Thursday, February 28, 2008

Miscellany: Poop Jokes, Hot Dog Pie, and Short Short Stories

I’m tired, okay?  Not physically tired, which would help because I’m not sleeping as much as I probably ought to be.  My mind is in foment and my body feels inappropriately charged up (for a guy who just spent 9.5 hours at his desk without once traveling farther than the men’s room).  But I am tired OF things - tired of working, tired of cooking, tired of not being at home, tired of being tired, and (dare I admit it) tired of Shmuel.  Yes my yiddishkeit friend, you are a wonderful person and a font of hope and all sorts of good things, but seeing you there at the top of my blog is starting to bring me down.  You’re dead, dude, and you ascribe to a lifestyle I find, to say the least, distinguishable from my own.  But tonight is double-island-madness night (Survivor AND Lost), and I expect there will be some cold beer in the fridge once I get home, and I think things are poised for improvement.  Well, let’s see what I can do here to break the Shmuelistic pallor and shake things up a little. 

I think I promised some poop jokes.  Let’s start there, follow up with some math-related food-throwing, and finish with some small literary treats.  That should clear the decks for whatever decides to enblogulate itself here next. 

I have been, as I mentioned, diagnosed with a curious condition, “jumper’s knee.” I had my first PT session for it last night.  It went a lot better than I had feared ever since my diagnosing orthopod had handed me a sheet of recommended therapies.  It was a long, complicated series of three stages of exercises, but right in the middle of the first group of workouts I saw a pairing that struck dread into my heart.  Turns out I was not asked to perform either of these maneuvers - the mini-squat or the stool crawl.  And there was much rejoicing.  By the housekeeping staff and my drycleaner.

NEW SUBJECT: as I mentioned, I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a few weekends ago and had a really great time.  Among their exhibits are two - two! - species of otter, riverine and oceanic.  Now I’m not going to badmouth these adorable waterrats, they attract a big crowd and eat shellfish on their backs and maintain charming moustaches, much as I do myself.  But the aquarium being a learn-y kind of place, they insisted on spoiling the cuteness with facts and details.  For instance, did you know that river otters mark their territory?  O yes they do, by spraying a “scent” (stench, reek, noxious liquid) from a gland cunningly concealed between their anus and their urethrea.  It is an area known by many names, two of which I know: choad and taint.  In this case, it is clear that the second of these was utilized by biologists who were seeking a name for the product sprayed therefrom.  What do you think they call the thing that otters spray from their taint?  Sometimes even scientists make the obvious choice. 

OKAY let’s move on, now that I’ve got you warmed up.  Enough with the execretory functions, let’s talk about food.  How about pie?  And hot dogs!  Or, no, how about pi and hot dogs?  I know sometimes you find yourself in the same situation that I encounter - I need to calculate the value of pi, but all I have is a pack of frozen hot dogs or a handful of churros.  Or perhaps a sack of smooth, cylindrical zucchinis (or “courgettes” for the Euro crowd).  Used to be, I’d just eat my zukes and churros and mourn my ignorance, but NO MORE - here’s how to calculate pi by tossing tubelike food.  You only have to toss it 100 or so times, but the more you do it, the close you get.  As it is with so many things.  You tell me how it works out for you.  I don’t feel, at present, much like tossing my dogs. 

OKAY OKAY, now let’s bring the mood back down… hilarity is hilarious and all, but this is a serious blog and I’m a serious guy.  This was evidenced by my incomprehensible feature on LitPark, a site I do enjoy (it’s on my links list, do a little work for once in your life).  Last week or so that site hosted a sort of contesty thing in which writers were asked to tell a story in 75 words.  I told two, and since I rather like them and they’re in my notebook, I consider them fair game so hold tight, here they come:

He queued up for the pharmacist, the lino marked with footworn tape.  Minutes lingered; the line crept.  Initially, it sounded like his lungs, but everybody else had problems too.  Then he rested his head on his walker’s crossbar and sobs racked his bulky frame.  His mottled hands shook on the grips.  A tap: “You okay?  You can move up.” Bewildered, furious, he wheeled himself back out the door but had nowhere to go.

Same bus, every day.  I get on and he’s already there.  I have my usual seat; he’s in his, a few feet down: solid, undistinguished, quiet. He never reads, never listens to music.  For years our routine has been the same: we ignore each other.  Tonight he was looking particularly dapper.  As I approached my seat our eyes met.  He clenched out a grin, I curtly nodded.  Now we’re bus buddies, I guess. 

That’s nice, isn’t it?  A little literary intermezzo.  No idea what comes next but at least it won’t be following old Shmuel.  Now go on with your bad self or selves. 

Monday, February 25, 2008

Shmuel and the Tallis

The Festival of Ephemera has been… concluded? revoked? let’s say, canceled for lack of interest - which is as it should be.  Ephemera are entitled to no greater indulgence than I have already afforded them.  Let us now briefly pause, before I get back to poop jokes and longwinded tales of events fascinating only to myself, for a moment of reflection.  I’ve done writ a story and I’m not sure why, but you are going to get it now and get it good.  Or well.  I’m not feeling terribly adverbial at present.

Background: I went recently to a lovely bar mitzvah ceremony, which is a standard sabbath morning service at which a youth - in this case, my sterling nephew Aaron - is inducted into the Jewish community by leading the congregation in key parts of the ceremony.  Afterwards, but before the congregation descends upon the thimbles of concord grape juice and the tables groaning with kugel and lox and pound cake awaiting in the activities hall, the celebrant is traditionally given a variety of symbolic gifts.  There’s a wine cup from the sisterhood, a certificate of tree-planting by the youth group, a prayerbook from the rabbi and, from the parents, a tallis - a prayer shawl.  As Aaron received his tallis I was wearing one given to me by my own father, who was sitting just across the aisle from me.  It all started me thinking and in the end I wrote this story.  I considered loading it up with hyperlinks for those unfamiliar with the jargon, but then I decided it was too late and anyway why should I deprive you the thrill of internet research?  In that spirit of selfishness and verbosity, I am pleased to unload:

Shmuel and the Tallis

There’s a storied (!) tradition of the interview at heaven’s gate, in which an angel or some such numinosity queries one of the newly dead about why paradise is, or is not, the appropriate destination for that particular soul.  Usually the interlocutor is St Peter but there’s no reason Jewish yarnspinners can’t work this genre too.  And thus I’m inspired to try one myself:

When Shmuel was laid out, it was, consistent with everything that had led him to that moment, with tradition.  The coffin was pinewood, untreated, fastened with pegs.  Internment was swift, and prior thereto his corporeal remains were never left unattended.  And what he wore, inside that plain pine box that he so briefly occupied above-ground, was a plain white shroud, over which was draped a tattered white shawl woven through with stripes of blue and fringed at three corners with tassels of four threads wrapped and bound in knots by a fifth.  (The fourth tassel had been cut when the garment had been placed on the body.) Shmuel had received this tallis 57 years previously, and had worn it religiously for every holy day and torah reading thenceforward.  He had davened in it and prostrated himself in it on Yom Kippur; he’d shielded his eyes with it and used it to contain the light of the Torah whenever he was called up to read from the scrolls.  It had aged well, as he had himself, but they had both finally reached the end of their respective roads a little threadbare and ragged.  He had even thought, the preceding Saturday morning, as he’d pulled it from its worn velvet bag for the last time, that perhaps it had served him for as long as it would be able. The old tallis had seen better days.  One does not dismiss the services of a lifelong companion so easily, however, and so Shmuel had made no plans to get a new tallis even when he noticed that his rheumy eyes could see right through his old one.  He just thought that the end of an era was upon him.  Three days later, he woke up dead.

“So, I’m dead already?,” he asked himself.  He was passing through darkness.  He could see nothing, felt nothing, but sensed his movement away from one realm and toward another.  His mind was untroubled; his body, nonexistent.  “So,” he reflexively re-inquired into the Stygian void, “this is death?”

“Of course it’s death.” The response was felt, not heard; apprehended, not perceived.  “What else would it be?  A chometz hunt?”

Shmuel felt silly for questioning the obvious, but then again, it was his way.  He was an asker of questions, even in answer to other questions.  He had a few good ones in mind right now but he wasn’t sure how to ask them. 

“You’re wondering what’s happening, nu?” The entity’s inquiry pervaded him like thunder pervades falling rain, filling its interstices and shuddering its substance. The silence that ensued was so awfully silent that Shmuel’s answer blurted itself out of its own accord: “Yes, I’m wondering.” All that seemed clear at this point to him was that any further inquiry would be, at best, delaying - at worst, impertinent.  Any understanding he might eventually be granted would be on terms over which he would have no control whatsoever.  He resigned himself to answering, for once.

“Do you think this is heaven?” The question opened up within him like a budding flower. 

“I don’t know.  It’s not what I would have expected.  It feels like an afterlife. From heaven, I don’t know.”

“You’re a wise man, Shmuel.  The real question, though, is not if you’re wise, nu?”

“No?”

“No.  The important thing is not wisdom, but righteousness.  So look at yourself, Shmuel. Do you see a righteous man, or just a clever one?”

Looking at anything had heretofore been an impossibility beyond comprehension in the blackness of the buried coffin.  But upon the entity’s suggestion, a visual image presented itself to Shmuel, one that he immediately recognized.

“Oh dear,” he thought out loud, “what’s happened to my tallis?” For indeed, the vision occurring to him was not that of the gleaming linen shawl he’d seen each time he’d put it on in the many years immediately elapsed.  This tallis, though indisputably the same one, was dingy, tattered and stained; the tzitzis dangling from all four corners hardly more than frayed threads.  The satin atarah at the neck, inscribed with the blessing he always recited but never actually needed to read, was dull and illegible.  A conscientious cook wouldn’t have used that shmata to dry a soup pot.

“So, it’s your tallis?”

“Yes.  I’m sorry.”

“What have you to be sorry about?”

“Look at it.  Look at it!  It’s hardly recognizable!  I can’t believe I wore it to shul, a thing like that.  It’s a shondeh.  I meant no disrespect.... I guess it happened so gradually I never noticed. I just -”

“Enough.  It’s a tallis.  You wore it for your entire lifetime as a man of the community.  So tell me: Why?”

“Why?”

“Why did you wear this tallis?”

“It was ordained!  We all wear it!  It reminds us of birthright and duty!  It honors the almighty!  What do you mean, why?”

“So, you’re saying, if you had no tallis, you would have neglected your duty?  Deprived of this piece of cloth, you would have spent your days dishonoring the holy name?  If you never had a tallis to wrap around your bony shoulders, how long would it have taken you to disown your birthright?”

Shmuel was starting to forget his place in this conversation.  “What kind of a question is that?  What do you think?  Never!  My birthright and my duty are woven through my being like the blue threads woven through this garment - even though they’re barely blue anymore!”

A moment was granted for him to regain himself before he was then asked: “So look back on your life - on the men you met.  Did you ever meet a man who forsook his duty, who lived in disrespect of hashem?”

Shmuel considered the unfurled scroll of his life and answered, “Yes.  Such men are everywhere.  Well, maybe not here, but everywhere else.”

“Indeed.  And that is why you are here, now, engaging in this polemic.  There are two kinds of people who wear the tallis: those who never need to be reminded why they wear it, and those who can never be reminded no matter how often they wear it.  You, Shmuel, are one who does not need reminding.”

“Just those two types?  For all people?  No middle group?”

“Darkness was created, and light.  There was no need to create twilight or dimness or a gentle auroral glow.  These all consist of the two extremes, in different relations.  And thus it is with persons, too - there are good ones and ones who forsake their goodness, and though these extremes occur in innumerably blended degrees, each of you falls to one side or the other.  And thus, your tallis you wore not for the eternal - the eternal is untroubled by individual practice.  Neither did you wear it for yourself, for its knots and tassels and stripes are superfluous to the heart upon which its lessons are already inscribed.  Rather, you wore this tallis as a beacon to those around you who might be induced to blend a little more light into their own darkness.  That’s why it looks to you so worn and dirty.  You see it dimly because of all the light it has bestowed on others, and it appears stained to you because it bears all the stains it helped erase from other souls.  From here, you understand, it is infinitely radiant and impeccably maintained.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“I’m glad to let you know.  And now, you are bade a task: unravel your tallis.  Loosen the knots, pluck free the fringes, tease apart the threads of the fabric. Continue until you are left with a bundle of fibers and a satin strip, and then I will return to you.”

A lonesomeness unlike any he had ever conceived fell upon Shmuel; time was meaningless to him as he confronted his task.  Fingerless, incorporeal, he didn’t even know how to start.  Eventually his concentration focused on one tassel, one knotted bundle of string.  It spoke to him of the first commandment, and he listened to it with all his heart.  He dwelt upon it until it dwelt within him and he absorbed it like bodies are absorbed into the earth.  Understanding came to him at last, and as it did so, the knot became not.  Where once there’d been a firmly tied bundle, now there was a loose grouping of strings.  Shmuel turned to the next knot, and the next commandment.  He let the lesson arise from within him and fill his being.  The strings came loose.  In this way, mitzvah by mitzvah, he deconstructed his tallis.

When he was done all that remained was a jumbled mass of thread and twine, linen fibers kinked from interwoven years.  He sensed the entity’s return, replacing an infinite void with a sense of impossible fullness.  “You’ve left nothing but threads.”

“It was a good tallis.”

“No, the goodness was yours; you’ve just reclaimed it.  You had poured so much of your soul into that tallis, you deserved to get some of it back.  We will leave the fibers to rest with your bones.  But now, congratulations and let’s get going.  I suspect you’ve got some questions for us.”

good enough for govt work, anyway, and it’s past my bedtime.  dentist tomorrow, then a big heavy week of big heavy work.  i’ll make up for it with less weighty posts.  till then, take it easy.  it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Neighborhood Resource

Ephemera returns!  Yeah like you’ve been waiting but here it is anyway....

My neighborhood’s been getting a face lift of sorts - old eyesores are getting gussied up.  The ratty old grocery was torn down and replaced with a normal nice grocery store.  The burger joint that was so depressing bought the failed veggie place next door and totally remodeled into a normal nice awesome burger place.  Okay, it’s sort of generic-looking for my tastes, but it’s the same great burger in a nice new storefront.  And the musty mid-century sporting goods shop next door has simultaneously turned into a nice fancy sort of dayspa place.  The old vacant upturned eye of the deceased Park Walker liquor store has finally been covered over with paper in a respectful acknowledgment of its demise. The Coronet is now a vacant lot, soon to be a brand-new seniors’ services complex.  With the newish De Young filling out its landscaping quite well and the impending amazitude of the upcoming Academy of Sciences, I’ve got to say that the Richmond District is doing all right for itself. 

Then there’s DC.

I’m calling it DC because I don’t wish to use this site to malign anybody or anything more than absolutely necessary for purposes of narrative integrity, unless there’s a really good laugh in it, which is manifestly not the case here.  There have been a few times I’ve said more about someone here than I should have and I’ve regretted it every time.  I don’t want to name those whom I might describe in a less-than-positive light.  It’s insensitive and it diminishes the other person’s dignity.  So if I’m going to be harsh, or even unstintingly realistic about a subject that could benefit from some flattery, I don’t want to make identities too obvious.  So often the things that I wind up writing about are the things that are broken, don’t fit, don’t work.  I guess they’re easy targets.  Maybe it’s mean-spirited of me; I prefer to think of it as merely lazy.  I make my wine from blemished fruit.  And thus I turn again in my mind to DC, an abbreviation I’ll use to spare this little blemish of a shop any avoidably excessive humiliation.  But if I’m going to make wine, let’s get stomping:

I live on a block on which three sides are residential and one, facing the boulevard, is also partly commercial.  There’s a mattress shop, a little medical supplies store, a prescription herb outlet and a questionable bodywork establishment up a steep flight of stairs.  Additionally, for many years, there was shop where music could be digitized in various ways.  It looked like a decent little space, with a large front window that revealed an open room around which keyboards and drum kits and lots of CPUs were scattered, strung together with thick dark cables.  It was about a year ago that this establishment disestablished itself; subsequently, the large front window opened onto a view of emptiness and gloom for several months. 

Then I started seeing work being done inside the little shopspace.  Walls were patched, carpets were cleaned. A strange temporary sign went up in front, an ungainly geometric shape that spelled out DC’s full name - a name which initially seemed to me rather an over-reach, evoking much more than I thought the shop was likely ultimately to deliver.  Still, I withheld my acid judgments till I could really see what DC had to offer.  Maybe they’d surprise me.  Maybe DC really was the name that fit best.

Redecoration went slowly.  A handful of bracket shelves went up on some walls and one section got painted an outdated mauve.  Then, all of a sudden, DC was open: a large flatscreen had been mounted on a wall adjacent to the front window, playing an endless loop of fluttering asian girl-band videos heavy on CG flowerpetals and adorable coyness.  Butting up against the front window, a display table had been left stranded, covered with hyper-cute alarm clocks and makeup kits and pencil boxes.

Taped inside the window were color ink-jet printouts of specs for a dozen or so MP3 players and phones selling for more than I would have suspected they were worth.  The spartan wall-shelving held a variety of pointless-looking merchandise.  And in the middle of it all, adrift like an iceberg, was a glass counter, behind which sat a slender asian pre-middle-aged man in clumsy squared glasses and a puffy ski jacket.  The shop felt dramatically under-furnished; the temporary sign in front had transfigured itself without any visible enhancements into shoddy permanence.  It looked understocked, cloying, and creepy, and it was open for business.  Signs taped to the window in front, printed out on typing paper in 30-point times roman, proclaimed DC as a hot spot for holiday shopping. 

And then: nothing happened.  I passed that shop every day and i never saw anyone in it.  No one, that is, besides the proprietor in his invariable ski jacket.  He’d sit behind his counter, surrounded by garish toys and off-brand electronics, reading a magazine or watching saccharine videos.  Weeks passed and nothing seemed to change.  Though I lived on his block I never got a flier or circular inviting my patronage.  He started staying open later but it didn’t seem to improve foot traffic.  Maybe he was doing well on-line but on the street he was tanking. 

As I pass I sometimes see him peering out the front windows between the taped-up product listings and signs, eyes obscured by the florescent lights reflecting off his clunky glasses, his face a perfect blank.  I can’t figure what he might be thinking, but I know for sure what he puts in my head: DC is not the hot spot for anything I want.  At best, it is a warehouse of futility.  And goodness knows I’ve got enough of that already.