Thursday, January 31, 2008

Spatters and Drips: Memopad Leftovers and Mental Logjams

It seems I need to enliven the old Chucklehut with a handful of drolleries for the ADHD set - I mean, welcome, readers from OINY!  Yes, I’m the sicko who came up with the winning headline for their bi-weekly contest, which is as close as I’ve come yet to that goddamn National Merit scholarship (I’m looking at you, Princeton).  So I’m giddy with, um, gid, and stuff, and I’ve got crapreams of reamcrap coming my way today, plus weird anxiety and excitement (non-free-floating varieties), so let me take this opportunity to dump a few items of notebook-dross and to clear my mental dex as to issues that are producing particularly high levels of agitation. 

Noted while shopping at Walgreens:
* Most misleading name for cheap, shoddy, tissue-thin men’s dress socks: “Looking Good Mister” brand hosiery. 
* Least misleading name for cheap, probably shoddy, men’s athletic socks: “Bag o’ Socks” brand hosiery. 

Noted while driving from Seattle into California on the 5:
* A farming-equipment outlet with two stacked signs erected by the side of the highway, ostensibly advertising the products sold therein: (top sign) “Cummings,” (bottom sign) “Onan.” In that farmers are in the business of spilling seeds upon the ground this might actually make sense. 
* A mattress store called “Mattress Country,” with its offshoot outlet, “Mattress Country and More.” I’m wondering, once the whole country has gone mattress, what do they think is left?  I would recommend that future expansions be called “Mattress Territory” and “The Mattress Protectorates.” After that we get into Mattress colonialization and that’s always just a quagmattress. 

Noted while driving out to the 5 from SF on Highway 37 in south Carneros: The Randy Bolt Memorial Highway, and the Richard “Fresh Air” Jansen Memorial Bridge.  With all due respect to the deceased, what do you have to do to get such cool nicknames?  Nobody ever calls me by any of my preferred cool nicknames.  But “Randy Bolt?” Sounds like a combination wrestler-porn star!  Dang that’s a good name to put on a sign....

Cool nickname applied to my dad during his festschrift luncheon (which was a big important deal so get with the program): “The Anti-Quasi-Obscurantist.” I think he ought to have it tattooed to his forehead, but that might interfere with the whole “talmud professor” gig. 

Items on which I misread a final exclamation point for the letter “l,” indicating to me that I need to update my ocular rx:
* Christmas Salel
* A Potty for Mel

My current mental kidneystone: how did an indolent and under-exercised lout like myself wind up with “Jumper’s Knee?” Which jumper, and off of what?  Is this BASE jumper knee, or just toddler-overalls jumper knee?  I really hope it’s not bail jumper knee, anyway.  If I were in Mexico, would I say I had “humper knee?” And of course, how the hell did I get it?  It must be from jumping too rarely because high-frequency jumping is not, as they say, my thing.  And how did I avoid getting “lounger’s ass” or “nap-eye,” anyway? 

My current eagerly-anticipated thrill: I’m agonna Didnylan!  Yes, my dear step-nephew is celebrating his manhood with a bar mitzvah ceremony on Saturday, which means Kel and Z and I are going to jet down to Los Angeles’ south bay region for the weekend.  Saturday is the bar day, with services and a kid’s skating party (I assume there will be a bar at one of these events, anyway).  Sunday is the mitzvah day, and dad is taking us and also my sister and her little family all out to the Happiest Place in Anaheim (assuming the Ducks and Angels are having bad seasons) (and not counting that breakfast smorgasboard with the amazing apple fritters).  Zach is thrilled to meet “Pickymouse,” as he says it.  I don’t think he knows what he’s in for - the sight of a five-foot plastic rodent in pants is unnerving to even the most seasoned travelers.  Wish me luck.  Wish!  Wish harder, damn you!

Let’s wrap up with a list of qualifiers that I will insist apply to all my purchases and activities during 2008:
* Carbon-neutral
* Dolphin-safe
* Anti-bacterial
* Indigenous enterprise
* Rehabilitated
* Metro-sentient
* Pro-democracy
* Drought resistant
* Artesinal
* Neo-trad alternative
* Fully armored
* Re-legalized
* Disambiguated
* Ozone-replenishing
* Ritually slaughtered

So, anything that qualifies for all that, I can buy or do.  Disneyland will consist of 8 hours sheltered under a cloth umbrella trying not to exhale.  See why I need all that luck? 

Okay, g’wan with you now.  Don’t you need to milk a goat or something?  I know I do! 

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Golden Girl

Hey Heather, in keeping with my “never break a blog-content promise you made on the bus” pledge, here’s a bit of the old making-it-up:

The stack of jaundiced envelopes flopped into her brown plastic tray, as they did four times daily.  “Internal correspondence,” they all proclaimed in heavy letters across the top, followed by line after line of hand-scrawled senders and recipients, each envelope secured with a thread wound around two cardboard rivets. 

She spent much of her days unwinding those threads, opening those envelopes, and filing their contents: countersigned originals, FYI cc.s, yes, but mostly file copies of innumerable NCR forms: blue file copies, pink ones, random versions in green or sienna or peach or canary or tangerine, and even the occasional lavender.  She’d never created any of the originals herself.  The contents of the pages she received were meaningless to her.  All she did was file them.  If someone ever needed one back, it had to be findable.  She’d never heard of anyone needing to do so, of course.  Once she closed the cabinet door on a piece of paper, it was as good as dead to her. 

She rubbed her eyes, sighed, and reached for the new stack.  It wouldn’t do to have a senior clerk stroll past and see them sitting there.  Unwind, open, stack in order of how close the file cabinet was.  Original.  Blue copy.  Tan copy.  Cc.  There were an even dozen this time and she’d opened 11 before she got to one that caught her attention.

The “to” line was just her first name; that was unusual.  How had it reached her?  She knew there were others at the corporation who shared her name; it was so common that she sometimes tried to hide behind it.  The “from” line - was blank.  That was just weird.  She thought that Office Services didn’t even deliver internal mail that didn’t say who’d sent it; it was opened for sourcing and returned for label completion.  There was something unusual about this envelope.  She felt an inexplicable surge of excitement as she unscrolled the little thread and peered inside.

For a moment everything around her ceased to exist - her desk, the desks around her, the bullpen, the world.  She just gazed into the envelope.  It felt unreal, even as her incredulous fingers slid into its shaded confines to touch, withdraw, and gently grasp the single sheet it contained. 

It was so thin and delicate she could almost see through it; the NCR write-through was crisp - yet spectral, as if written by a celestial finger dipped into the azure skies of dusk.  She didn’t even realize she’d stood up until she heard the voice at the next desk break through her reverie from an unexpected angle.  “What is that?,” the neighbor asked, but from the tone of her voice it was clear that she already knew. 

“This… this is the goldenrod copy.” She’d tried to keep her voice controlled but the words carried of their own accord. 

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Sent to you?”

“Directly to me.”

“Don’t show it around.”

“Okay.”

“But - can I see it?”

“You can take a look, she replied with newfound steel in her spine, “but I’m not letting it out of my hands.”

By now a small crowd had gathered.  “Goldenrod.... goldenrod....” the mutters fluttered around her.  People who’d worked just a few desks away but had never so much as said hello to her were flocking close, their eyes sparkling with wonder and awe.  “I’ve never seen one.” “Thought they were mythical.” “How did she get it?” “What will she do with it?” “Goldenrod.“

The mail boy was wheeling his cart back to the elevators, old mail delivered, new mail acquired.  He was new and confused by the to-do.  “What’s going on?,” he asked from the back of the crowd.  “Is something wrong?”

A senior clerk, approaching retirement, face pasty from a life in the office, answered without looking at him.  “Don’t be an idiot. You brought her the goldenrod copy.  Things around here may never be the same.  Now take off your damn hat and show some respect.  You will never see a day like this again.”

And through it all, the file clerk stood in the midst of the throng, her face beaming and ethereal, her chest and chin uplifted, a single sheet of paper fluttering softly in her trembling hands as she cradled it under gentle HVAC breezes. 

Good fun, that, wot? Got lots more in the ol’ book plus loads of new fodder like inexplicable ailments and funny names for foot fashions!  Let’s see what the blog fairie brings us next time!  Or not!  I said you needed another layer with that skimpy jacket!

Patry Francis Day: Bookulation!

I’m hardly new to writing, but I’m kind of new to the on-line writing community.  I certainly don’t read enough to keep up with most of them but I do enjoy how they advise and support each other.  That’s why I’m jumping on this bandwagon today, to ask you to look at a book by a writer who’s overcome lots and has lots more yet to overcome - just about when she got her “your book is being published” letter, she was dx’d with bad cancer.  Now it’s a matter of getting her good words out to as many people as the blogternet can reach, and my litpark friends - about 300 of them - picked today to do that.  I’m one of them, I guess.  So check yourself out some Liar’s Diary when you get the chance.  Judging from the company the author keeps, it probably kicks ass. 

Since I’m being literary and stuff, I actually did read some book-like things recently: this and this.  And I’m currently reading this, which has a brooding air of impending horror about it but Kel tells me it’ll all be okay in the end, but regardless it creeps me out so I’m taking too long to finish it.  Plus, Kel just finished the first one of these and apparently I’d love them and will drink them down like cold yoohoo on a hot afternoon.  So I’m not sure when I’m going to fit in Liar’s Diary but I intend to.  You too, right?  Good, thought so!