Friday, April 30, 2004

Don’t Talk to Strangers

The past two posts have been about being on the bus and hearing things, or not hearing them, as the case may be. This is the third and last of this series.  Cleveland elects to receive. 

And then sometimes words aren’t even necessary:

I was riding home on a shockingly crowded bus at 8:30 or 9 at night; I wore a dark suit and carried a worn-out brain.  I was tired of arguing, of talk, of words.  I sat quietly, a magazine warming my lap, my eyes scanning it without much comprehension.

We were mostly commuters so we knew the rules: keep quiet, eyes to your lap, thoughts peacefully inward.  But nobody told him, or if they had, he had forgotten.  He was young, looked to be in good shape, maybe even smart.  He wore a cheap suit with his collar open and his tie loosened.  He was lit up, flushed and drunken.  In a mass of people jamming the aisle, he stood mumbling to himself and weaving, engaged in an out-loud internal monologue - laughing at imagined jokes, responding to the questions of his own overtaxed mind…. People tried to edge away but there really was nowhere to go. 

I was about four rows behind him.  Naturally, he caught my eye, and consequently I caught his.  Thankfully, I was too far away even to have to think about talking to him.  He had no such inhibitions, though, so he cheerfully started a conversation with me, speaking to me over a dozen strangers’ heads.  “Hey, how ya doin’?” With my eyes I tried to brush him off.  He misunderstood it as a reply, rather than just a response.  “Yeah, long day.  Don’t have to tell me twice.” I scoffed silently, he responded vocally, and the conversation continued in this fashion for some time - him speaking, me responding silently. 

He was finely attuned to the tiniest facial gestures, picked up on the smallest non-verbal cues.  Without meaning to, I began to toy with him.  Then, when I saw how easy it was, I began to do it on purpose.  I listened to his rantings and raised my brow, or turned down the corners of my mouth a millimeter or two, or looked away in a delicate gesture of mock rage; I made whatever minuscule changes of expression I thought would feed his randomly-firing neurons.  As a result, I somehow convinced him that: he’d been spied on, but wasn’t currently under surveillance; that I was with an intelligence (!) organization, but not working on his case directly; that I was, in reality, a mole working to destroy a corrupt system from the inside; and that our communication was not only unauthorized but dangerous for us both. 

Realizing how powerful an ally I was, and how exposed he was for fingering me in public surrounded by all these who-knows-whos, he suggested he’d better get off the bus for our mutual safety.  I agreed, closing my eyes with serene resignation.  When I opened them again, he was gone.  I tried to go back to my magazine but it seemed pathetically two-dimensional.  I was a double agent, after all.  There had to be something more gripping to read.  And in the end, nothing is so good a read as another person’s face. 

Thursday, April 29, 2004

What He Told Her at the Door

This is the second story about hearing and not hearing on the bus.  Where’s the first story, you ask?  Immediately below this one.  Like hell I’m going through the trouble of making a link for that.

And sometimes I realize that I’m missing something with the headphones....

She got on in the theater district with a bunch of art students who toted bulky portfolios and well-honed ennui; she glimmered unmistakeably among them despite her clear avoidance of any effort.  She carried a small plastic shopping bag with a box of cereal in it, wore a long plain grey coat and no makeup - except a French pedicure revealed by her delicate sandals.  Her hair hung straight and unstyled, pure gold.  Her face was the classic scandanavian ideal: small perfect features, icy blue eyes.  She sat across from me and kept to herself.  As other riders boarded and swarmed around her - art students, tenderloin drunks and hustlers, concertgoers heading home from Davies in the suits they wore to work - she sat like rock candy, a fructified gemstone, eyes on the road or in her lap, hands demurely folded.  She spoke to no one and no one spoke to her.

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Not Overheard

I’m a bit brain dead this morning but that doesn’t diminish my residual and retroactive enjoyment of my evening yesterday.  It was a lovely banquet, and a great, though much too short, visit with my dad and connie and the family as well.  While I was there I thought dad would actually like to see some of the stuff I’ve been going on about to him for so long, so between the main course and dessert I fetched out my iPod and showed it to him.  “Well look at that,” he declared, “is that your TiVo?” They’re just so darn cute when they’re this age.  Turns out that I don’t think anybody at the table had ever seen an iPod and I got to do some basic demos two or three times over. People were pretty surprised by it. 

Already, for me it’s become the operating standard, the minimum mandatory requirement.  iPod, therefore I am.  However, that is such a shallow sentiment that it really makes me take stock of how much lately I’m sitting around surrounded by people - interesting people, even - and my ears are plugged with headphones, cutting me off from the throng of which I truly am a part.  I’ve been doing some thinking on this lately and it seems that sometimes hearing what’s happening is important and sometimes it’s not.  And this distinction is the basis for three short transit tales about hearing and speaking in their various permutations.  Why, here’s one now!

Sometimes I can see it all from the bus and I don’t even need to hear a single word:

They sit on a low concrete bench set into the sort of corporate plaza that blunts the vitality even of this city’s nerve center at nine a.m.  She is young and lovely with straight black hair, honey-tea skin, big almond eyes, and an ingenuous round face on which she bears an expresion of paralyzing tension.  She huddles in her down jacket holding her slim jean-clad legs tightly together. 

He sits next to her, young and hunky, tousled blonde locks and a square jaw, plaid shirt jacket, faded jeans and worn sturdy boots.  His eyes are on her as she stares out at the street; his body is turned toward her and his arm encircles her shoulder.  Their faces are close together, he’s speaking softly to her.  Her knees begin to bounce, small movements getting faster.  She doesn’t seem to be in control.  He turns her toward him and kisses her, tenderly, deeply.  Halfway through the kiss her knees stop shaking.  Their lips part; she rests her head on his chest and and he lays a quiet hand on her quiet leg.  The bus pulls away, taking me with it.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

A Little is Better than Nothing

My exercise for myself started with one that I learned from pea: three short stories, each beginning with the same sentence.  I added a few twists - five sentences maximum, and finish them all within one bus ride downtown (about half an hour).  The five sentences could be as complicated as I wished, but not just for the sake of being complicated - they had to be literary sentences, not merely bizarre grammatical aberrations.

I really liked my first one, but the second one was weaker and the third was just plain weak.  Regardless, getting one good one story out of the process was worth it, and I may have learned something about how I write.  Like, forcing myself to try to be creative on a crowded bus lurching toward my final stop is a foredoomed enterprise. 

Because I find them all more interesting in context with each other, and I could use being taken down a few notches, I’ll show you all three efforts, but in reverse order.  You can read them in any damn order you like, of course. 

3.  His footsteps creaked on the porch.  The light snapped on.  He froze.  The light eventually went off.  As quietly as possible, he left.

2.  His footsteps creaked on the porch.  He stopped; slowly rocked back a little to see if he could make it happen again.  Creak - a resonant, raspy chord, sort of a D, a good country chord; it spoke to his bones.  He pulled the mandolin from the case slung over his shoulder, creaked a few more times, and began to riff on the tone, exploring combinations he’d never considered before.  After only a few bars someone had stepped up to an open porch window with a dobro and began to accompany him, with an occasional muttered “damn....”

1.  His footsteps creaked on the porch.  “It’s been a long time,” he thought.  “Dad would never have let that go.” As he juggled for his keys in the dark, he let go the small paper sack.  He heard the bottle shatter, smelled his whiskey soaking into the floorboards, whispered a choked curse to himself and slid sobbing to the floor.

That was fun, wasn’t it?  Come back tomorrow and we’ll learn how to grow magic rocks in a jello shot!  Do you remember magic rocks?  Did you ever wonder what would happen if you ate one like a vitamin?  If you tried this, I’d be interested in hearing from you.  Otherwise, I’m on the road a lot of today - supper with Dad in LA, where he’s being honored by his Jewish law enforcement association!  Whoo-hoo rabbi cop!  I’m looking way forward to seeing him and it’s just a pity it’ll be such a short trip.  But a little is better than nothing.  Hence, this post.

Monday, April 26, 2004

MANY HAPPY RETURNS

Let’s recognize right up front that my wife and friends are by a wide margin the greatest people ever anywhere in history.  I had a spectacularly awesome time for my birthday and I’ll be looking back on recent events with overwhelming gratitude and appreciation for as long as my neurons are firing. 

All I’d wanted to do for my birthday was to get myself and the house cleaned up a little, do some important paperwork that would make me feel more on top of my game, get TiVo on line and to eat very well.  Mission accomplished - plus.....

Supper saturday night was exceptional - the Buckeye has never let me down.  Three big courses, four big cheerful drinks (was that a tankard of the ‘97 Sandeman they poured for us?), and a beautiful room overlooking Richardson Bay.  Everything had been prepared to perfection and I ate unto - nay, beyond - satiety.  Braised artichoke with tarragon sauce, oysters bingo (broiled in the shell with cheese and spinach), fillet mignion and then a fat slice of S’more Pie: it’s been my experience that most things with the word “S’more” in their names don’t really do their namesake justice, but I swear to you, s’mores aspire to be as good as this pie was.  Kel had a lovely sundae with cinnamon ice cream, served in one of those parfait glasses that’s broad at the top but gets deep and narrow at the bottom.  It took her a long time to make any headway on her dessert because most of the bulk of it was on top, but once she’d gotten past that it didn’t last long.  With my pie, however, I started at the pointed end and the more I ate the wider the pie got, till by the time I got near the end I was overwhelmed by how much was left.  Not that I didn’t finish it, mind you.  Gluttony is an acquired trait and I’ve been working on it for 40 years now.

Once we got back home we enjoyed half an hour of my new Family Guy dvds (thanks Kel) and then I fell thoroughly asleep, dreaming of good things.  These began to take fruition with a leisurely and very pleasant sunday morning that included both lounging and dawdling, as well as a brisk run with Kel (thanks Kel, good idea) around Stow Lake, then a nice dog walk, then some stumbling around as I got ready for a quiet brunch at Heidi and Andy’s place.

Kel seemed anxious that we get there close to “on time” - this, together with the fact that I was dealing with Heidi (who throws surprise parties) set off some buried alarms in my brain but the rest of me was too relaxed to pay attention.  I really had no clue that there was anything happening till I got in the front door and 25 of my best friends shouted “surprise” to me.  For the next five hours I let people pour me excellent wines, feed me outstanding and widely various foods of both sweet and savory varieties specifically chosen for my own preferences and tastes, and ply me with goodies and gifties which I love very much.  I soaked in a redwood hot tub as children scrambled hither and yon and felt extremely lucky.  These are really smart, funny, busy people, and that they pulled together to party for my birthday means a lot to me. 

(My best line from the party: two people were discussing The Lion King - The Musical, which is coming to town or has just opened, and it’s hard to get tickets.  I scoffed, “you know what really gets me - it’s not even an original show.  All they did was take Hedwig and change the costumes.")

Eventually we packed up the car with loot and Kel spirited me back home - where I pulled the ol’ audio tape deck out of the media cabinet and re-wired things generally so that all the different components are plugged in and TiVo is ready to activate.  We can even run the DVD player through the stereo now without distortion, which we couldn’t do before.  The VCR is set up to tape off TiVo or straight off the cable.  I didn’t even shock myself once.  Except when I stepped back and realized I’d done it all, and correctly, too. 

Furthermore, I’m up to 1100 songs on the iPod - which we listened to in the car on the drive to the East bay for the surprise brunch party, and on the way back home, and then out to the east bay again sunday night to watch the Sopranos with Dave and Kim.  I got to put Daisy into her jammies (her request, I think) (come on man she’s like 28 months old) and we closed out the weekend with a healthy dose of tension, confrontation and violence, HBO-style.  It’s our own little ceremony to conclude our weekends, and this time it seemed particularly satisfying.

So in the end I got everything out of my birthday I could have wanted, and one hell of a lot more.  Thank you so much, everybody, for thinking of me and boosting the energy I was enjoying.  It calls to mind that I recently received the gift of a volume of poetry which I opened to a random page on friday; the poem I read there was moving and passionate, and it ended with words I thought might possibly be prophetic:

“But pale despair and cold tranquility, (/) Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, (/) Birth and the grave, they are not as they were.” (Shelley: Alastor, or Spirit of Solitude). Maybe, Percey, but then again, are these things not as they were, or is only my relationship to them changed?  Or is the change within myself alone? 

Monday now, and time to take stock.  I’ll have some good transit tales for you later this week.  For now, I’m still masticating on a very meaty weekend indeed.

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Supermodel Personals

I wouldn’t tell you to go there if it wasn’t funny as hell. Courtesy, once again, of Memepool.

Friday, April 23, 2004

Meditation on Transience

This morning I got the news: the green-brown shirt is beyond repair. It was my favorite and luckiest shirt, the soft one that people always wanted to touch, the one that went with most of my clothes, that had a flattering cut and didn’t fade even though I’ve probably had it for five years. I even sliced one sleeve on broken glass one fateful night but it didn’t fray.  But a (capped!) pen recently leaked in my pocket and this morning the drycleaner pronounced the fabric hopelessly stained. (On the plus side, it happened during a class and I got a lot of sympathy; the teacher who pointed it out to me when I stepped up to do a reading suggested something along the lines of sucking the ink out, but I didn’t think she actually wanted me to take her up on it.) I told the dry cleaner to throw the shirt away. Obviously, it had been meant for my 30s, not my 40s. 

And 40 is what I effectively am today.  Well, in two more days, but I won’t be posting then.  Instead, while I have a moment to do so, I’ll revive a hoary old tradition from nigh on 365 days ago or so, when I last had a birthday and posted a poem.  Lacking the imaginative spark to do anything different, here’s another one:

Take a moment here to linger
on extended middle finger
raise a draft commemorating the occasion of my birth
Fill the stadium with bourbon
I’ll have all of you in turbans
and ecstatic in a revelry that shakes the very earth
Tear my spandex off in shreds
braid my body hair in dreds
hoist my bootie on the table and I’ll show you how to dance
Make a mockery of age
understudy in a rage
I will burn the stage beneath you and put weasels in your pants
Eat a hundred hits of acid
always turgid, never flaccid
adamantium and kryptonite with teflon mylar skin
Making diamonds out of charcoal
ace the cup on any par hole
write myself a bluegrass opera for electric mandolin
I’m the pride of this great nation
I’m adjusted for inflation
I’m the answer to your prayers if you’re fool enough to pray
With another year behind me
I’m right here if you can find me
Time to fill the cup and drain it - birthday 40 is today!

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Sweet and Dirty

Yesterday I posted the story of me and a young friend, and a lesson learned.  I promised to give you another story about that kid today, and another personal growth experience.  This time, everybody wound up happy and wired, and no mastodons died. 

It was a day when the Executive Editors needed help with both kids.  Kel and I therefore drove together to their house on a “distract and amuse” mission.  I took on JV, whom I knew only too well, and Kel got set up with R and one of his four-year-old friends. 

R and JV’s folks had some strong opinions about food and diet.  The one most worth mentioning here was that it was pretty much a sugar-free household. R’s snacks were fruit and crackers, or strips of yellow and red peppers.  He seemed perfectly fine with this, and his friend, it seemed, had the same setup at his home.  Two four-year-olds, and either of them knew their aspartame from a hole in the ground.  What a world.

So what was Kel to do with these kids, to keep them out of trouble for an afternoon?  Mom sent them with her to the store to buy supplies for baking cookies.  That’s right, cookies: sweet, delicious, exotic.  Why did mom choose this activity for their distraction?  We still don’t know.  We just did as we were told. 

Kel tells me the story - I was elsewhere with the baby.  She unloaded the ingredients on the kitchen counter as the two little boys watched with curious skepticism.  She showed them the flour, the sugar, the powder - well, they were all white powders and the boys were not overly impressed with any of them.  Together, they measured out some butter, added sugar and eggs and chocolate chips, and then blended up some flour and sugar and powder.  When they finally mixed the whole mess together it turned into a tacky mass of tan agglutination. 

Kelly then had the kids transfer the dough to cookie sheets.  After just a few seconds of work, though, they turned to Kel in revulsion, their hands caked with cold gooey muck.  They complained.  Kelly suggested that they taste a little of the stuff that was making their hands so messy.  Hesitantly, they raised their hands to their mouths.  When their tastebuds decyphered the flavor, their eyes bugged out of their precocious little heads.  They had discovered how the other half lived, what they’d been missing all along.  Kel had to persuade them to save some of the dough for baking instead of scarfing. 

The kids learned a valuable lesson - and not just that their parents had been ripping them off.  I think they learned something deeper, too.  It had to do with problems, and challenges, and triumph.  And sugar. 

I’ve tried to carry this lesson with me as I’ve gone through life, but honestly it’s been hard.  It turns out to be fairly unusual to be able to eat your problems - even rarer to enjoy doing so.  However, even in the midst of tribulation, I’d like to think that I can still keep a weather eye for the occasional errant chocolate chip. Some of them turn out to be made of real chocolate, I’m told.

A Beaver by any other name

I wanted to say something about it yesterday but it seemed disrespectful.  Now I see a sign in today’s paper that I’m supposed to put those qualms behind me: when I see an article referencing a guy named Dick Peters, I know the universe actually wants me to mention that I saw an obituary yesterday for Mr. Harry Beevers. 

I guess it was a more innocent time.

Visual Proof

So someone suggested that I do the old “picture worth a thousand words” thing and spare you all two thousand of my best.  Well, you might already have read them but anyway here is the comparison between me in ‘94 and me in ‘04.  I’ll be a lot more comfortable with Chuckly Dan instead of Grimacin’ Dan.  And now you may return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The End of Innocence

In this birthday countdown week, I’m going to continue my “ruminations on the passage of time and youth” by sharing two stories about some kids I knew once, and some lessons they taught me.  Here’s the first one:

I thought I was pretty wise but I guess I wasn’t in some big ways.  Regardless, I was a clever college grad with a live-in squeeze and a bright future.  This arsenal of favorable traits was critical, if I was to withstand the shame of being a nanny. 

Of course, my job title was “Assistant to the Executive Editors,” but they didn’t need any help either editing or executing anything.  They were at the top of their craft, writing a successful serialized tv drama.  A husband-and-wife team in their early 40s, they had suffered years of privation before being launched into unqualified tinseltown success.  What they needed help with, had less to do with work and more to do with life: paying bills, picking up things they’d bought, getting them lunch and - mostly - entertaining their infant son so he could stay with them in the studio production office all day.

Little JV and I got along great.  I revelled in my new identity.  I’d always been the cerebral one, observing from an intellectual remove, as long as I could remember - but now I got to be totally responsive, emotional, in the moment.  It was tiring and difficult, but surprisingly rewarding as well. 

Sometimes a situation would come up in which their older son R wold also need to be attended. This, too, was fine.  R was four, serious and very smart.  I enjoyed his company, After spending so much time with JV, it was good to ber able to really talk to someone, you know?

So I am tasked, one fine day, to get R out of the house for a while so his folks can do some work.  The museum, they say.  The one with all the dinosaurs. 

I know immediately which one they mean: the sunny and inviting Page Museum on midWilshire at the pits - one of those magical places where nature has actually forbidden the dominion of man.  Wilshire is a major boulevard lined with some of the most important and expensive real estate in the world - but right at midWilshire, between the hollow deco aspirations of the Miracle Mile and the crystalline excesses of Beverly Hills, stood a good-sized grassy park, not unusual in itself but for what was in it: LACMA, of course, and its associated collections, but also the La Brea Tar Pits.  They are real, and real old. I always loved them as a child - the pools of tar bubbling up from the planet’s core, some housing active digs where I could watch actual paleontologists chipping away at a clotted mass of matrix, the bones they’d found laid out behind them - and of course that heartbreaking moment frozen for 20,000 years in the big pit where a simulated concrete mommy mastodon sinks into oblivion, slowly, calling out in horror and sorrow to her cub, shown standing on the edge of the huge bubbling foulsmelling pit trumpeting futily.  And tar bubbled up out of the ground all over the place, and there was a cool museum full of bones.  I’d take R there - it would be fun.

I realized I’d made a mistake when we got to our destination and R asked me where we were.  I said, we’re going to the museum with the dinosaurs.  He replied, that’s somewhere else.  I thought twice.  There was another museum: Natural History, down by USC.  That’s a real schlep. But they do have dinosaur bones.  They have got about a billion other things, too; it would be as misleading to call it a Dinosaur Museum as it would to call Disneyland ‘that place with the pirates,’ but it was only misleading, not actually inaccurate.  “Inaccurate” would be me coming to the Page Museum for dinosaurs when the entire collection was paleolithic - from an era when humans walked the earth, or were damn close to doing so.  I was at the museum without dinosaurs.  But I still thought it was a good idea to go, so we soldiered on. 

We got to the main entry, across from the statues of the drowning mastodon, where wew stood awhile at the wire fence, watching the methane and sulphur bubble up from the interior of the planet. R gravely observed the plight of the plaster animals. He said nothing.

Inside the museum we stopped at the first display - two skeletal mastodons (sorry, dark photo), propped up as big as life, standing in naturalistic postures. One was as big as a panel truck; one was as petite as a smart car.  R looked at them for a while before turning to me to ask, “why is one big and one small?” “One of them, I answered, “was all grown up when it fell in the tar.  One wasn’t.” R took this information with seriousness and silence.  “I thought,” he eventually continued, “that only old things died.”

Something in me died right then and there.  I thought at the time it was old but really, it wasn’t.

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Expired Identity

A few weeks ago I took a big step towards getting rid of an unwanted guest: Tense Daniel.  I try not to have too much to do with him anymore, but it’s been impossible to ignore him, the way he’s hung around on my driver’s license, scowling at me with somewhat more hair than I currently grow, and the sneer of one of those bad guys from the Matrix. From that laminated card, I stared out at myself from 10 years ago, when I was a very different person indeed.

Monday, April 19, 2004

Page 23, fifth sentence: till I get a good one

When I first read about it, the only books nearby were a dictionary, some procedures manuals, and a book of poetry by Shelly (Percy, not Winters) on page 23 of which was a biographical sketch in non-sentence form.  I had to wait till now to sit at an normal (non-employment-related) computer to:

* Find the nearest book,
* Open it to page 23,
* Locate the fifth sentence, and
* Post it here: “As already remarked, it frequently happens at the very beginning of a treatment that a dream reveals to the doctor, in a wide perspective, the general direction in which the unconscious is moving.”

Let’s hear it for C.G.Jung and his rockin’ hit, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.  Eh, screw that.  Right under the Jung was another book, effectively equally near to me; let’s see what it has to say instead:

“I took out a card and gave it to her.” Oh great, Mr. Raymond Chandler, is that the best you can do with a story like Farewell My Lovely from which to glean?  This sucks, I’m getting reamed on the cool sentences. 

BUT WAIT.  Wait.  Wait.  It gets better, indeed it does.  Page 23, sentence number five, in the third book in the stack just inside the closet right next to this very chair on which I am presently seated, reads as follows: “Lots of satellite dishes and rotating radar emitters are great things to have on your roof.” Finally, a sentence worth reading.  For this one, I had to visit a charming volume called, The TICK: Mighty Blue Justice! by Greg Hyland. 

For purposes of completeness, I will also explore page 23, sentence number five of the fourth of six books in the stack, all of which were naturally equally near to me (the last two are volumes of cartoons and don’t have a fifth sentence on page 23).  Thus: “It was in January 1877 that the Sutter Street Wire Cable Railroad was formally opened.” Let’s hear it for Edgar M. Kahn and his classic revised edition of Cable Car Days in San Francisco, a humorless and encyclopedic survey of all matters relating to public transportation in a certain west coast hamlet prior to the promulgation of internal combustion (a form of combution with which I am sadly only too familiar).  I’ll have to say that the quoted sentence is about as entertaining as the book gets. 

Oooh!  As I typed that last paragraph the phone rang and I had to run to the bedroom to answer it, and right next to the phone I found what must be the El Dorado of good fifth sentences on page 23.  I haven’t checked yet.  Let’s try this one then: “Together they put the leash and cape on Sandy.” Oh yeah.  Now that’s a fifth sentence worth re-reading.  Thank you, Rita Balducci, author of Girl’s Best Friend, one of the most heartwarming volumes in the Barbie and Friends Book Club.  What, you think I’m kidding?  This is a kid’s book about training guide dogs.  Come on, I don’t whip out the cape and leash for everybody, you know.

Even Losers can be Weiners

I just got a disturbing email.  It begins, “I’m a web master, and I was just searching Google for suitcase weiner. I found your domain, chucklehut.thalysman.com ranked 4, which is pretty cool.” She goes on to suggest that we should trade links, she won’t steal my business, and I think there was something in there about a candlelit dinner on an elephant howdah.  I may have actually been hallucinating during that portion of the email, but let’s concentrate on the key issue: I was searching google for suitcase weiner and the Chucklehut is ranked #4 - which is pretty cool.

Okay lady, you were googling “suitcase weiner?” Right away I form questionable impressions of you.  Everyone knows weiners are carry-ons.  It’s also worth mentioning that I have never used the phrase “suitcase weiner” until today.  Not even on a dare.  Why google associates me with this linguistic and anatomical aberration, I cannot say.  But now that I’m in the game, I intend to win it, goddamn it. 

So, you were looking for a “suitcase weiner” and google listed the ‘hut as #4, eh?  I’m assuming there were more than four options, and that you checked 1 through 3 first.  I think the point here is, I was out of medal contention, and now you’re saying “that’s cool.” Well it’s not cool, it totally sucks.  I may not know much about “suitcase weiner,” or if I do I’m not saying, but being number 4 is about as cool as discovering a big yogurt stain on my crotch after making a lengthy stand-up presentation to a roomful of my mother’s friends.  Four is an inherently weak and shifty number and I’ll thank you not to remind me of it.  However, in the interest of moving on with my life, I would like to think that, after this post, the Chucklehut will be Number One in Suitcase Weiners henceforward. 

I will, however, mention that for a while I wanted to name my band (which does not exist) the Weiner Boys; our first album would be “Weiner Takes All.” The whole weiner concept was altered for me by Elvis Costello in “Straight to Hell.” So I’m not feeling emasculated by the weiner references.  I’m just kind of hoping that the suitcase is one of those hardsided ones.

Prohibited Violations

Hey I’m not out of words, I’m just using them on other people right now.  You’re better off not hearing from me today anyway, unless you want to talk about program-owned evaluation and the outcome-output controversy. 

In the meantime, this is what I have to say for myself:

I’m the “void” in the phrase “Void where prohibited,” and I’m the prosecutor in the phrase “Prosecutors will be violated.” Now, where did I put that sawhorse?...

Friday, April 16, 2004

Future Perfect

It was one of those moments when I actually expanded my mentality - figured out how to use my brain in two or three directions at once, a sort of personal intellectual watershed.  I remember it clearly: I was lying in bed, waiting for sleep.  It was 1970.  My sister and I lived in a comfortable house that my dad and mom owned (the fine points of mortgages were lost on me at the time); we had two cars, a nice grassy backyard, a dog and a model train (N gauge).  Dad was a grown-up, by definition and acclaimation.  I wondered in my idle childlike way what the world would be like when I was dad’s age - what I would be like. I wondered, as well, when that would be - when I would be as old as dad. The prospect seemed so remote as to be almost fantastic. It would be almost like living in the year 2000, an amazingly prophetic and futuristic date, from my perspective. 

I started doing the math in my head, slowly, clumsily.  Dad was 36; I was six; that’s a thirty year difference.  I would therefore be the age my father was at that moment in another thirty years.  That would take me to thirty years from 1970.  That would be the year 2000.  Not only that, but in the year 2000, I would be as old as my father was at the moment I was having this thought.  It was the same both ways.  It blew my little mind. But at least I knew what was coming - how life would be for me when I got to a given recognizable point in the future.  I had thirty years to get my own wife, house, kids, cars, world.  Although I had not idea now to accomplish any of it, it seemed like an appropriate goal structure and timeline. 

Thirty years later the year 2000 was upon me and I realized that I’d reached that predictive point in my future.  Married, but no kids.  No house - we rented a flat.  I was just starting a second career, saw a future ahead of me that looked nothing like my dad’s life, and less so with each passing day.  All I had anticipated that timeless night when I did all that math in my head was not to be - not on the schedule I’d anticipated, anyway, and maybe not ever.  All I could say to myself was, “I guess that didn’t work out like you figured....”

In retrospect, I’m relieved.  I’d have missed out on a lot if it had gone as I’d expected.  But I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have explained that to me if I’d had a chance to try in 1970.  The importance of breaking the predictive model was based on a value structure I hadn’t yet recognized, much less learned to appreciate.  Hell, I’m still learning to appreciate it now.

Thursday, April 15, 2004

Cross “Perish” Off the List

So it was last year, in June, that I had a weird and asymmetrical experience getting my baggage screened in Wilkes-Barre - Scranton’s Avoca International airport, long known as the central focus of the Transportation Screening Authorities’ national security concerns as related to unauthorized transport of cheap beer and trucker hats.  I thought the situation was amusing at the time, and then they left me with an hour and a half in the waiting crypt in which to write up a hi-larious sendup of their arbitrary behavior toward me.  I posted it here. 

It was only last month that I got a response from the TSA, or from their unauthorized representatives: I am writing to ask permission to repost your blog article “Feeling Secure,” located at {location}.  I would like to post your article on my “Screeners Central” website. I am willing to include whatever appropriate attribution you require, including a link to your blog.

{name}, Screeners Central
http://www.tsa-screeners.com

I’m not sure how I missed seeing this for close to a month but last night I unearthed this message while excavating my inbox, and wrote back with magnanimous permission.  As a result, I am now not only a published author, but I have even been published by someone other than myself.  I may not be in anybody’s anthology but at least the good people who sneak other people’s illicit drugs into my luggage will know that I’m a big celebrity. 

If only I could get the same response on that article I wrote about strippers, now....  I’m sure there’s some kind of quid-pro-quo that would be of value to me.  A link to the blog has been so done already.  Anything else on offer today, my friends?

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Celebratory Overload - or an Old Man Can’t Party Like This Every Weekend

You could say I have plenty of time to come up with something - as of now, just about 10 days.  That’s more than plenty of time, much longer than I need for most decisions. But I suppose I’ve been putting the decision off for longer than that - more like most of 40 years: because that’s how old I’ll be when the deadline hits.

I remember when celebrating my birthday was as easy as inviting anybody who hadn’t actively been beating me up out to Traveltown to play amidst the defunct steam engines, but that’s too much of a schlep for me now.  There were the birthdays when I lived on campus and all I had to do was drop a hint or two and my friends would see to my entertainment with enthusiasm and sensitivity to my, shall we say, special preferences.  But now, it’s a little different.  This event is more auspicious, for one thing - birthday # 40 cries out for a festive fete, moreso than any I’ve had in a long time.  Thirty was no big deal to me, I was already much older than that in my bones so I don’t even recall having a party ten years ago.  But this birthday I feel due for some festivating.  The time is ripe - as, indeed, am I.

And then again, having a party for myself would be almost superfluous now.  I like a party as much as the next guy, if not more, but there is no reason whatsoever for me to try to stage one now.  One week before my natal day - this coming weekend, in fact - my dear friend Dr. Andy is having a huge party.  I’m counting on him never reading this journal because he’s not supposed to know that his friends, including the executive chef and the owners of one of the finest restaurants in north america, are setting him and ourselves up for a staggeringly memorable feast for his 40th, which precedes mine by a mere four days.  I will revel and carouse with all my oldest and dearest friends, to and beyond my heart’s delight.  Consequently, I don’t feel the need to call them all back to get together again one week later to my flat to have frozen fish sticks and instant muffins with me for my birthday.  I could never match the splendor of Andy’s party, and franky it would be too much for me if I were able to.  His will do just fine for me.

Then again, one week after my birthday I get to attend a party with some of my favorite imaginary friends from blogdom, confirming some nascent relationships and, I hope, starting some new ones in an authentic rollicking gazebo-rocking mountain town bash like my youthful spirit hungers for.  It’ll be the gin-soaked fiesta that my liver fears but my heart craves. 

And then again, in a few months I get on a plane to a tropical paradise where about twenty of my closest friends and Kel and I have all rented houses on geothermically heated oceanside lagoons where we’ll all celebrate a slew of 40ths, as well as my 15th wedding anniversary, in a freeform board-shorted bacchanal of lazy days and laughing nights.  There will be no finer way to celebrate this watershed event, to usher in this new era of ostensible maturity, or - better yet - to memorialize this phase, this epoch, as an apex, yet another apex among apeces, as once again I find myself more where I want to be, more whom I want to be, than I’ve ever dreamed of being. 

SO: big gourmet gorgefest; big bloggy blowout; two weeks on the islands with my darling wife and hand-picked compadres.  Nothing’s on the agenda yet, though, for my actual birthday.  I’m open to suggestion.  What I need is something memorable, inexpensive, local, and reasonably low-impact, that will mark the day as one that will live in the annals of history even longer than I do myself.  (Heh.  I said “annal.") Currently on the short list of options under consideration are the following:

* Ride the 38L downtown to my office and then back again.  Make it festive by doing it naked.
* See what happens when I open that creepy stone puzzlebox I got when that defrocked preacher accosted me in that alley.
* Hang around the library and take notes on what people are wearing.
* Explore the magic of hyperventilation.
* Find out what’s making that awful stink.
* Go to the zoo, break into the habitat of a nocturnal animal and sleep with it. (No, not like that - just regular sleeping.)
* Visit the local Ukranian grocery and eat samples of foods with more letters in their names than I have in mine.
* Sitting on the dock of the bay, but not watching anything roll anywhere.
* Returning to the womb.  Lacking that, spending the entire day under a comforter in a papasan chair, humming favorite nursery rhymes to myself.
* Count my freckles. Might as well name them, too.

Your input is obviously badly needed.  The clock is ticking, and I ain’t getting any younger.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Exit Interview

Her office is next to the corner.  Her desk is broad and glossy; the view out her windows is unobstructed.  He knocks on the open door with practiced tentativeness.

Good afternoon Ms. Lloyd; do you have a moment?

I do.  Come in, close the door and have a seat.  What’s on your mind?

Determinative Analysis

Help me out, will ya, peoples?  I don’t understand the title of the PDB.  That’s not a peanut-dutter bangwich, you know - it’s the presidental daily briefing.  On August 6 ‘01 the PDB included a nugget entitled ‘Bin Ladin Determined to Strike within the U.S.’ or something like that. 

There is some question whether this document was entirely “historical” in nature, or if it gave reasonable notice of the likelihood of terror attacks on U.S. soil.  However, this ambiguity arises from, and could have been avoided by changing, one single word - one word that rendered this critical piece of security analysis effectively useless. 

“Determined?” Are we saying, this guy is bound and determined to strike at a U.S. target, so even though we don’t know for sure which one it will be, we can expect him to keep trying?  Or are we saying, we have determined that he’ll strike a U.S. target.  In other words, does “determined” mean “intends” or “verified”?  In once case, the threat is vague and openended.  In the other, it is specific and clear. 

I remember an old SNL skit about nuclear reactors where an inspector warns the crew, “you can’t put too much water in the cooling towers.” The crew spends the rest of the night debating whether that means “you shouldn’t put in too much water” or “it’s impossible to put in too much water.” There, the two interpretations would have led to very different responses.  Here, the only response I think we had to the 8/6/01 PDB was to reissue it on 8/7 with some of the more alarming bits removed. 

The ambiguity of the word “determined” falls within a narrow ambit - either interpretation should have driven a reasonable person to take precautions. Needless to say, precautions were not taken.  John Ashcroft turned down an FBI-requested increase in counter-terrorism funding on September 10.  So whether the threat was vauge or specific, we apparently decided not to invest in responding to it.  Mr. Ashcroft, I know you don’t do caffeine, nor do you dance - but you’re going to have to do some pretty fast dancing to explain why we ignored the warning in that PDB.  In the meantime, can anyone tell me what “determined” is determined to determine?

Monday, April 12, 2004

Katrina Part III

A few days ago I was waiting for my 38L to work in the morning when the regular 38 rolled up.  I stood back to let others board and then heard a thumping from inside the bus.  I glanced up to see Katrina on the bus, waving to me, smiling broadly, welcoming me on board.  I waved her off - I was waiting for the next bus, I tried to convey to her. She seemed disappointed, until she suddenly leaped to her feet and started pounding on the exit door; they let her off the bus and she joined me at the stop. Her gold bridge and teeth gleamed in the morning sun.  “Nyaa, hello,” she said happily. “Hello, how are you?,” I replied.  She didn’t answer, but a few seconds later she repeated back to me, “Nyaa, hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?” She just grinned at me, grinned at the traffic.  She didn’t answer.  She did, however, hand me two jolly rancher candies. 

The L arrived with merciful swiftness.  With grunts of delight and consternation she shouldered her way to the front of the line and almost ran to a bench near the back of the bus.  I moved more slowly and took my usual seat half-way down.  She noticed that I’d separated myself from her and got up, forded the stream of foot traffic to join me.  I resigned myself to her company.  She smiled, started to dig in her bag - put her hands on a ziplock with baggies full of photos in it.  My heart sank.  As if she felt my discomfort, she dropped the photos, took hold of another ziplock, pulled a paltry butter and jelly sandwich from it wrapped in plastic.  “My food,” she announced to me.  “Very nice,” I told her.  She began to try to take a bite of the wrapped sandwich, realized that she was chewing on saran wrap and quickly put it back away in the purple backpack she held on her lap.  Then she pulled out a large white envelope folded into quarters and carefully unfolded it, sharing its contents with me: a letter from a doctor, handwritten in both russian and english, stating plainly that “Katrina M~ has medical problems - she is retarded.” I told her I didn’t know if she wanted me to read the letter.  She thoughtfully put it back int the envelope, which she folded and returned to the backpack. 

We were getting close to her stop when she asked me, “You married?” We’d covered this territory before and I didn’t want to go back there again, but I answered, “Oh, yes, fifteen years.” “Kids?” “No kids.” “Me, no kids, no husband anymore… all gone now...” I felt her emotions start to well up and choke her but she moved on quickly before we got stuck.  I noticed - for the first time - a slim silver band around her left ring finger.  Looked like a wedding ring.  Made me wonder. 

“Anyway,” she continued, “you’re my friend.” She said it as a simple, well-established fact.  “I’m your friend?” “Oh yes, you’re my friend, aren’t you?” “I guess I am.” “Well, bye bye friend.” And with that, Katrina got off the bus again.

The Liberation Will Be Live

This was indeed the rejuvenating, redemptive paschal weekend that I’ve been needing so badly.  I won’t drag you through it step-by-step because you’ll grow despondent and morose that you missed all the fun, and that’s no way to start a monday. What you need is festive tales of gladness and triumph.  So I’ll tell you that seder went great.  There was enough food for an army - the finest roast brisket drowning in a sea of carmelized onions, paired up with matzagna, three different tsimmises, mazoh ball soup, crispy chewy coins of pure horseradish root, and Kel made her homemade chocolate-dipped macaroons which are astonishingly good - and these are just a few of the items I can still remember.  I was able this year to do a bit of additional research for the hagadah, throwing in a few new theories and poems, making it - if I may say so myself - the BEST SEDER EVER.  You’ll just have to take my word, because, as Dr. Andy said, “The Liberation will not be televised.” What I can do is share
this
image of me doing a bit of mazoh-talk - the mazohs are in the pink watered-silk case I am fondling.  I’m in traditional-style all-white dorkwear, and in the foreground you can see evidence of a wandering princess.  In fact, this may have been the most princess-intensive pesach in the history of either pesachs or princesses: evidence can be found here. 

I should take this opportunity to thank every person who came to Jon and Lisa’s seder, because all 37 adults and 13 kids brought something unique and valuable to the experience.  I, for one, was especially grateful that we had so many people who did not know me or my unweildly group of friends; many of them had never been to a seder before, which is especially meretorious.  I got a major spiritual boost and we had a wonderful time; when we went home it was with a really shockingly generous token of my friends’ appreciation - thank you, Jon and Lisa, for my beautiful new iPod.  I mean, gevalt.  Really. 

On Easter sunday I made Easter Brie (fried mazohs and eggs, and I make it a lot better than it sounds - adding dried fruit, cinnamon, jam, and other secret goodies), and then we hit the road for some seasonal experiences.  You think you’re doing easter right with a bunch of chocolate eggs and the hollow shell of a confectionary bunny?  Well check this out: we went to Audibon Canyon Ranch, a birding sanctuary where we watched some beautiful nesting egrets and herons in the trees - I’m used to them strutting nobly around the tidepools and wetlands but here they were filling the pines, the sleek fletching of the egrets festooned with long filmy frond-like “aigrette" feathers, unique to the mating season; we watched from an observation post through spotting scopes as the birds, their eyes emerald green and gleaming in the seaside light, stood in their huge nests and carefully turned their melon-green eggs with their long bills.  That is the easter egg that I most valued - least calories, most significance.  I didn’t get any good shots of the birds, so here’s the clubhouse and
here’s the old milk cans outside the exhibit center.  Afterwards we cruised down the coast past the Bolinas lagoons - where dozens of huge fuzzy brown seals were hauled up out of the water, looking cuter and more anthropomorphic than any lousy verminous bunny on this fine easter day; we proceeded to the Pelican and had a plate of bangers and mash with some frosty pints; back home to walk the dog and then over to Berkeley to gorge on chinese food and to watch the Sopranos with Dave and Kim and two excellent bottles of Meeker wine. 

I may have other stuff to say at some point but for now I’m just revelling in a weekend chock-full of bliss.  If I play my cards right, I can make it last right through Friday.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Getting Caught

Today I have my second of four voice-acting classes.  Last week’s kickoff session was a lot of fun, very similar to the two other classes I’ve taken there.  We started with introductions, which is actually pretty important if you are going to try to get into anything emotionally honest with people.  The teacher asked us all to include in our introductions some mention of something that really scared us, explaining that it would help her understand our blocks as actors, and help us relate to each other better. 

One of the others, who spoke before me, started describing his fear - but I really only heard him start to talk. His first words scared the hell out of me.  Even though he went further into a more complex area of his psyche, admitting to the fear of getting caught as a talentless hack, I was stuck at those first two words: “Getting caught.”

I realized, hearing that, that I’ve had this fear my whole life, sometimes even desparately running and hiding in my own house for no reason other than a pounding frightening sureness that, if I were seen, by anybody, I would die - or worse yet, disappear as if I’d never been.  I don’t think I typically do things at which I should reasonably fear getting caught, but this is not a matter of rational responses - it’s just a deep, marrow-chilling fear, and it rides under my skin whether I understand what it’s doing there or not. 

I did a creditable job for myself during class - made some reasonably bold choices, took direction without whining, listened carefully, maybe even learned something.  We’ll see.  But for sure, once I got back on my bus home at 10 o’clock at night, my mind rolled like a marble in a funnel right to the notion of getting caught and getting scared.  I didn’t understand it any better, but I could sense it more fully without the distractions of the classroom.  And this is what resulted of those cogitations:

Dropping a Tab

Sometimes a small object can tell a whole story, if you happen to see it where it lies and you ask yourself how it came to be there....

A good example would be that little metal tab on the tile floor of the mens’ room. It was flat, with a small angled section and a few green-brown threads dangling from the trailing edge, as if it had been torn off of something to which it had once been sewn.  I recognized it at once - not in particular, but in general: it was the tab that comes with nicer slacks, the kind with a secondary closure.  These, any hi-klass haberdasher can tell you (and Sulka blood flows through my veins) give one’s trousers a tidy, tailored smoothness across the thundergut so there’s no pucker at the fly. You hook it in before nailing the main button and zipping up.  Pretty basic stuff.

The thing is, sometimes I forget that the pants I’m wearing have this secondary closure.  I pop the button, drop the fly, expect the slacks to tumble smoothly to my ankles - but that extra tab holds them to my slender hips anyway.  Ha ha, joke’s on me.

Well, from that one scrap of metal on the bathroom floor, it looks like the joke was on someone else this time - someone who must have rushed into the facilities, wrestling with the girding of his loins, able to extricate himself from a button and a zipper and then ripping his pants open even before he’d undone that little secondary metal tab… He must have heard it rip, felt the threads give way, sensed that the fastner had gone flying, skittering across the sour tiles - but he had other things on his mind (if not elsewhere). The metal tab, the tidy tailored trousers - they were a lost cause, and most likely, profoundly irrelevant to his value structure at that specific moment.  He must have been in quite a rush.  The only evidence of that drama now was a metal tab lying mute on the floor, but it told a very poignant story indeed.

For some reason, even though I didn’t touch it, I still felt like I needed to wash my hands with particular thoroughness before returning to my desk.  I feel a bit soiled right now just thinking on it.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Return of the Paschal Quiz

It occurs to me that 1) I liked my quiz from last year and 2) my boss and supervisor are both out of the office for the afternoon, leaving me with a newly-cleaned-off desk and a few hours of less-than-totally-full time.  Therefore I’ve decided to relink to the quiz and fulfill the commandment that, at this festive season, you should bore the crap out of everybody. 

Don’t fret, my friends - I have lots of weird new dross to post too.  Don’t lose faith.

Why I was giggling in the crosswalk

The white cargo van was so typical as to be invisible.  I only noticed it because I cut around it to walk across the street.  The graphics were utterly unimaginative - the company name in a sans serif font, along with their specialty.  To be specific, the company is called “Schindler” and they provide “elevator servicing.”

I wonder if they consciously decided not to court the possibility that someone would think it in poor taste to shorten the whole thing to “Schindler’s Lifts.”

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

It’s Almost Impossible

It’s unusual for me to leave my desk in the middle of the day, but the idea of eating a cookie got into my head and I just had to step out to to bakery around the corner.  It had been outrageously nice, warm days with blue skies and a light breeze but no clouds ... I noticed right away that a lot of people were utilizing outdoor space, lounging and lingering as they might.  Everywhere, little alcove cubbies teemed with conversational knots. 

I walked amid the network of pedestrian alleys that honeycomb my block, out to the bakery through a particularly nice path lined on either side with angled benches backing into planters thick with clover that contributed to a soothing, secluded feeling.  As elsewhere, this area was densely occupied, but as I began to make my way through and automatically scanned the crowd, I noticed those two at the end pretty quickly.

Well, the woman, really.  The guy wasn’t too remarkable, except, of course, he was with her.  Though she and her lanky friend whose back was to me sat all the way at the far extreme of the path, I immediately noticed her masses of bonde hair in the sunlight, her tall lean form and light sundress.  It almost felt as if she caught my eye for an instant but that was crazy talk.  In the meantime, I did get a clear vibe: discomfort.  She didn’t look like she was where she wanted to be.  As I made my way down the path and eventually past her I glanced toward her - saw that her companion was a pale, closely-shorn skinny guy in a knit tennis shirt, chinos and a baseball cap.  He was splayed out on his little bench self-indulgently, maybe even a little petulantly.  Was he slowly shaking his head?  My eyes swept over him without pausing on their way to her. 

I really think that we briefly caught each other’s eye except I really couldn’t afford to look for long enough to tell.  She was young and stunning, apple pie america with extra ice cream, but she sat rather rigidly and her persona seemed totally blank.  I heard her say, as I went past, in a voice both sympathetic and noncommittal, “Oh yes, uh huh, that’s right, naturally...”

I went to the bakery, ordered one each of the fresh oatmeal raisin and the fresh semisweet chocolate chip, and I was heading back to the office within two minutes.  As I went around the corner where they sat I heard a snippet of his side of the conversation: “It’s really hard, you know, when you’ve been celibate for four years; when you’ve been celibate for eight years it’s almost impossible...”

I went on, didn’t take a seat to eavesdrop or even turn my head, though curiosity consumed me.  But as I reached the foot of the path and made my left onto the main walkway toward my building, I glanced back towards her.  She was still sitting there, shining in her spot of sun, looking for all the world as if she wanted to bolt at a dead gallop, and from a hundred feet away I could feel her looking back towards me, her large green eyes watching me as I walked away with the tantalyzed frustration of a chain gang convict watching traffic rolling freely by.

Monday, April 05, 2004

Rites of Spring

Me and my crew do up a big ol’ Passover ("Pesach") service ("seder") every year.  I really get into it, and my friends enable this in me by letting me run the seder with the help of my enormous manly hagadah, which is the guidebook to Passover celebrations.  As far as I can tell, Passover actually starts tonight, but my Pesach posse (in hebrew, posse shel Pesach) is stretched too thin to do a decent job of it on a weeknight, so we typically wait for a saturday (Passover being eight days long) to have our event.  Out of respect for those who are doing it right (that is, at least, right on time), I’ll post this insightful essay here and now.  But please don’t finish all the horseradish before saturday night, okay? - We’re going to have a lot of gefilte fish and without horseradish it’s barely worth calling food.

Sunday, April 04, 2004

Parking

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Trouble at the Ranch!

At the dinner table when I was little I’d hold forth and ramble, inventing any number of characters and shepherding them through any number of situations.  My imagination was very active - but as I try to reconstruct those stories now, I wonder if all my efforts were really as strange and small as the one I do remember well: The Adventures of Senior Lopez.

The Lopez opus would be filmed in color, but the blotchy saturated color of an old movie with all the associated stutters, burbles and gargles of the poorly-preserved celluloid of the 50’s.  It was and remains thus:

Fade in: on a bucolic pasture; the title “The Amazing Adventures of Senior Lopez” is superimposed in somewhat rustic, ranch-oriented typography.  Pan left (left creates tension) to Sr. Lopez, out standing in his field.  He’s wearing a small white sombrero, a discrete cabana shirt, dark tailored slacks.  (His shoes are not in the shot.) He’s standing happily, arms akimbo, looking up and to his left, surveying a realm of peace and tranquility.  His broad smile gleams serenely from beneath a thick but tidy moustache. 

Suddenly little Pepe runs up and the shot cuts dramatically to: a close-up on the child’s face. He’s only 10 or 12, chubby but energetic, earnest and goodhearted.  He’s upset, concerned; he’s run up to warn Sr. Lopez of bad news.

“Senior Lopez, Senior Lopez!,” he shouts as he rushes up to our hero.  “Trouble at the ranch!” He speaks with breathless anxiety and a castillian lisp.

Cut to: Sr. Lopez - close-up on his face. His brow furrows.  Perhaps he’s been chewing a blade of grass or stalk of hay - he throws it aside with a decisive gesture.  Cut to: a mid-distance shot in which we can see Pepe and Sr. Lopez walking off to the right.  The camera is stationary and holds for a moment on the empty sundrenched meadow.

The next shot is of another part of the meadow, with a big cow grazing alone in the foreground.  Sr. Lopez walks up to the cow; Pepe stands to the side anxiously.  Sr. Lopez speaks clearly and comfortingly to the cow as he leads her to the right, saying in his continental baritone: “Oh Bessie, let’s get you back where you belong.”

Cut to: a tidy cattle yard with a gate.  Bessie stands alone behind the gate, which Sr. Lopez is just closing and latching.  Cut to: a tight shot of Sr. Lopez’ face, first frowning with concentration and then smiling broadly again.  Pull back to include Pepe in the shot, looking on with pride and adoration.  Cut to: a tight shot of Pepe looking up to Sr. Lopez, the sunlight drenching his beaming face.  “Gee, Senior Lopez,” he gushes, “you’re the greatest!” (Roll credits.)

This may have been the only adventure of Senior Lopez - an unoptioned pilot, you might say.  Yet I retold the tale often, each time forcing my sister to fill her sinuses with milk a little earlier in the story.  And now, looking back, I realize that I actually miss Senior Lopez.  He was the greatest.