Saturday, April 25, 2009

Oh Crap It’s That Day Again

It’s been a hell of a year, and promises to get even more interesting pretty damn soon.  The new car arrived yesterday, not without tsurris but we overcame it as will we overcome all obstacles with which our way may be strewn in days ahead.  My birthday soiree to Rohan was diverted due to Rohan being clo-sed, so we retooled the plans for Aziza cocktails but they weren’t open in time for us, and ultimately we tried five places before settling on our favorite for appetizers and a local newbie for supper - both serviceable, though not particularly noteworthy except that we left the kids behind and went out on our own. 

Also we’ve now got a new cable remote that I don’t understand (plus like a million more on-screen options, plus all the old stuff but I’m not sure how to make it all work together).  PLUS ZACH AND JESSE ARE cURRENTLY SLEEPING IN THE SAME ROOM.  If this works the way I hope it does, THE FUTURE IS NOW.  For our home design, at least. 

Which brings me to my annual birthday poem.  I got some amazing and very sweet sentiments of a natally-commemorative sort from many friends of many stripes - old friends only recently renewed, longstanding friends who are like parts of my own soul, intensely dear friends I’ve actually never met and some passing acquaintances whose good wishes still are much appreciated.  But the most important felicitations of the day come from myself, in the form of a poem pursuant to hoary tradition of five or six years and if you want to read the old ones you can link through the archives, it’s getting too ponderous to link it all up.  But anyway, here’s this year’s, and I hope it’s everything you hoped it could be:

Man alive I’m 45
Looks like now I’m here to stay
Revolutions, colts and me
I lived to fight another day
I’m the new black, the new Coke, the new 30
Everyone’s doing it, starting with me
Open promptly, offer expires
Like you seen on your teevee
Invented by myself alone
to keep having birthdays till forty-and-five
I’ve played it by ear, building year upon year
and can you believe it - I’m still here alive.
Better faster stronger older
You can do it - Ask me how
Swim like shark but taste like chicken
Focus on the here and now
One more year has left me blinking
One year less left in my store
I’ve fared well for forty-five
So here’s to forty-five once more!

You may now return to your normal activities.  Thanks for your support. 

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Night of Swirling Stars

I’ve already laid out the set-up - six years old, in England with my family, six months abroad and trying to keep up in school.  My first try didn’t work so well, but my second matriculation was rather better.  Sunnymeade House was near to home and dad’s bus downtown, as I recall, so he escorted me daily to school - a big old rambling place with a backyard and an upstairs.  The kids seemed mellower; we easily found a way to coexist if not even perhaps to get along.  I got the sense that my teachers viewed my educational shortcomings as opportunities rather than inherent deficiencies, and I began to feel more at home with academic exercise.  Wasn’t this the place where they ordered me to get my awesome little dictionary and my hip little satchel?  Sunnymeade House was okay in my book.

“My book,” I mean in the most important way: my principal advantage seemed to lie with reading, which I did with avidity and proficiency.  I read some weird stuff, too - those German mutilation nursery rhymes, and Grimm, and creepy stuff like that.  I’d read fairy tales about pixies and trolls and goblins and such… so it wasn’t like they’d unleashed some new concept to me when they asked me to read Rumplestiltskin to the class. 

Regardless, I was totally freaked.  Freaked in a way I don’t think I’d ever been at my previous school, where I’d been treated roughly.  This was a class assignment - everybody had to do it; we’d just go a few a day till we’d all had a chance.  At my prior school, I’d been able to deal fairly well with every incident that had befallen me at the hands of my peers, whether malicious or neglectful.  I’d just go through it and move on.  It was usually over before I’d had a chance to think about it much.  But now I had days to anticipate my impending public exposure.  An oral exhibition.  Front and center.  My exotic twangy voice and slightly “different” clothes and obvious anxiety would be impossible to hide… I might as well go to school naked for all the attention I’d be drawing to myself; I had a target on my back already and there I was passing around arrows… all my instincts urged me to flee from this spotlight, from this order to real aloud to English schoolchildren....

to read to them ... Rumplestiltskin. 

The name alone made my skin crawl.  Hell, it’s got “skin” right in it.  Then “Rumplestilt” - what a compelling evocation of brokenness, nominal determinism, a life trapped in fetters of twisted flesh, inhuman, both greater and lesser than those beautiful, cruel, weakling humans among whom he eked his pitiful existence; reduced, despite unimaginable powers, to petty extortion for his begrudged share of happiness, taught by bitter experience to trust neither the word of men nor the smiles of women; a soul so tortured and marginalized that he was prepared to resort to whoring out his extraordinary gift of transmutation to bind a maiden to his embrace, and to to take his pleasure from her since he rightly dispared of sharing it with her.  Quasimodo.  Hopfrog.  Deformed, unfinished, stranded in a world not his own....

And then, beyond the litany of tragedies constituting his essence, my mind was drawn with fascination to the vile abuses he perpetrated on that waifish strumpet of a knitting girl who verged on being more willing to to suffer a courtyard execution than to endure his kiss, she who owed her survival to taking credit for his work: a “maiden,” repulsed by the thought of him; she, the quintessence of a beauty of which he could never honestly partake.... From dross did he weave pure gold for her, yet his body and being were too wretched for her to see the value of his soul or to test the purity of his heart.  She knew him only for the goblin he was, even as she made him into be the troll she knew him to be.  In a sense, she could hardly even be faulted for fulfilling her role in this saga, vapid and cruel though it may have been - no more than he deserved the ignominy heaped on his own stunted shoulders for being what she made him.  So what.  I blamed her anyway.  Bitch.

I felt badly for Rumplestiltskin.  But, more importantly, he scared the piss out of me.  I feared his power, his subterfuge, his devilish bargaining and his physical grotesqueness.  The whole package just freaked me out, way more than any prior tale or fable had ever done to me before.  The very idea of reading the story at all was enough to make me woozy and short of breath.  And let us not forget that I was expected to read this hideous legend of exclusion and recrimination out loud, in front of everybody.  Of course I had no qualms regarding the technical aspects of the task - I was entirely capable of doing the reading, intellectually.  In fact, that worked to my disadvantage.  My reading skills had progressed to the point that I could think other thoughts at the same time as I read.  I could think about what I was reading, where and how I was reading it, and why, and to whom.  The story flew out of the book so smoothly that it could take on a life of its own, in the real world, surrounding me as I read it.  I would have the luxury, while standing before my classmates, of identifying with my anti-hero very personally indeed.  I would know my madness to be madness even as I sank into it. 

Time skulked past, day after musty day, and the appointed hour grew ever closer.  My limbs felt heavy and my pulse raced as I waited for my my destiny to claim its due.  Finally came the night before my presentation, and the fear was so intense and personified that it had itself become the homunculus haunting my bedroom.  Rumplestiltskin had me where he wanted me - just where he’d had that maiden fair I so detested.  I was beyond the ability to recognize where I ended and my fear began.  Reading aloud, Rumplestiltskin, in front of everybody.  And here was I, just a frail grub of a boy, lacking any ability to turn the gnarled finger of fate that swept inexorably toward me, my dark little bedroom now a weaver’s hutch, a dungeon, a hole out of which would crawl my undoing, and my undoing would be at my own hand, myself both Rumplestiltskin and his maiden, an evil committing itself upon itself, saving and sacrificing in one fell swoop.

I lay in my bed as all this passed through my mind, repeating itself, renewing itself.  Frantic to to escape my own cogitation, I turned my gaze to the window beside me.  Out it, as I knew well, was the courtyard, upon which I looked out from the fourth of six floors.  The night sky above that patch of lawn held no mysteries to threaten me; a well-surveyed scattering of stars decorated the heavens, and I looked to them for constancy and a sense of connection, those same stars having spangled my nights back home in California as well.  Familiar constellations greeted my anguished eyes… But as I watched them, they began to spiral around the sky, huge beautiful circles that terrified me utterly.  Silently and in despairing confusion, I hallucinated a broken heaven.

That vision of the cosmos cut adrift wrenched from me my last clasped shred of rationality.  In my bed, I wept - both for Rumplestiltskin, and as him.  The next morning found me indisposed; I stayed home from school and read friendly stories quietly in bed.  I think my mom may have spoken to the teacher; the assignment may never actually have been completed.  For about a dozen years after that night I had difficulty finding my rest at night.  I’d lie awake in bed most evenings, trying to relax.  Eventually I overcame my fear of public speaking, and then my insomnia.  I even eventually outgrew my neurotic anxiety about Rumplestiltskin.  But it’s not like I’ve forgiven him or anything. 

Well that was fun.  Just thought it was time to put something non-stoat-related up here for a while.  Birthday poem is coming up soon - gird your loins!

Monday, April 20, 2009

Moishe: Exploits Your Grandfather Should Have Told You

I told you in the last post about the big new idea for “selling” passover to the elusive younger crowd: The Legend of Moishe the Passover Stoat.  I explained then just exactly how genius brilliant an idea it was, so you can read it there and marvel.  But today, I want to share a few of the legends themselves.  These are the stories we’ve learned about Moishe, theoretically, at seder after seder, year after year, tradition after tradition.  Moishe, these are your legends.  I mean, here they are - again. 

The Disharmony of the Sages

Tarphon, Hillel, Amaranth and Kori were in deep discussion one seder night.  One sage thought that each of the plagues was multiplied because things bounced, rubber-like, off the Israelites and stuck, glueishly, to the Egyptians.  The other three believed this to be hogwash but they didn’t want to sound like blowhards so they all just sat around stroking their thick, full beards, and giving each other the hairy eyeball.  Then a stoat came upon them suddenly and scampered up Kori’s vestments, and fetched him a grievous but unmentionable injury.  But it had not been Kori who had imagined the stupid idea about the plagues, from which they learned: THE STOAT DISFAVORS BOTH ERROR AND ACQUIESCENCE.  The remaining rabbis acclaimed the wisdom and charismatic charm of this gifted weasel, and thus was borne the legendary Moishe the Passover Stoat. 

The Garden of Redemption

Moishe was reading QBVII in his tidy garden when he noticed that his horseradish and arugula were looking sad and chewed-upon.  As he took a closer look at the damage to his beloved little plants, he saw a bunny - possibly wearing a top hat and/or waistcoat- gnawing on a tender stalk of garden celery.  “Why, I never,” thought the Stoat refulgently, “that rabbit is reaping the fruits of my handiwork.  Let me enlarge him!” And with that the Stoat scampered over to the bunny and eviscerated him with a Garden Weasel.  As he returned to his novel, Moishe looked back over the rabbit’s twitching remains.  “If you can come back after I’ve done that to you, he cheerfully intoned, “you’re welcome to try me again!” FROM WHICH WE LEARN: A GENEROUS INVITATION COSTS NOTHING UP FRONT. 

The Runaway Macaroon

Moishe was wandering the arid tablelands, when he spied a macaroon tumbling toward him.  “Where are you going, my moist cocoanutty friend?,” the Stoat asked, but he received no reply because the macaroon was going too quickly and was a cookie anyway.  Moishe watched the macaroon roll and roll and roll right off the table and onto the floor, where the old family dog made ready to pounce upon it.  Moishe saw his friend in mortal peril, so to save the macaroon he scampered down off the table and used his sharp claws and powerful foreshanks to eviscerate the old dog right there in the dining room.  He then carried the fallen macaroon to a new seder where it could be properly appreciated.  FROM WHICH WE LEARN: A STOAT PROTECTS HIS MACAROON FROM DOGS AND DISRESPECT. 

The Stoat and the Fruit Gel

Tehe desserts were arguing about which one was finest.  The chocolates emanated an extravagant chalky confidence; the fruit bowl glistened lubriciously and the angelefood cake shone like a chaste queen.  (The macaroon was, of course, already gone.) With merry banter, they each advanced themselves as the perfect ending to a perfect seder.  “So rich and indulgent, for we were once slaves but now are free!” “So sweet and satisfying, the promise of springtime fulfilling itself, and it’ll help you shift that matzoh through your system if you know what I mean.” “Cake… sweet, cakey sweetness....” For hours they went on in this way, each professing ultimate supremacy. 

But then, shortly after supper plates were cleared, a new box arrived in the kitchen - a new dessert had been brought by a guest and was being placed in contention at the last moment before the ultimate judging of the pre-aphikomen course.  Sneering, the three other desserts watched the frosted translucent semicircles being transferred to a serving plate, four day-glo colors with slightly muted rinds, garish and exposed to the derision of the other desserts.  “What are you, to have earned a place among us?” they demanded.

“I am honored to share a table with you,” the fruitgels replied.  “I am a token of that gratitude for that very honor.  I am man’s work wrought in nature’s image; I am emulaiton; I am innovation.  I am light and cloud and honey-sweetness.  I am an object of desire and satisfaction; may it be your desire I am so fortunate as to satisfy.”

Then the back door blew open and who stood there but Moishe the Passover Stoat?  Quick as a whiskerflick he scampered into the kitchen and onto the table to see what was happening.  “Let us appeal to Moishe!,” acclaimed the desserts.  “He will decide!  Moishe, Moishe - which of us is the best dessert?”

Moishe took only a moment to look at the cake, the chocolates, the bowl of fruit, and the glittering, jeweltone fruitgels.  He leapt forth and devoured - first the cake; to the very last crumb; then he turned upon the chocolates, leaving nary a morsel on the plate.  Next, he unleashed his ravenous jaws on the parvenue fruit gels, smacking and salivating as he struggled go unstick the glutinous candy from his teeth. 

Finally he turned to the fruit bowl, the last remaining dessert.  He picked up an apple, a pear, and an orange, and contemplatively juggled them for several minutes.  Then he put them back in their bowl, uttered a brief prayer, and left.  FROM WHICH WE LEARN: ONLY JUGGLEFRUIT IS SAFE WHEN A STOAT’S IN THE PANTRY. 

Elijah’s Helper

It was late in the evening.  The third kiddush had been completed and every one at the splendid table was very full and comfortable.  Some fought sleep but the seder was far from over.  It had come time to throw open the door for the Prophet Elijah, to invite him to his seat and to drink his reserved cup of wine. 

The youngest at the table was sent to the door and opened it with childlike glee.  But much to his surprise, instead of Elijah, a majestic stoat stood on the doorstep.  “It’s Moishe!,” squealed the child.  “Invite him in,” encouraged the grandfather, “as an honored guest.”

The child stepped aside.  The stoat threw a macaroon at the grandfather and scampered up onto the table.  He knocked over Elijah’s cup and then caught his tail on fire on the candles.  With a haunting squeal he knocked over a chiffonaire and behind it, stuck to the wall with an iron spike, was the aphikomen.  Grandfather broke down in tears, and the child just kept looking out that front door for two weeks.  FROM WHICH WE LEARN: NOT ALL LEGENDS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD.  BUT AT LEAST THIS ONE HAD A STOAT IN IT.

There may be more to be said about Moishe at some point in the future but I’ve got so much other stuff all of a sudden.  And some of it’s even blogfodder.  Lucky you. 

Thursday, April 16, 2009

FIXING PASSOVER - One Stoat at a Time

I’ll be out of the loop, wherever you keep yours, for the next few weeks.  Maybe I’ll do lots of writing and posting, and maybe it’ll be ALL JESSE ALL THE TIME while I take four weeks of bondo leave to deal with the bodywork needed after that little bruiser beats up on me.  In the meantime, it’s the last night of Passover tonight and Easter candy is still rolling around behind most of our furniture at home, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer a few thoughts on modern religious practice, and how to make it more moderner.  This is because I am HELPFUL.  Am too.  Shut up. 

Before we get into a face-slap stooge-fight, let me divert your attention: have you been celebrating Passover?  Really?  Have your kids, or all the kids that you now know or ever met?  No?  I did not think so.  Well now you can stop being part of the problem and just dissolve yourself in this solution:

FIXING PASSOVER - ONE STOAT AT A TIME

1.  The Problem with Passover

Protocols of our elders having been duly consulted and ignored, a determination has been made by your correspondent regarding the great paschal festival, the observation of which is ordained as a holy obligation at Lev. 23:4, Num 9:3,5, and probably elsewhere but who has the patience, I mean really.  Yea, it has not escaped our attention that this very commandment - to observe in its season the pesach each year - do we forsake, and increasingly so through the compounded effect of our ongoing failure to provide an entertaining kinderspiel for the younger crowd.  What I’m saying is, we are boring the children with our longwinded Passover seders, and we need to do something to keep their focus on the matters at hand. Maybe I should just have said that first and moved on.  Lesson learned. 

The traditional recitations of the four questions or the descriptions of the four students that are reiterated at the Passover seder each year ostensibly seek to capture the imagination of the very young, but honestly they never really step up to the task. The exodus story itself, with its twenty combined plagues and commandments, is too busy, confused and attenuated for tender ears. Meantime, the paschal prohibitions against leavened products - cereals, pizzas, beeves wellington - are too many and too onerous to be borne without some friendly sympathetic helpmate to add cheer and boost spirits. 

The quest to hold a child’s attention has simply grown more challenging over the last several thousand years.  What may have worked once in Yavneh is no longer playing in Poughkipsie.  Where once the children could go right through all eight days of Passover and see only Exodus-themed imagery, such as plague-sets or toy flails, now they’re beset with bunnies and literally (figuratively) pelted with chocolate eggs that are not kosher for Pesach and might even possibly contain ham.  The competition to keep kids keyed in on Pesach is fierce and demands a creative strategy.  The Passover festival is too rich and profound, too redolent of redemption and mystery, for us to allow it to get pushed off the radar screen by some fleabitten bunny.  Passover therefore clearly needs a mascot, as has long been the custom for some of the other important festivals (for example, Manny the Menorah or Sukkah Shmuel).  Not to engage in this effort to make Passover more attractive to next-generation celebrants, would be to deny our very destiny as a people.  Action is demanded.  But of what kind?

2.  Selection Criteria: Making Passover Cuddly

Our criteria are, thankfully, wide open.  Let us consider precedent: what is the marketed face of the festival of Christ’s resurrection, after having been crucified and three days in his crypt, miraculously to assume his place with his father in dominion over all lands and nations?  The face children give to this transfiguration of unutterable majesty, is the pinched, bleached-out face of a white rabbit - albeit, sometimes in formal top hat and waistcoat - who runs around of a saturday night pooping out candy all over the lawn. 

The Easter Bunny: not only thematically inconsistent, but weirder than a platypus on mescaline.  Think about it: He’s a rabbit - but not a regular rabbit, no - he’s a male egg-laying rabbit, what lays the cho-o-lat eggs.  And I need not belabor the utter failure to posit any specific resurrective significance to the ubiquitous sugar-encrusted marshmallow animals and cryptic jellybeans that abound in the rabbit’s corn-syrup wake.  But despite the ridiculousness of selecting a bunny to symbolize this festival, that bunny has successfully co-opted the whole affair.  Easter is now mostly about a bunny bearing candy, standing in for the life-restoring power of the King of Heaven and his Holy Son.  The bunny stands triumphant and unquestioned, despite that he embodies breathtaking leaps of logic and credibility.  This means we can choose whatever we wish to be our marketable face of Pesach.  Clearly, almost anything will do.

3.  The Answer that Ends All Argument

I propose: Moishe, the Passover Stoat.

Can you not already sense the inherent familiarity, the obviousness, the pendant cultural embrace of our friendly friend Moishe?  If not, let me remind you that the legend of Rudolph, RNR, was actually only written in 1939 - but now we literally cannot conceive of celebrating the virgin birth of the messiah on earth without explicit reference to an ILLUMINATED PRESENT-DELIVERING ARCTIC CERVINE.  Seriously, this is the mascot they picked after we gave them almost two thousand years to come up with something.  Yet despite this thundering ridiculosity, Rudolph has been fully established as a principal holiday mascot in the course of only a generation or three.  This renowned case study proves that the market is now ready to hear the multifarous legends of Moishe the Passover Stoat.

Each time his name is uttered, the more inveitable is the seepage of his legendary exploits into the fabric of our social history, like the greats before him - Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, or that Giant Sno-Tire-Holding Guy by the Highway.  Those popular legendary figures, though arguably of more recent vintage than the Easter Bunny (or, by extension, “Jesus"), still have captured our hearts and insinuated themselves thoroughly into our individual and mutual idioms.  Our very mental image of “straightening a river with a lasso” or “holding a giant sno-tire by the roadside” is a product of the hard cultural inroads secured by these modern avatars.  Moishe will easily become every bit this much a cherished definer of our cultural narrative as any of them, given half a chance. 

The choice of “stoat” as the genus mascottus would appear to be so self-evident as to render explication superfluous, but for the record: the stoat is possessed of the four classic Passover qualities: generosity, piety, refulgence, and juggling.  Stoats are known among animals for being judicious and good-humored, for keeping tidy gardens and for enjoying Leon Uris novels.  They both are kosher and keep kosher.  They are the veritable diamond fob on the great terrestrial food chain.  Plus, kids love’em. 

“Moishe” is a good name for a Passover stoat because it evokes the Passover story, which also concerns a “Moses.” The name itself includes the sound of the inaspirate hard schwa, which similarly appears in “stoat” and “Passover,” lending a happy assonance to the articulation.  This phoneme is the Pythagorean “perfect sound” from which all other sounds are generated.  It is both qualitatively and quantitatively euphoneous.  Plus, kids love it. 

It is possible that certain other animals could also suffice as the Passover mascot in place of the stoat.  Potential candidates include a squirrel, a penguin, and maybe a wallaby.  Compelling arguments could be crafted for the elevation of any of these to mascot status ahead of the noble stoat.  However, I already am working on a whole collection of Passover Stoat legends, so let’s not rock the boat.  Regardless what the kids are loving. 

Up later: Moishe stories.  But first, I probably have some other stuff to post, or do, or something.  Make sure you wash your hands before returning to your other computer-related activities, now - you don’t know where that stoat has been playing.... 

Monday, April 13, 2009

Social Obligations and the Redistributed Sloth: A Case Study

It’s the eyes that seem to speak to me.  They peer out from the jumbled menagerie on the shelf behind Zach’s bed, where Kermit huddles with the fuzzy doggie and some plush hand puppets and an ever-rotating coalition of other cuddly toys.  From there, the sloth gives me the eye. 

All the dolls have similarly vacant expressions (except for Kermit, his bulged eyes glaring as if he were being forcibly inflated with a nitrous suppository).  But from this pantheon of fuzz and stuffing, the little sloth distingishes itself.  How, I’m not sure; it’s one of the smaller doll denizens, camouflaged in browns and tans, hardly remarkable in itself and less so amid all the other stuffed animals.  Maybe it’s because I know its its history, or part of it. I see something more than just a doll - I see a slice of a life, one I’d ignore in any other case.  This time, though, I just can’t. 

As time creeps past me, or I along it, the details of that provenance begin to escape me despite myself.  The sloth’s gaze grows less friendly and more maligned and accusatory, calling me out for letting its unique qualities slip away.  Its history is all that distinguishes it, and I am the sole repository thereof.  If I lose the remaining strands of that skein, the sloth will revert to being nothing more than an empty shell stuffed with polyfoam.  It remains more than that now, I know, at least for the time being.  So I will take the time to retrieve that story, so far as I remember it.  I wouldn’t want its loss on my conscience.  That little sloth’s beady gaze wouldn’t ever forgive me. 

It all went down at the Panhandle playground.  The ‘handle is a piece of GG park that stretches a statute mile into surrounding neighborhoods, just one block wide and lined with bike paths, hoops courts, and one funky playground for kids.  We’d often see that playground as we zipped past the ‘handle on our way into the park alonng a standard shortcut home.  Though there’s no dearth of facilities in our neighborhood, sometimes variety is worth pursuit on its own merits alone, so one golden afternoon a few years back we went just a little out of our way when it waws time to exercise the toddler, and headed over to the Panhandle Playground for to check it out in person and hands-on.

It was quintessentially urban - a tired railing hemming in well-seasoned structures of worn metal and faded plastic, some bits vaguely dangerous-looking and all the more fun for it, some tagged indecipherably and some poignantly unremarkable.  Standard animal-headed spring-rockers stood grimy sentry, a hand-cranked trolley enticed kids and parents alike to take a little spin, and outside the ratty fence a pickup basketball game served up a backing track of friendly shouts and the hollow echoing percussions of the ball on the blacktop.  I even think a couple homeless dudes roamed aimlessly around the general vicinity, but inside the rail everything remained comfortingly juvenile and very much playgroundesque. 

Consistent with the subdivision of the Code of the Playground that applies to parents at parks with their kids*, those of us there with progeny exchanged benign greetings and humored each other with compliments about the little ones and comments about the equipment, the weather, and the park itself.  The panhandle is a gentrified neighborhood and a wide cross-section was represented.  I wouldn’t have called it idyllic but it was pleasant enough, with smiles all around and an easy concord. 

And, of course, there was the big guy.  The way I remember things, he was significantly taller than anyone else there, even without taking his thick shock of greying dreds into account.  His shades were enormous, lenses wide and deep and very dark in thick black frames - yet not too thick for his big round face, cheeks like bocce balls, lips like slabs of brisket, and a benevolent visage that seemed to start with the confidence instilled by physical hugeness and to conclude somewhere both distant and deeply internalized.  His enormity extended to a chest more like a cask than a mere barrel, arms like cannon and an abdominal rotundity that rendered him nigh-spherical.  He wore a baggy XXXL collegiate sweatshirt and presentable blue jeans, and he carried a battered shopping bag from some major retail outlet.  A boy of eight or nine, slim, coffee-complected, and delicately disinterested, was apparently there with the big guy more than the other way around. 

The kid entertained himself as best he could on equipment generally designed for and occupied by kids younger than he, keeping pretty much to himself.  The big guy was approaching the other parents, as we all approached each other - smiling, friendly, nice day, good playground.  Cute kid.  Here, take this.

“This,” as it turned out, was a stuffed animal, drawn from the big guy’s shopping bag.  As he extended the toy toward one of us, he would say something about his kid’s birthday, that he was giving away the toys his son no longer used or needed.  The boy’s gaze lingered assiduously elsewhere.  He was, obviously, uncomfortable, feeling our glances flick over him as the huge cheerful dude approached us, one after another.  The dude made no inquiry as to our interest in his gifts - he’d simply pluck a toy from his sack and hand it over, with no apparent consideration for any poossible rejection.  “Here, this is for your kid.  Mine just had a birthday, he doesn’t need this anymore.”

None of us knew what to make of it.  No one wanted to antagonize Gargantua, but similarly, no one wanted or even trusted the dinky little toys he was thrusting upon us.  His proffered novelties were dwarfed into insignificance by his massive ursine paws. 

It was thus that I first met the sloth. 

To tell the truth, I felt sorry for it, as I did for the kid ignoring it being given away to us.  Just a handful of fuzz, glossy eyes unblinking immodestly, and a face small, pinched and masked with dun stripes over the eyes.  I took it from the big guy with a moderate qualm, even as Kel quietly conveyed to me her opinion that our child should never be exposed to so questionable a plaything.  But by then I had the sloth in hand, could feel that it was clean and well-maintained, resilient yet cuddly.  I slipped it, already feeling a little protective, into my jacket pocket like some marsupial mom. 

Later, Kel superfluously reminded me that “that thing” would have to go through the wash at least twice before it could even be shown to our child.  She remained deeply suspicious of it even after our thorough “due diligence” laundering, but once it was properly re-sanitized I offered it to Zach.  He treated it with the same amused disinterest with which he treated almost all his stuffed animals, none of which he’s named except for his favorite, a blue bear called “Blue Bear.” The sloth, to him, was just another set of eyes staring out from the shelf behind the headboard. 

But somehow for me the sloth’s eyes are distinguished - thoughtful, or at least sympathetic.  They are eyes that have a story to tell, though how it ends or began I am not sure.  I know one of the middle chapters, though, and feel thereby a fraternity with the redistributed sloth.  Through that fraternity I gradually felt a responsibility - to the sloth, to its story.  I had saved the one from the trash-heap; I should save the other from being lost as well.  That, too, I have now done.  I wonder if I’ll notice now in his black button eyes any recognition of the favor I’ve done him.  While I doubt I’ll see any gratitude, I will be happy to see at least the end of that accusatory glare. 

* Division III, Part d, Section 5: “Recreational Accompaniment"

Friday, April 10, 2009

Keeping It Real: Cell Phone Photos

You know, I really do plan to post a cool little story about a toy sloth, but DAG this is one crazy time to try to get anything done.  Inlaws (beloved) are in town.  We go to seder tonight - a gourmet feast for mind and body, hosted by the inimitable Mitch and Cath, and I’m so excited.  Work is very busy, especially since I’ll be taking off for a month as of next friday for bonding and I’ll need to clear my decks and make sure all disasters have been anticipated and pre-resolved.  I’m back on the union bargaining team, and bargaining is not going well this time around.  That sort of stresses me out as a team member, but also as a wage-earner.  Kel’s been feeling poorly and the boys have been bouncing off the walls.  Plus, there was that thing with Anatoli and the red light he didn’t see at Anza and Stanyan, that of course led to the thing with our car violently colliding with his, while Kel and the kids were all aboard.  Everyone seems uninjured by the accident which is more than I can say for the car, which is teetering on the brink of being declared a total loss.  WE JUST HAD THE BRAKES DONE.  AND THE TRANSMISSION.  AND WE CLEANED THE INTERIOR, goddamn it.  The cd player just started working again.  We just paid it off. Plus, of course, Kel starts back to work in about 10 days and needs reliable wheels.  The timing, to say the least, leaves a lot to be desired. 

So when my plan last night to work on posting my little story got subsumed in new plans to watch two hours of TiVovision and to have an unexpected sit-down for 45 minutes with my delightful FIL, and the evening just evaporated on me, I knew that my only real blogging window had irrevocably closed.  I won’t be posting that story - yet.  Yet, I have to post something, or my know-it-all nieu millenium hip-ness credentials will be revoked by some clove-smoking layer-wearing hipster enforcer.  Before I get further carried away with this imagery, I think instead I’ll resort to cheap thrills and offload a few cell-phone photos on you.  It’s better than one of those double-deck tourist buses, I assure you - hop-on/hop-off has nothing on me.  Just look:

From my friend’s room at the St Francis, nine floors directly above the corner of Powell and Geary, looking out at dusk over Union Square.  I took one other that was sharper, but it somehow conveyed so much less of what it was actually to be there.

This is a poster that’s up by the front door of the Finance Department. 

Yes, it’s a little fuzzy, and it’s sort of dark, but can you see what’s going on?  It’s the iconic silhouette of the attache’ man at the bureaucrat’s desk, a classic image of office decorum.  Overlaid upon this, you can see the tripartite green mobius arrow of recycling.  I can’t help but think, when I see this in passing, that they’re telling me that they recycle humans somehow.  The Finance Section, not unlike soylent green, is People!  Or so they would have us believe, anyway.

This is the crowd that gathers up the block from my office building on Thursday afternoons to watch the peregrines that nest up above the treeline hereabouts.  SFGate just ran a story about it; they don’t need me posting a link and it’s too much trouble for me right now to bother.  But it’s pretty cool that this natural covey has sprung up amid the towers of downtown san francisco, swooping around in search of indigenous prey, nesting in specially built containers right through every mating season, and that they show up with all this equipment every week to look at birds. 

This fellow and his ream-worthy friend seem to have an urgent job to do.  I wish they well, whatever they may be rooting. 

And finally, a statue that caused some theological disruption in our household:

So we’re wandering through a small collection of sculptures and we see the first sculpure some distance ahead.  “Why, that’s Edward Muybridge,” I predict, and so it is.  Z asks who he was and I explain a little.  Then we find this statue of Yoda, and Z is pretty sure that having a statue means that Yoda is for real, too, and honestly, doesn’t this make it hard to argue with him? 

So that’s what I’ve got for now.  I’ll be back with more, but later.  Circumstances demand my attention, and who am I to disappoint circumstances? 

Sunday, April 05, 2009

The Meaning of Life: A Photographic Smack in the Chops

Maybe that last post was a bit too much of my dirty laundry, to speak both literally and figuratively.  And maybe it’s just a good place to start.  Was a time that this here Chucklehut was a place of mirth and merrymaking, but that was back when Mirth Day was a mandated federal holiday and

ooh, internet magic!  for you, no time has elapsed.  For me, it’s been over an hour of cleaning off the kids’ car seats, ironing pants, preparing tax documents, and rationalizing a few cut corners.  As I hauled the last sacks of garbage and recycling downstairs and outside in anticipation of tomorrow morning’s very early pickup (sounds more enticing than it is), I found an elderly man at our big blue bin, a broadbrimmed hat protecting his silvery locks from the moon’s searing rays, his body covered in sturdy workclothes, his face a map of lands undiscovered, his hands busily burrowing through our glass-plastics-paper.  I staggered up to him with yet another tranche of effluvia, wishing that he’d been a few doors away or that I’d been just a shred quicker or slower to attend to this duty.  He wished me a good evening, his voice like old newsprint or brown paper bags, as he transferred a few bottles to his shoddy, overworked totecart.  I don’t recall saying anything back to him, which means I probably said, “have a good one.” That’s eminently repressible, given the circumstances.  Who am I, to invoke the “good one,” for one such as he?  What would a “good one” mean to him, anyway?  What does it mean to me, anymore? 

Well, I have to admit that there have been plenty of good ones for me lately.  Not the kind that get lots of attention, with the sparklers and dancing girls and laudatory chirons, but good ones nonetheless.  I had a good visit from my sister and her family; among other things, we together celebrated Z’s 4th birthday in grand style with 25 of his closest friends, and had a lovely trip to the new Science Museum - finally, for me, not on a weekend, so it wasn’t a giant exhibit in factory-farming livestock conditions, and I even got to see the movie at the planetarium.  (The movie was narrated by Sigorney Weaver, so I was waiting eagerly through the whole thing for a giant acid-drooling titanium-clad alien to show up.  Guess who walked out disappointed.) There was a charming trip with one of Z’s preschool chums to the zoo ("No Maulings Since 2007!"), full of them full of juvenile excitement and giant cockroaches comfortingly ensconced behind nice, thick plexiglass.  Yesterday the four of us jaunted up to the headlands to visit Hawk Hill, a very short drive and an even shorter walk but the kind of landscape (natural and otherwise) that really makes an impression even on such jaded locals as we.  Soon, Kel’s folks and two sisters and a nephew are coming to town to experience the phenomenon that is Jesse.  Plus, pesach is around the corner - I’ve already got my gourmet Israeli caramel chews and a recipe for macaroons that would amaze anyone who’s been stuck with those chewy lumps of pencil-eraser shavings up with which most of us grew. 

So yes, I shouldn’t complain, but why should I let that stop me?  The inside of my skull is a riot of scrawled vituperation and dirty limericks and lots of redaction, rich voiceless blackness overblotting the outbursts I prefer not to acknowledge, or at least, not to articulate.  Life seems to be a series of highs and lows.  It reminds me of the stories of Everest climbers, who trudge across unimaginable heights on ice plains that are woven with hidden fissures, any of which could collapse beneath their feet and send them hundreds or thousands of feet into an abyss narrow enough to touch both sides with one’s ears and deep enough to be tantamount to an ocean floor.  If that’s too tortured an analogy, I’ll stick with “highs and lows” - all experienced with explicit comparison to the plights of so many of those around me who suffer or risk so much more than I do, or who triumph with successes they seem to overlook but which leave me stammering with envy and impotence. 

Given this bipolar orientation, this double-bound relationship with my own life, I challenge myself when I open the blog editing window to chuck an le or two, but lately it’s not coming out that way at all.  Partly it’s the fault of my stupid bus, on which I haven’t had a decent seat downtown for weeks - just too crowded to get any writing done, and not even in an interesting way.  Partly it’s work, which has been engaging and diverting and fully occupational lately, much to the detriment of my willingness or ability to do any decent writing once I get on the bus home.  Partly it’s the sudoku, to which I’ve been resorting as a soporific at bedtime instead of my inkstained notebooks.  Maybe it’s that I now live in a world in which hope is not an entirely ironic concept; maybe it’s that my world now includes a young child whose every vital fiber - and he’s got plenty of them - is devoted to the disassembly of anything that has been assembled, and the toppling of anything that has been constructed.  There’s just so little energy left for jokes, after the boys are put to sleep, and so little chance for them beforehand. 

Was that an excuse?  An apology?  A complaint?  Maybe a bit of each, but really not.  I read the site stats - there isn’t anyone coming by on anything like a regular basis, who doesn’t know what he or she is getting into when clicking through.  By a wide margin the majority of my new visitors are looking for something related to some silly joke or bad pun I made years ago.  I owe those trawlers nothing, and the rest of you I owe too much ever to make it up to you so I am comfortable not trying to.  I do have a few lighter things stocked up somewhere to share with you someday, some silly rants and some light verse and even a funny list (funny to me, anyway, which is all it takes to get on this site).  I could do an upbeat post on kitchen equipment (maybe that would be an upbeater post, but you see I’m already pushing my luck), or a downbeat one on another chapter of my English schoolboy days.  But after all is said and done, none of that seems like the post that this site - as an extension of my own psyche - needs right now.  What I need right now, rather, is a crisp, invigorating slap across the punim. 

Everything is fine, goddamn it.  I get black moods but I need to remember that blacklights brilliantly illuminate as well.  I once had blacklight posters, and marveled at their intensity under the purple bulb for more hours than might have been recommended for a child of my then-tender years.  The point being, I need to get the hell off my Hamlet complex or whatever it is that I am indulging so gratuitously these days.  And lucky for me, I actually have an antidote.  So let’s all take a mutual gander at the following THINGS THAT REMIND ME THAT LIFE ROCKS:

Exhibit 1 is Jesse.  Here he is charging down the boardwalk at the Lobos Creek meadows at the Presidio.  The really cool thing about this photo is that he’s actually running toward me.  He’s a runner-awayer, most of the time.  But whether he’s coming at you or otherwise, he definitely does it with every scrap of enthusiasm he can muster. 

Kel snapped this Jesseshot at the Academy of Sciences.  I think he’s getting ready to do some welding. 

For all of J’s goofy hamhandedness, Z is all smoothness and panache.  He’s got more style already than I will ever be able to rent for any occasion.  This image of him showing off his ticket at the zoo is a good example of how amazingly cool this kid is.  And today he came up and whispered to me that we were going to be friends and have fun all day long.  And you know, he was right. 

At Z’s birthday party, he insisted on having a pinata.  He was so excited about it the night before that he couldn’t settle down to sleep, eventually just begging Kel “Just say ‘pinata.’ Please, just say it!” We picked one out in the shape of one of the characters on one of his favorite television shows.  Zach loves Pablo.  Especially, Zach loves whacking Pablo with a cheerfully-festooned authentic Chinese pinata-whacking stick.  And he he is, doing just that.

After several of the kids at the party had taken their licks against Pablo’s tissue-clad hide, the poor thing’s head popped right off.  Not to be dissuaded, we just hoisted him aloft again with the rope strung under his adorable little flippers.  Actually, it felt macabre and wicked, but the kids smelled the candy and were going to attack Pablo till he burst anyway so I figured we might as well keep trying to make it sporting.  But once we got Pablo’s pieces back home, his decapitated head became an object of delighted fascination, especially to Zach and his cousin Delia:

Changing gears briefly, a few days ago Z begged me to make cookies with him after work.  We still had a good lump of hamentashen dough, so we rolled it out and punched a few standard sugar cookies out of it.  Z and J both participated in the whole process, and apart from leaving the kitchen so dusted with flour that a CSI team could have been there taking prints from every surface from the ceiling down, a cubic hectare of fun was had by all. 

Plus, the cookies turned out great.

Let’s conclude with a few shots from yesterday’s trip to Hawk Hill.  It’s a stunning setting just west of the GG bridge, at the top of coastal bluffs that rise about 1500 feet right up from the ocean.  The whole city is laid out across the bay, the water sparkled through the gate, and the bridge gleamed orange in the blazing sunlight.  I took a bunch of landscape and cityscape photos, none of which are in the least interesting.  If you’ve been coming here for any length of time at all, rather, you already know that my interest was mainly taken with the many ruined military emplacements left after WWII.  Hawk Hill was heavily fortified and fully manned, and the crumbling concrete bunkers and magazines have been richly embellished by individuals with a fondness for cheap beer in large cans, and for writing in a mostly illegible manner on every available surface.  Here’s what it looked like to me:

- and here’s what it really looked like to me.  By which I mean, this is what it looked like to visit a paint-stained, rust-crusted wrack of a reinforced concrete bunker, and to find in its wall an inexplicable hole that penetrates from the fog-battered exterior to the sot-stained interior, a hole that was most likely originally made for some military necessity but has since turned into a place for pushing beer cans out of, or into, an abandoned and outmoded space.... a garbage chute, a wind-admitter, a toehold for erosion and a cipher in shape and purpose.... but this day, I peer into it and find instead:

the meaning of life.  I think I’ll go to bed now, and be grateful for its warmth and constancy.  And maybe later on in the week, I’ll send along something less self-referential.  I think I’ll be ready for it soon. 

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Next to Godliness: Brainwash on Warm, Tumble Dry, Cool Iron if Desired

Lest I fall out of practice telling people what to do and how to do it, allow me to unburden myself regarding the laundry.  I do it, with help from Kel, all the time. I iron shirts.  I match baby sox.  I am perpetually immersed in the laundry, one might say, and stuck on “soak.” Given this predeliction, as you might imagine, I have a thought or three about the laundry, and my unhealthy relationship thereto.  Hop in, why don’t you, and let’s take this baby for a spin. 

ITEM: After a lifetime of benighted error, I know know the correct order in which to LOAD MY CLOTHESWASHER.  It’s a standard domestic toploader like I’ve most always had, and I never really thought this through till recently, but this is how it’ll go from here on out: First, set the washer load size and water temp, select the appropriate cycle, and turn it on - empty.  Next, add liquid soap directly into the inflowing stream of water.  I’ve had too much experience with the heartbreak of aphid-like spots showing up on my clothes ever to use powdered detergent anymore; adding liquid soap right to the water disperses it more rapidly and evenly.  ONLY THEN do I add clothes, being ever-watchful against overfilling.  In this way the clothes spend the least amount of time in the washer, the soap is distributed with maximum efficiency, and the whole process concludes that more more quickly.  No other order of filling the washer achieves so many virtues so completely.  When genius reigns unfettered, such - such! - are the results.  You may adore me. 

ITEM: I do not typically resort to this blog as a confessional, but exceptional times call for exceptional measures.  I’m going to lay myself open to you as to my laundry-based OCD.  Please restrain your derision.

I’ve had this little laundry game I’ve played for as far back as I remember, and I started doing my own laundry pretty darn young. Yeah, a “laundry game.” Even I don’t really get it, and I’m the one who plays it.  But I take it very seriously and play as if I have no choice in the matter.  Here’s how it works:

When folding my clean laundry, I try to touch each item as little as possible.

Yes, that’s it!  But, of course, over forty years or so of gameplay, a certain amount of technique and ritual have accreted to this nucleus like lint that clogs the trap defending one’s inner clarity.  Here are the most noteworthy complications I’ve invented:

Every item, once folded, is placed in a stack or pile of like items to be put away in the same drawer.  These stacks are in turn organized in the order in which these drawers appear in my dresser - the organization of which has not changed significantly since I began using the thing back in the early ‘70s: sox, undergarments, white t’s, colored t’s and other folded shirts, shorts and “miscellaneous” items too few to merit their own drawer.  T-shirts get a quad-fold - sleeve to sleeve and then hem to collar - unless that obscures distinguishing characteristics of the shirt, in which case I resort to a hex-fold (thirds - sleeves inward - and then hem to collar).  Items to be hung or enshelved in the closet are set aside and, if appropriate, folded; otherwise, they are preliminarily smoothed free of major wrinkles.  I try to concentrate on doing like items all together, all the t-shirts or bandanas, for example, and sometimes (though I feel shame just admitting to it here) I prestage items, laying them out ready to fold but not finishing the job till they’re all waiting in identical readiness.  Then I blaze through a whole stack of shirts or shorts in rapid, unthinking succession.  Kelly chides me for this but I am convinced that it makes the job go faster.  It’s an economy of scale, or something.  Stop pestering me, anyway.  I still have sox to roll. 

For sockrolling is the most challenging part - really, the heart - of the laundry game.  The socks I leave for last unless a matched set presents itself to me spontaneously during the first phase of the process.  But in the end I always face a tidy series of themed stacks of clean folded laundry to one side, and a jumble of dozens of unmatched socks to the other.  At this juncture I calm my thoughts, slow my breathing, cool my ki, and begin by scannning for two socks to roll up together.  Usually, I can get two or three pair right off the bat without any trouble, but eventually I will no longer see any matched pairs just loitering around for my sock-rolling pleasure, naked and exposed (the sox, and in some cases, myself).  Here’s the challenge, then: if I pick up two unmatching socks, I deny myself respiration till I’ve matched them both. I can hold my breath for a minute or more, the deprivation is rarely serious.  I really don’t even know why I do it.  Regardless, if I accidentally pluck an unmatching pair from the pile, I inhale heartily and then start in as quick as I can, selecting candidates for a match until I’ve paired and rolled every sock I’ve touched since I last inhaled.  If I pull more socks that don’t match, I have to find their mates too before I breathe again.  It’s not a very challenging game unless I’m missing a sock or two, but I play to win every time.  And as the winner, I get a pile of perfectly matched, tightly rolled sox.  And an abiding sense of shame, which I now generously share with you.  The sox, however, are all mine. 

ITEM THE LAST: Back in the ‘80s I spent a year or so working at a big department store.  As a short-hours part-timer, I didn’t have my own department; rather, I just floated wherever they needed me, which occasionally brought me to the linens department.  There, I was inducted into a very specific way to fold towels: in half widthwise, in half again widthwise again, and then in thirds.  This gave a satisfying heft and cosmetic appeal to the finished, folded product.  I took pride in seeing a wall of my handiwork stacked up in all the colors of the spectrum.  I held fast to that technique for many years thereafter - until, in fact, quite recently.  But no longer - and here’s why.

Space has become a prime commodity in my house lately, and the towels have migrated to a cozy haunt in the bedroom credenza. When I launder a load of towels and fold them into perfect beautiful dodecal lozenges, they actually don’t fit where they’re supposed to go anymore.  They’re too thick.  I have to stuff them in, stack them sideways or atop each other, or in serried ranks.  It isn’t a very efficient approach.  Honestly, it’s an insult to the loveliness of my fold-job - and it weighed heavy on my simple, simple mind. 

The inefficiency of my time-honored system was made blatant whenever Kel would put away the towels she’d folded - quickly, neatly, and without aggravation or artifice.  Eventually I learned her secret: don’t fold them so nicely!  My twelve-part fold made the towels too thick; it wasted space, and anyway nobody could appreciate the aesthetics of a brilliant fold-job when it mouldered behind closed credenza doors, mashed into a rumpled mess.  Kelly just folds them in half widthwise, then lengthwise, and then widthwise again - and she’s done.  Her way, the towels fit where they’re supposed to go.  My way, what’s beautiful when it leaves my hands is a slovenly mess by the time I pick it out again from the shelf. 

My moral: stop folding things so damn much and listen to my wife.  What you take from this episode may vary.  And with that I bring my laundry rant to a close.  I hope I feel better now.  Maybe I just need a few minutes of fluff to work out the kinks.  We’ll have to check in on that later.  For now, I think this is enough.