personality quirks he had. He is dead, and I continue to mourn him. He visits my dreams. I think of him often, and I cry again. I am now a widow, and I long for the day I will be relieved of my grief.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
nice, churchgoing black ladies
I work with some very nice, churchgoing black ladies. The sort who are very sweet and kind people who can be counted on to always be honest and do the right thing. Not a mean or duplicitous thing about them. Loyal, dependable, intelligent, and with some of the most peculiarly skewed and limited worldview I have ever encountered.
I have a very dear and close friend of over thirty years, who now lives in another state. A couple of years ago, to the joy and surprise of all his old friends, he announced that he was being ordained as an Episcopal priest in the small town where he had become active in the church. Several of us here packed up on short notice to take a couple of days off to visit for his ordination, his first mass, and some attendant partying. I was excited to tell my coworkers why I was going to be out for a day or two.
When I returned, one of my favorite coworkers in the category in the heading greeted me and asked if my friend had successfully been made Pope. I had a few minutes to spare, so I explained to her that my friend was merely a priest, that there was only one Pope, and that he was head of the Catholic church anyway, and my friend was Episcopalian. She said oh, okay, but not as if she understood. So I went on to tell her, as simply as I could, that in the early days of the Christian church, Peter was the first Pope, being the rock on which Christ built his church, and all the others were supposed to have followed directly from him, taking on the authority which Jesus gave to Peter. After fifteen hundred or so years, when people were really getting upset with the excesses of the Church, it began to split up, and new, Protestant churches were founded by Christians who denied the authority of the Pope. The Episcopal church was descended from the church started by Henry the Eighth, who got mad at the Pope when he wouldn't let him get married as many times as he wanted.
My friend listened to all this with interest as if it were something that she had never heard of before, at least anything that happened after Jesus and St. Peter. She nodded, and said, mmmmmm-Hmmmmm. Then, she said something polite, to the effect of, well, that's an interesting thing to believe....
Not only hadn't she ever heard of anything that happened after the Acts of the Apostles were written, but she didn't think I was giving her a lesson in history... She thought I was telling her about some kind of strange, white-folks', intellectual, Yankee, suspect alternative religious belief which was likely to get me in trouble in the afterlife, although she was too polite to say so!
It goes beyond boggling my mind. It makes my head hurt. It makes flashes of sputtering light in my brain like a defective neon sign, just to think that people would not know, not want to know, and not have it occur to them that there even WAS a history of their own church. I guess this is the kind of thinking that lets people live with the kind of contradictions there are between their church and their religious faith. It's also the kind of thinking, for example, that lets these same nice churchgoing black ladies believe (because they have told me they do) that homosexuals are a kind of pervert who are different from the rest of us, and who do not have any interest in "normal" sexual relations because they only want what's abnormal, and the normal and abnormal never co-exist. I believe that this unshakable denial has to be one reason why AIDS is spreading fastest in the US among heterosexual black women.
I have a very dear and close friend of over thirty years, who now lives in another state. A couple of years ago, to the joy and surprise of all his old friends, he announced that he was being ordained as an Episcopal priest in the small town where he had become active in the church. Several of us here packed up on short notice to take a couple of days off to visit for his ordination, his first mass, and some attendant partying. I was excited to tell my coworkers why I was going to be out for a day or two.
When I returned, one of my favorite coworkers in the category in the heading greeted me and asked if my friend had successfully been made Pope. I had a few minutes to spare, so I explained to her that my friend was merely a priest, that there was only one Pope, and that he was head of the Catholic church anyway, and my friend was Episcopalian. She said oh, okay, but not as if she understood. So I went on to tell her, as simply as I could, that in the early days of the Christian church, Peter was the first Pope, being the rock on which Christ built his church, and all the others were supposed to have followed directly from him, taking on the authority which Jesus gave to Peter. After fifteen hundred or so years, when people were really getting upset with the excesses of the Church, it began to split up, and new, Protestant churches were founded by Christians who denied the authority of the Pope. The Episcopal church was descended from the church started by Henry the Eighth, who got mad at the Pope when he wouldn't let him get married as many times as he wanted.
My friend listened to all this with interest as if it were something that she had never heard of before, at least anything that happened after Jesus and St. Peter. She nodded, and said, mmmmmm-Hmmmmm. Then, she said something polite, to the effect of, well, that's an interesting thing to believe....
Not only hadn't she ever heard of anything that happened after the Acts of the Apostles were written, but she didn't think I was giving her a lesson in history... She thought I was telling her about some kind of strange, white-folks', intellectual, Yankee, suspect alternative religious belief which was likely to get me in trouble in the afterlife, although she was too polite to say so!
It goes beyond boggling my mind. It makes my head hurt. It makes flashes of sputtering light in my brain like a defective neon sign, just to think that people would not know, not want to know, and not have it occur to them that there even WAS a history of their own church. I guess this is the kind of thinking that lets people live with the kind of contradictions there are between their church and their religious faith. It's also the kind of thinking, for example, that lets these same nice churchgoing black ladies believe (because they have told me they do) that homosexuals are a kind of pervert who are different from the rest of us, and who do not have any interest in "normal" sexual relations because they only want what's abnormal, and the normal and abnormal never co-exist. I believe that this unshakable denial has to be one reason why AIDS is spreading fastest in the US among heterosexual black women.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Quiet Saturday
It's been a quiet day in the cave. Sorry to say, I have followed my natural inclination, which is to say, waking up late, reading and napping. Every so often, I've gone online to see if there's anybody there I wanted to chat with, but apparently, they all have something constructive to do. I have something constructive to do also, and even something destructive, which would be much more fun. Alas, the inclination just isn't there. It has been just about exactly a year since the other fish was finally persuaded to leave the cave, and things have not gone from the messy transitional state to a nice, settled, stripped-down state yet. One might say that the sand is still stirred up. The cave needs a lot of work. A lot of rocks need to be picked up and spit out onto the ocean floor.
That was a nice comment, thank you. You may continue stroking my ego, along with everything else.
Writing this reminds me of my English class in my senior year of high school. For some reason, all my friends were put into the college-prep class, and I was not. It wasn't formally designated as a college-prep class, because at that time, all classes were officially the same. Some parents had, apparently, at some point, been offended that their children were put with other children of a similar academic proficiency. They thought they were being labeled as retarded. After this, for years, any attempts at categorizing students was verboten. I was placed into a class with a bunch of underperformers who couldn't read. That's not an exaggeration. One day we were studying Shakespeare - by the time-honored educational method of taking turns reading from the textbook - when the teacher asked a lanky lout in the back of the room to take the next turn. He declined, on the basis that he couldn't read. He was excused, because she believed him.
That was a nice comment, thank you. You may continue stroking my ego, along with everything else.
Writing this reminds me of my English class in my senior year of high school. For some reason, all my friends were put into the college-prep class, and I was not. It wasn't formally designated as a college-prep class, because at that time, all classes were officially the same. Some parents had, apparently, at some point, been offended that their children were put with other children of a similar academic proficiency. They thought they were being labeled as retarded. After this, for years, any attempts at categorizing students was verboten. I was placed into a class with a bunch of underperformers who couldn't read. That's not an exaggeration. One day we were studying Shakespeare - by the time-honored educational method of taking turns reading from the textbook - when the teacher asked a lanky lout in the back of the room to take the next turn. He declined, on the basis that he couldn't read. He was excused, because she believed him.
The leader of this educational expedition was a frail blonde not much older than we were. I remember she suffered from severe personal problems which kept her out of the classroom for months, and prevented her from actually teaching the class for most of the rest of the year. Her favorite teaching-avoiding tactic was assigning the class to "write something" at the beginning of the hour, then scribbling frantically at her personal papers, reading something that had nothing to do with English literature, or disappearing altogether. For a period of time, she made the writing assignment every day. She never specified any subject matter or style; just "write something." I started out racking my brain for interesting subject matter, stunning metaphors, charming descriptions and heart-wrenching emotion. As time went by, and the writing assignments weren't returned and weren't commented on, and certainly weren't graded, and I quickly ran out of serious, poetic essays, I came to the conclusion that this busywork wasn't even being read. After all, when would Frail Blonde have time, aside from anything else? She was certainly too busy with other things to hold class. I began to write silly things. I wrote sillier things. Still no reaction, still no sign that anything was being graded, read, or pausing on its way straight to the Dumpster. Finally, when I wrote the story involving talking rolls of toilet paper, I got her attention. Most of the circumstances surrounding this incident, along with the rest of high school, have been erased from my memory. But I seem to remember she had me stand and read the story to the class because she thought it was so hilarious. NOW she pays attention. Typical of my entire academic career, and, by extension, my life.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Story of the Coelacanth
Why Coelacanth? If I am a fish, which I am for reasons I won't go into here, coelacanth is the appropriate species. I could be said to live in a cave. In fact, my previous, virtual (imaginary) Internet identity was the Cyberhermit, whose website, if it had existed, would have been known as the Cave of the Cyberhermit. In the offline world, I even live in a dark house with low ceilings and some amount of encrustation.
The coelacanth, latimeria chalumnae, is older than the dinosaurs, and supposedly one of the last of the critters in the evolutionary progression to live in the primordial sea before somebody crept up onto land during the late Devouring period. We hang out in our caves during the day, and only come out at night, when we eat unwary squid and octopus squirting along the seabed in the very deep ocean. We are unique animals, not to be mistaken for any other fish. Even the pattern of whitish spots on our blue scales, which camouflages us against the sponges on the walls of our deep blue caves, varies with the individual.
Somebody else is blogging under the name Coelacanth, but not on Blogspot. What the hell, it's a big Internet.
There are two cats in my cave, but they have easy access to high-quality cat food, and they're not going to bother hunting down a bony fish who's much bigger than they are. Lazy beasts. They only chase what runs from them.
This cave is not as cool as it should be. Global warming is a fact. Hang around minding your own business for 450 million years, and somebody comes along and fucks everything up.
The coelacanth, latimeria chalumnae, is older than the dinosaurs, and supposedly one of the last of the critters in the evolutionary progression to live in the primordial sea before somebody crept up onto land during the late Devouring period. We hang out in our caves during the day, and only come out at night, when we eat unwary squid and octopus squirting along the seabed in the very deep ocean. We are unique animals, not to be mistaken for any other fish. Even the pattern of whitish spots on our blue scales, which camouflages us against the sponges on the walls of our deep blue caves, varies with the individual.
Somebody else is blogging under the name Coelacanth, but not on Blogspot. What the hell, it's a big Internet.
There are two cats in my cave, but they have easy access to high-quality cat food, and they're not going to bother hunting down a bony fish who's much bigger than they are. Lazy beasts. They only chase what runs from them.
This cave is not as cool as it should be. Global warming is a fact. Hang around minding your own business for 450 million years, and somebody comes along and fucks everything up.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Introductory Blog
This is the first post on the new blog from the Coelacanth. My good friend Joe Kimbuck has been after me to start a blog called "Tales From the Cave" almost since I've known him, so here goes. I don't know what to write about, but he says he'll read anything I write, and that anyone else will, too. Judging by some of the other stuff I've seen on here, randomly sampling blogs, I don't seem to have anything less to say than anybody else does.
I haven't put anything on the profile, because I thought it would be better to reveal myself as I went along. A little bit of background information: I am a single woman, born in the 1950's. I live in the Deep South now, but I was born in Quincy, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. This is important to me, because, just as the Father of Waters gathers the rain from the surface of the entire country, I feel a connection to all of America. It is as if the history of the land and all of the people were soaked through the earth along with the water, and brought along the tributaries like blood to the heart of the country. I don't know if this is cause and effect or just coincidence, but I think that my birth across the river from the hometown of Mark Twain is appropriate.
I intend to write more about my immigrant ancestors in the future, and my take on history, among many other things. I will try to keep it civil and literate. I encourage anyone out there to let me know if you are reading this, and to respond, and to please keep it civil and literate as well.
I haven't put anything on the profile, because I thought it would be better to reveal myself as I went along. A little bit of background information: I am a single woman, born in the 1950's. I live in the Deep South now, but I was born in Quincy, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. This is important to me, because, just as the Father of Waters gathers the rain from the surface of the entire country, I feel a connection to all of America. It is as if the history of the land and all of the people were soaked through the earth along with the water, and brought along the tributaries like blood to the heart of the country. I don't know if this is cause and effect or just coincidence, but I think that my birth across the river from the hometown of Mark Twain is appropriate.
I intend to write more about my immigrant ancestors in the future, and my take on history, among many other things. I will try to keep it civil and literate. I encourage anyone out there to let me know if you are reading this, and to respond, and to please keep it civil and literate as well.
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