History, as the blowhards tell us, is the accumulation of coincidental ambiguities.  It is the profundity that is born of consecutive inconsequentialities.  It is a trial without a verdict, a verdict without a sentence, and a sentence without a period.  It is an orange without sections; it is an elevator that stops on every floor.  It is a large and smelly cheese.  You cannot spell “history” without “rot,” “sit,” or “hoy.” And to the limited extent to which any of this makes any sense at all, I agree with the blowhards.  History is many things, and we make quite a spectacle of ourselves saying what they are.  But in one respect, the blowhards and I part company.  Is history truly written by the victors?  I say nay.  Rather, I aver, history is written by the writers.

- Which brings the conversation, as all conversations are eventually brought, to me.  Look upon me, ye mighty, and extrude!  Lo, my shadow eclipses the very feet upon which I stand.  I am blogger, hear me post with drivel more inane than most.  Tweet, and the world tweets with you; blog, and you blog alone.  I submit, something less than humbly, that writers are those whose creative engines engender a world in which they both rule and are enslaved.  I am that slave-king, here at the Chucklehut - and history is the witness against me whose testimony I myself have scripted.

In this case, history began July 24, 2002, with my first tentative, yearning, expletive-laden blog post.  A hut of chuckles had been erected, and I - yes, I! - was its erector.  Never before had so much been said about so little; here, greater blogsylvania was subjected to unprecedented surplussage and excesses of articulation far exceeding federal recommendations.  All too often neither hutular nor chuckleicious, this blog has endured presidencies, surgeries, adoptions and obfuscations.  And now it is eight years old.

Eight years is a long time in internet terms, where a blog mitzvah is celebrated at 30 months and registry for the cyberdraft is obligtaory upon attaining 150 posts.  (For the record, all blogs are born of age both to drink and vote.  Typically, simultaneously.) Well, I’ve got nearly 2000 posts and have been drafted into, and survived, any number of web-based contretemps.  And what have I got to show for it?  This lousy t-shirt.  And when I bathe, not even that.

In a recent exchange of correspondence with a new luminary of the internet, whose punctuation marks are funnier than most of my whole posts and whose daily hit count exceeds my annual ones, I mentioned the longevity of this site.  In response, she referred to me as the “Dick Clark of Blogging.” I took it as a compliment, with only a passing reference to my annual ball-descent.  Still, it got me to thinking - and we all know how tricky that terrain can be for me.

It has been my practice in years past, and you are invited to check the archives if you don’t believe me, to observe the anniversary of my blogception with a look twenty-four to twelve months backward.  I re-read my posts for the year concluding one year prior, and squander an entry by listing off my favorites.  It’s not an objective process, even though it has an objective - I just pick the ones that I most enjoy reading again.  Sometimes I surprise myself, on the plus side or the minus.  Typically there is a scattering of gold in the dross, all too easily overlooked if I don’t refine it out.  Today, I reveal the results of that process - but this time, with one exciting (only to me) twist:

When I first undertook this exercise in 2003, I selected less than 7% of my total of over 600 posts - a “Top 40.” (More Casey Kasem than Dick Clark, perhaps, but those were simpler times.) I’ve stuck with this format ever since, even as my output shrank to barely 200 posts per year.  Well, now when I look back I’m reading stuff I wrote as the father of two children, and there are barely 100 posts in a whole year with which for me to reacquaint myself.  There’s no point in selecting a top 40 when the total pool of essays is so slim.  Forty is too big a chunk; it’s insufficiently selective.  It’s time for me to ratchet back.

So this year, in the immortal words of Captain Chaos and Jungle Judy, it’s Top Ten Time.  I selected ten out of 103 posts for an exactly about-ten-percent slice of steaming hot blog pie.  You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to, but you’ll really only be depriving yourself.  These bare ten posts represent the absolute finest in contemporary American blogfodder available for your internet dollars today.  And if that’s not good enough for you, I guess I’ll have to do better.  Your vote of confidence is appreciatively recognized.  Meantime, read these anyway.  I’m not blogging for my health, you know.

Choice 2:
why I didn’t write you anything - click and learn, grasshopper
(found on the bus a few months ago and jealously protected till the perfect moment arose, which obviously is now)

In either chase, whether you prefer choice 1 or choice 2, here are my latest faves ("sick-ass lions"):

Phat Farm Fresh
The Jewish Goodbye
In Commemoration with Two Sugars
The Grubby Groper of Outer Geary
Hardly Unwanted
the night of swirling stars
Saving Passover - One Stoat at a Time
Social Obligations and the Redistributed Sloth
Unspeakable Wonder
Bag Man

Thanks for your support, I’ll be here all week.  Of course, I’ll be eating or sleeping for most of it.  Recapitulation takes it out of a fellow, you know? 

However, two major social institutions came with the territory, so to speak - they were seemingly plotted out with the city grid, and have been with us, pretty much since the start of things as we recognize them today.  Some lots had been set aside for schools, some for parks; we got an official Carnegie library and the French Hospital was already a well-established institution; but the houses of worship on either side of Park Presidio Boulevard at Clement Street are - or were - too well-matched architecturally and geographically to be a quirk of zoning.  They were planned, clearly, as sentinels to the entry to the city, welcoming the Godfearing visitors streaming off the new bridge that spanned the Golden Gate, and driving the sinners out of Eden.  So it seemed to me, anyway. The presence of those two big imposing sacred spaces pretty much across the street from each other was demonstrably no coincidence.  (I marked their location by an oval in the photo linked-in above.  No, that’s not an actual black oval carved into the topgraphy.  You are just being obstreperous.)

On the west was the synagogue, once boasting a sober facade of damp sandstone carved to resemble an unscrolled torah, with columns and stained glass.  As I’ve written here before, the integrity of that architecture was insulted by a 1970s addition and up-do that added a false front, depersonalized the adjacent assembly hall, and generally stepped on everything of value in the original design.  And then a few years ago it got revisioned, razed, and utterly reborn as a gleaming new edifice unlike any other in the city, a chalice raised heavenward, an ark ready to float away down 14th Avenue.  The old synagogue is now the new synagogue, standing where it has stood since 1934, its message renewed and its presence emphatically reinstated.

Then there was the church over on the other side. I suspect that it started off as a more impressive building than the old original synagogue, and for sure it remained so.  The Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist was a neoclassical structure with a colonnaded facade, uprights framing massive patinaed bronze doors capping a short set of steps that raised the whole building up like an altar.  The sanctuary was a lofty room proportioned so as to be, improbably, both intimate and grand, with walls of leaded windows and a shallow dome of Tiffany glass overhead.  It boasted gardens and lawns, and a classic old school x-tian science reading room with period typographic signage bolted letter by letter to the outside wall, in which room a dwindling cadre of increasingly-elderly believers apparated to peruse tracts and the church’s well-regarded newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.  Above the main portals the formal name of the edifice, FOVRTH CHVRCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, was incised in clear classic Latinate lettering, flanked by massive yet graceful plaster amphorae. 

As a child I’d found humor in the name of this sect ("They laughed at my experiments in the seminary - but who’ll have the last laugh now!") but over time I grew into a more nuanced appreciation of their ethic, which I considered admirable if misbegotten, and the architecture of their churches, which was frequently robust and inspirational.  In this vein, I was glad to have the 4CofCS as a neighbor.  It elevated the ambient tone and classed the place up.  Even as I wondered how they kept the big old place looking good and pumping out the gospel, I always felt inspired by gazing up at their Parthenon-inspired lintel, surmounted by those huge urns that caught the sea-washed light of this district with almost sentient clarity.  The 4CofCS: living proof that classy dowagers make good neighbors. 

The thing is, dowagers appear timeless, but they’re really not.  Eventually the frailties to which we all are heir will take them down, and thus it was as well for my dear old friend the 4CofCS.  Though she unfailingly kept up her appearances, congregants increasingly failed to throng her, or even attend her perfunctorily.  The free Children’s Sunday School seemed to languish unattended.  As their vaunted newspaper, the Monitor, shrank in size and circulation, so did their reading room dwindle in usership and vitality.  I began to wonder how they kept the place going, in this age of skeptical modernity.  The synagogue had updated, architecturally, and in doing so, seemed to have renewed its lease on spiritual life.  What was the plan for the church?

A brief diversion: I don’t buy a lot of music anymore.  I go on-line and listen free through Pandora or I tune in KPIG, and when I hear something I like, if it’s at all contemporary, I’ll check for concert recordings on the Archive.  Oh yes, the Archive - The Internet Archive - is a massive compendium of digital information - poetry and buddhism, historical children’s literature and kitschy midcentury video, and the Way Back Machine where you can see what the internet looked like at the beginning of time (circa 1998).  And, of course, they’ve got tens of thousands of hours of live concert recordings.  Punk, folk, funk, polk, and all imaginable interpermutations; 7,600 Grateful Dead recordings and about 3000 other artists from headliners to the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Band and Baghdad Scuba Review.  The amount they’ve got ready at your cyberfingertips is mindboggling, and it’s all freefreefree.  The Internet Archives: it’s everywhere and it’s everything.  If there’s a new religion, this is probably it.  Anglebracket slash diversion.

Let’s return to our regularly-scheduled blather, already in progress.  We were (I was) going on about the 4CofCS, stately and noble, enduring but no longer particularly vibrant.  I wondered as to its longevity, and then I saw the signs go up and I wondered no more: one day a cloth banner was draped over the modest lawn marquee at the corner of Funston and Clement, and print-out fliers were posted in the reading room windows: the old church was closing and the new church was moving in.  Christ Scientist was vacating to make room for Dr Wayback’s cyberarchives. 

One piece at a time, a transition was effected - huge servers were delivered and installed, with conduit and circuitry to serve them; the reading room’s musty carrels were upgraded with flatscreens and linux. It took a few months or more, all told, but for me the changeover was pretty seamless - from my desktop at home, I continued to enjoy uninterrupted access to Jackie Green concerts and Alan Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute lectures.  But one day as I strolled the avenue I looked up and those timeless, 70-year-old letters over the portal of that graceful building were no longer there.  Where once their dark lines and crisp serifs had looked down on me, suddenly there was only clean, smooth, unbroken tabula rasa whiteness.  And those big metal letters bolted above the reading room window referred no longer to either Christianity nor science - only the generic “Reading Room” part of the signage remained.  Instead of inspirational tracts, the window displayed a poster graphically depicting the range and scope of the internet in 2002.  In the reading carrels, the Monitor had been replaced by monitors. 

I have not yet been inside the new home of the Internet archives.  I don’t notice that my concert downloads are faster now that the server is mere blocks from my home network (though, technically, since they only moved from a location in the Presidio, it’s not a very big difference, objectively, as you can see from the first-linked photo above), and I still have some trouble converting FLAC files on a Windows Vista platform (but I think I know who to blame for that).  Still, I can’t help but feel that some progress has been made, while at the same time, certain verities have been preserved.  An inspiring edifice dedicated to the power of insubstantial actions and entities continues to function as such.  Its focus has shifted, however, from a messianic deity to individual opinion, unfettered and hubristic; the single text and truth is now an evolving compendium of multitudinous expression.  And that’s all, I suppose, as it should be.  The world may not have changed much since the 1930s, but our relationship to it has.  It only stands to reason that the old church of divine mystery is now a library preserving the evanescent profundities of the profane.  We seek new inspirations now, and I’m glad my neighborhood continues to provide them - on both sides of the boulevard, and for both my heart and my head. 

this is a scan of a photo I took a long time ago, which was developed in four different hues for reasons of technical incapacity.  The original looks a lot “smoother” than this one, but I sort of like the warholization of the image I have here now.  Anyway, this is what the place looked like, when it had lettering up top.  Those urns are still really gorgeous, though.

Up next: blogoversary recap.  I know, you’re palpitating.  Get over it already. 

But that’s not why you came here, is it?  You came here to gloat and glory in my ignominious downfall.  I used to post daily, even more than daily, back when words were cheap and blogging was exotic. Now there are pet lizards that friendfeed more often than I manage to get a handful of random adverbs up here. I’d say it was sad, but it makes me sad to say it.

So what I’ll say instead, is SALAD!  Yes, it’s “sad,” but with an extra AL that makes all the difference.  In Arabic, it means “THE!” So you can see why I’d want to make sure it’s included.  After all, you didn’t just kick your way into some random sub-basement of the Chucklehut.  By glorious happenstance, you wound up in the still-warm remnants of what our forebears once knew as RECIPE CORNER - where gustatory history still wells up from the dispoz-all and sprays deliciousness all over your hungry face.  It’s time, intrepid blogwalker, and the lot falls to you.  Ready your “print screen” button because I’m going to tell you the legend of a salad that will change your life and that of every cranberry in your pantry!

So here’s the thing: I was going to go to a party and wanted to bring a salad, but for gods sake isn’t there enough salad in this soggy old world of ours?  Which is to say, what can a fellow do to make a salad that doesn’t get lost in the sea of icebug (sic) lettuce and hand-cut croutons in which we all marinate?  I wanted to make a salad that stood up to the competition.  Figuratively. A salad that actually stands up would be either creepy or infested.  Neither one was my goal. I just wanted classy sophisticated wankers to say that it was the finest damn salad they ever rammed down their arugula holes.  It was a challenge, and nothing inspires me more than a challenge.  Except maybe a nap, so I took one of those to start, and then turned my attention to the question at hand.

The first thing to come up with was the base.  Salads have bases, you know?  Because otherwise they’d be acids, chemically speaking.  As I typically do.  Some salads are based on greens; some on beens; some are pasta-ish and some are mostly made of woodchips and cardboard flakes.  And that’s where I wanted to start.  Because I hate salad and hoped this one would end its semi-permanent hegemony of the first course.  But I failed.  I failed utterly.

That is because I didn’t actually use those wood-chips, I just used something that looks like them: KASHA.  Kasha is a gluten-free grain, that my peoples typically serve with pasta, because god knows carbs go better with extra carbs.  But I was going to use them straight.  It was going to be a kasha salad, without pasta, which I was pretty sure no one else would be bringing to this particular party.  Or I’d have to kill somebody.  This salad stuff is serious, man. 

So now I had my kasha, and all I had to do was turn it into a salad.  Easy.  -ish.  Here’s how:

Cook the kasha - two cups of grain in four cups of water with some salt and butter, brought to a boil and then simmered, covered, for, oh, twelve minutes or so.  Don’t overcook it.  Then again, don’t undercook it.  I’d recommend a basic cooking of the kasha.  That’s the ticket.  Dump it into a large bowl and let the billows of steam rising out of it sear the flesh from your hands as you turn it with a spoon and fan it a little to help the moisture escape.  No, seriously, help it off-steam a while, and then season it a bit with a little rice vinegar.  Mmm, steaming hot vinegar kasha.  No, no, it gets better.  I’m pretty sure. 

Start gussying it up, with either fresh or frozen gussy.  Lacking that, as I was, I used the following ingredients:

1 large yellow onion, diced small and panfried at medium heat till somewhat caramelized but not mushy

1 medium red pepper, diced small and sauteed till just softened

2 good-sized carrots, diced small (you see the pattern here?) and fried in a combination of agave syrup, cinnamon, and powdered ginger root (and as you can see, this is where the poseurs fade away, since it’s tricky to dice a carrot small and you need to get that damned agave syrup too, though it’s pretty handy to have around if you don’t happen to have a taste for unmoistened agave)

1 large ear’s worth of corn, cut free and barely sauteed with salt and white pepper in olive oil

1 bunch of regular (not “special") parsley, leaves only (not the stems), chopped up but not quite minced

-- so so far it’s pretty standard stuff, right?  I mean, it’s a lot of chopping and dicing and knife work and such, but those all mean basically the same thing so stop your harping and get back to work already.  But here’s where we take a sudden sharp turn toward Scrumptiousville:

Getcherself some simple syrup (ie boil a cup of sugar in a cup of water till it’s totally clear) and use that to simmer a cup of dried cranberries and a cup of dried currants.  You can even add a little orange blossom essence if you want to be cool and impress the ... um ... easily-impressed.  You don’t need to use all the syrup for this task, just enough to cover the fruit - use the rest for lemonade, cocktails, or art projects.  You also only need to simmer the fruit till it’s somewhat rehydrated, or, in other words, a little less chewy.  Actually, when it’s done, drain out the simmer-syrup through a sieve and you can make a damn tasty spritzer with it, together with some seltzer and maybe a shot of gin, but that’s up to you.  Anyway, when the fruit is drained, chop it up so the cranberries are not much bigger than any of the other ingredients, and mix them all into the kasha.  Oh, right, the kasha.  I’m still on that kick.  You’d thought I’d gotten over it.  But really, I’ve barely begun.

Well, that’s not quite true either.  I’ve mostly finished, is what I meant to say.  All you need to do now is come up with a little dressing, which seemed to work out pretty well when I mixed lime juice, rice vinegar, sesame oil, agave syrup (in this case, agave at the office), and enough water to make it not too oppressively tart or sweet.  Toss the dressing into the salad till you can just taste it - you don’t need a whole bunch - and then let it sit in the fridge overnight or whatever.  Then when you serve it, stand back and let nature take its course.  After the dinosaur die-off and the triumph of bipedal primates, you’ll see that all the best people want to know all about your wonderful salad, and the tired old bowl of baby lettuce, raw bacon and miracle whip just sits there wilting under the bug lamp.  You’ll be the life of the party.  Unless the lettuce-salad dude offs you.  I tell you, man, this is serious stuff. 

I call this salad Kashaberry Delight.  You can call it what you like.  It never answers to anything anyway.  But it’s a damn good salad and you can take that to the bank.  It’ll give you something to snack on while you’re in line. 

Up next, when I get around to it: oh, probably something about a building in my neighborhood, or about a creepy old hag.  I’m open to suggestion, and the comments functionality is up and running.  As am I, so I’ll smell you later, dude. 

1.  Oh look:

*

snacks for the office meeting!

2.  Eh, I don’t like those snacks.  I just won’t eat them.

3. Actually, that one kind

is pretty good but I choose not to eat any of them anyway.  They’re probably bad for me.

4.  I’ll just have this kind.

It’s the least bad for me, I’m bored, and my refusal to eat the snacks my boss brought to the meeting is verging on rudeness.

5.  Actually that one wasn’t the kind I wanted.  I accidentally got a really

good one that’s not so good for me, not one of the

not-so-good ones that’s okay for me. 

6.  Damn, that

good one was good, though.

7. I’d better go back and have

one of the kind I meant to have.  It’ll even things out.

8.  Wow, that kind really sucks.  I’m not eating any more of these at all.

9.  But that good one

was really good.  Please let this meeting end soon.

10.  New topic?  Damn.

11.  Let me just check the nutritional info.  Subtly, though.  I need to look like I’m paying attention.  I can’t grab that bag too eagerly.

12.  Oh no.  These things are awful for me.  Really bad. 

13.  Holy crap!  That’s not even for the whole bag, that’s per serving - and there’s, what, how many servings? 

14.  Really.  They leave it blank.  Not a a good sign.  Do I actually need to do math here?

now, how many grams per ounce, again?

15.  SIX SERVINGS.  Or seven.  In a one-serving-size bag.  DEATH ON WHEELS.  No more.  No way. 

16.  But that good one…

was soooo good..... and the lame one

was sooooo lame..... and that’s the one I can still taste....

17.  I’ll just have one more to, um, clear my palate… yeah.

18.  Yeah, that’s a nice clear palate.  I don’t need any more.  They’re bad for me.

19.  Meeting over.  Finally.  I’m escaping this mostly-full bag of tasty, tasty, deadly snacks.  Thank god.

20.  DON’T MAKE ME TAKE THESE TO THE CUBE NEXT TO MINE WHERE WE PUT SNAX.  I don’t think I have that kind of self-control.

21.  Okay, I’ll do it.  I’ll just leave them and turn around and walk away, three feet to my desk.  I do so have self-control.  And this will prove it.

22.  Who do I think I’m kidding.  I have no self-control.  I’ll just take some of these

bad ones and get away while I can.

23.  These

bad ones are not doing it for me.  Maybe I could sneak a

good one. 

24.  Or two.  Or so.

25.  No one is around - I could take as much as I want without anybody even knowing.  I’ll just, heh, clear my palate. 

26.  Oh god I’m completely out of control.  How many times have I even been into that bag in the last ten minutes?  I’ve lost count.  There are crumbs all down the front of my shirt and dried fruitmush is stuck between my teeth. 

27.  Empty?  EMPTY?  How in the name of jackfruit can the bag be empty?!!  I’M NOT SATISFIED!  I WANT MORE UNHEALTHY FRUIT SNACKS!

28.  I’ll just lick the crumbs and dust from the corners of the bag.  I can’t let it go to waste. 

29.  Oh.  My boss just saw me licking the torn-open bag.  I think this is going to wind up on my annual review.  Or as a blog post. 

30.  Probably both.

*: all photos taken with piece-of-crap phone camera.  what, I should be making myself look good here?  Come back next week, I’ll take a less-humiliating tack.  Relatively speaking.

Of these, one seems ripe for reconsideration now, for reasons I had trouble figuring out at first, are still rather vague to me, and which I therefore, incredibly, choose to leave unstated.  But, lacking that, let me start with a confusing diversion.

There is something inherently uncool about blogging, especially in the rambling, unfocused, autobiographical way which I embrace here at the Hut of Chuckletude.  The charisma I embody when writing up some incisive vignette evaporates utterly when I go back and review my archives, stuffed as they are with self-important blather; the power that surges from my fingertips as I type my trenchant screeds is dissipated into tenebrous echoes when my stat counter lingers on single digits and my comments hover equidistant between positive and negative values.  It’s easy, on-line, to lose track of the extent to which I actually impact (or fail to impact) the world that I like to think of as my oyster.  If I write something, then I have created it, and thereby become a creator, Godlike in my genius - or so my authorial impulse suggests to me.  It’s only in confronting my statistically verified irrelevance that I venture to question that hypothesis.

This tension between creative power and social irrelevance, between my dual identities as nerd and God, is at the heart of my recollection of a party I attended long ago.  How long ago, in fact, I am not entirely sure, but I can hazard a guess based on a few key details: I was reliant on others for my transportation, suggesting to me that I couldn’t yet drive; I was in the company of a young man I’d met in a theater workshop, and he lived up in the northern part of the valley, far from precincts familiar to me.  All this points to circa the summer of 1979, when I was fifteen years old and very much unsure of myself, a manchild in every sense of the word - rumble-voiced and hirsute, but naive to the point of embarrassment and as much inclined to idle amusement as anything else.

This young man I’d met at this workshop seemed in some ways a kindred spirit - smart but with much yet to learn, taut with frolics and questings, clearly as unsure of himself as I was of me but equally ready to find out.  He listened to antique LPs of baroque organ music, favored the wearing of full capes in the SoCal summer sun, and took nothing seriously, especially seriousness.  He entertained me and challenged me.  I had certain doubts about him, honestly, but none so many or so specific as to deprive myself of his company.  At the time I didn’t have enough friends to make any snap judgments.  I certainly didn’t think he was that much weirder than I was.  Then again, I thought I was pretty weird.  Then again, again, I guess I hadn’t really been around very much yet.

This kid - I have been struggling to remember his name, but have let these memories slide for so long that all I can say for sure is that it reminds me of “Vincent” (and not “Vince") so that’s what I’ll call him from here out - Vincent and I had enjoyed a few afternoons of conversation and wandering around various malls.  The time had come to move our friendship forward or to let it fade away.  The opportunity to make this decision came on a warm smoggy night: Vincent had been invited to a party some of his older friends were throwing, and invited me along to meet them.

This was big for me, a kid who’d barely made three friends throughout grade school: if things went as well as they might, I could wind up doubling that number or better in a single evening.  I remember excitement and anticipation.  Beyond that, I’m no longer sure - if I ever was sure at all.  I think I knew that it was a party of people who played Dungeons and Dragons but that they wouldn’t be gaming at the party itself, which was fine with me since I myself was not a D&Devotee.  I knew enough to expect that a lot of the attendees would be older than I, grown-ups in their late teens or even their twenties.  Role playing types, I think I thought.  Whatever I knew to expect, I was primed to see what awaited me.

My actual recollection of the party itself is spotty at best. I remember a cozy woodframe home in the foothills, a deck in the dusk perfumed with a few small blazes, a kitchen table liberally littered with flagons - flagons! - of ale and mead.  I remember a hostess of relatively mature years arrayed fetchingly in an elfish gown, and a stocky bearded host with leather pouches strung across his jerkin-clad chest.  I remember nice people who presented themselves first and foremost as characters - thieves and wizards and assassins - but who then spoke feelingly of quotidian matters like school, girlfriends, and where to shop for pewter figurines and dodecahedral dice.  As far as all that went, it was fine.

I remember not seeing too much of Vincent at the party, but that was fine too.  He wasn’t Vincent there, he was some fictive entity distinguished by hit points, mystical powers, and imaginary exploits in fantastical lands.  He was part of a crowd of which, over the course of the evening, I came increasingly to realize I was not a part myself.  I don’t recall anyone’s name, the ride home, or ever getting in touch with Vincent again.  The party was the end of all that for me.  The leggings most of the guests wore seemed too confining; the mead they drank, too cloying.  I had no actual objection to anyone I met there or how they spent their time, but once I got back home I could just tell it hadn’t been my scene. 

I felt a small disappointment to discover that I’d invested myself in a friendship that lacked at its core that ineffable consanguinity that would have made it a new and continuing part of my life’s path, but also a counterbalancing relief to have come to this realization when I did.  It occurred to me that I’d visited a shopping mall with a man who wore a lined satin cape in the summer in Los Angeles, and his friends had had a get-together where their actual personalities were essentially party-crashers.  I decided that I wanted friends who were front and center, and who didn’t hide behind costumes any more than was absolutely necessary.  I also recognized that I myself might not meet this lofty standard, but I had the audacity to seek aspirational examples.

Now I find myself looking back thirty years to that night, and the natural questions arise in my mind.  Not whether I’d made the right choice, but just - what if I’d chosen differently?  Whom would I have been, which manner of me would have evolved, had I made that night a moment of turning toward, rather than away?  What would today look like, had yesterday been different?

In the face of such inquiries, I first need to assess what today has brought me, and I to it.  I’m a man of some modest accomplishment, a diligent servant to my colleagues, a devoted dad and a heartfelt husband.  I have wrought a career and an identity from countless rough drafts and tenuous ventures.  I have made my path the path of action, and live each day of my life in a world which, so far as I’m able, I actively engage with and make my own.  In doing so I believe that I make it better.  I can’t know what any other life would have meant, whether I’d have been so dedicated to making a difference - though god knows I don’t make much of one as it is.  But so far as I do make an impact on my world at all, minuscule though it may be, it’s because I choose to dress in my own clothes and to act as myself.  I opted, a lifetime ago, to forgo costumes for transparency.  I admit I wavered sometimes in this resolve, but mostly I stuck with it.  It has often not been an easy choice or a comfortable one, but it has set me on a path which now brings me much quiet satisfaction.  A costume cape can hide a lot of nakedness, but ultimately, the nakedness makes for a more robust performance. 

Apparently not.  For even as I was writing up the story (posted below if you are late to the game, in which case, join the club) that I wrote to win a four-years-closed contest (and I woulda, too), DAVE EGGERS, a man clearly dedicated to rendering my work irrelevant and redundant (and irrelevant!), was ordering his McSweeney’s minions to post a “humorous" essay about Lebron James being courted by the Washington Generals, the world’s most hapless basketball team.  The Washington Generals!  What folly!  Such a parody would effectively write itself!  Why, who could even possibly take them seriously? 

Well, me, as it turns out.  I had taken them seriously some weeks earlier when I started writing a poem about them.  And you know what, Dave Egghead?  I didn’t let your dumb essay stop me.  I finished my poem and it turns out I rather like it.  And since I’m obviously scraping bottom here and not in a good way, I’ve posted it.  Maybe it’s not funny, or on a widely-read blog, or very good.  Why should this post be different than anything else on this site?  And with that pseudo-talmudic musing (the name, btw, of my next band, genre as yet undetermined but album cover clearly visualized already), I present to you:

Generalities

Knuckles and elbows ( ) clam pandowdie
a strong seventh man ( ) with a see-through smile
I majored in fitness ( ) and minored in faith
gave it all that I had ( ) but it still wanted more
Suited up daily ( ) for baselines and hoop drills
a solid eighth man ( ) on a squad with heart
I played out of love ( ) representing, defending
expected my fame ( ) to resound in the rafters
I shot for the world ( ) but kept hitting the rim
saw most of my court time ( ) when Jimbo got injured
or ran out of fouls ( ) or needed to detox
kept a spot on the team ( ) with my ass on the bench
we were proud in defeat ( ) but defeated regardless
My senior year record ( ) was 4 and 16
with a 1.8 average ( ) both game points and gradepoints
I had to believe ( ) that those numbers belonged
to some underperformer ( ) who wasn’t myself
I was better than that ( ) my name should mean something
there was more in my future ( ) than clapping from sidelines
junior high coaching ( ) or folk dance for seniors
my teammates took jobs ( ) in construction or sales
that wasn’t for me ( ) couldn’t live with myself
I need seams on my fingers ( ) and wood underfoot
I didn’t get drafted ( ) couldn’t even walk on
to a C-league expansion team ( ) playing outside
I was starting to wonder ( ) how long it would take
The obvious option ( ) occurred to me suddenly
Sweet Georgia Brown ( ) never sounded so sweet
the Clown Prince of Basketball ( ) that could be me
I googled and wikied them ( ) lay-z-boy research
drank up their legend ( ) inhaled their lore
the children adore them ( ) fans on five continents
dozen-year win streaks ( ) eight decades of joy
but of course the audition ( ) is where things got tricky
fate set a pick ( ) and I never got round it
They were polite ( ) but I wasn’t a Globetrotter
would I consider ( ) a generalship?
The Generals tour ( ) wherever the Globetrotters
need someone to beat ( ) and be awesome against
Their job: to inspire ( ) that Globetrotter greatness
can’t be too obvious ( ) have to keep losing
They wear matching jerseys ( ) so they are a team
but the symbol emblazoned ( ) on Generals’ chests
is a General getting ( ) his ass handed to him
by a graceful dark Globetrotter ( ) soaring in triumph
That was my destiny ( ) a General, I
suiting up every Sunday ( ) each game like the last one
It used to be galling ( ) to know what was coming
like living in replay ( ) heroically bested
a rotating door ( ) inescapable loss
I had grown up to honor ( ) traditional winning
the kind that evaded me ( ) each time I laced up
paid to be helpless ( ) flatfooted and slackjawed
A circus of sportsmanship ( ) not even basketball
magically circular ( ) Georgian Brown Sweetness
Introduced flatly ( ) just ushers applauding
a one-on-one defense ( ) that’s never succeeded
A General’s strategy ( ) tactical tragedy
footsteps like thunder ( ) come merciless at me
my spine is their ladder ( ) my ego their punching bag
Masses delight ( ) in our humiliation
Seconds tick down ( ) with the score leaning sideways
we remain in contention ( ) with hobble-kneed hopes
till the buzzer resounds ( ) to another defeat
And yet I continue ( ) invoking my failures
playing for the joy of losing
only salvaging my comfort
in this rationalization:

Any hero worthy of the name (...) has got to beat somebody.

Okay, I think I got that out of my system.  Dave Eggers, all is forgiven.  By me, anyway.  If you’re still mad, I’m willing to make it up to you by letting you do a guest-blog posting here at the Chucklehut.  For some of us, it’s the best we can hope for.  For others, hope is a luxury our budget can’t cover.  I’m man enough to let it go.  Now it’s your turn.  The ball’s in your court, Dave Eggers.  Sadly, I think I’m on the Generals’ squad on this one yet again. 

7.
Write a story that begins with a man throwing handfuls of $100 bills from a speeding car, and ends with a young girl urinating into a tin bucket.

Benjamin Franklin’s leering grin slapped her in the face as the Bonneville roared down the HOV lane.  Technically, its two human occupants were insufficiently numerous to justify their being there, but the driver seemed untroubled by the violation, as if the dozens of engraved images of a founding father in their presence put them over the “three or more” limit.  His attention was entirely focused, rather, on the tin bucket of hundred dollar bills in his daughter’s lap.  The windows were down and hot air was swirling between the two of them, making her hair a nest of whips, sending the bills she halfheartedly threw out the window right back at her.

“No, no, goddamn it a million times, you throw like a fucking girl!” He thrust his fist into the bucket and rootled around, grabbing the swirling greenbacks with sweaty fingers.  “Like this! THIS!  You gotta get some… some VELOCITY on these bastards!” He swung his fist to within inches from her face and then across his body and out the open window, where he released the bills to flutter in the slipstream of opposing traffic. Behind them they could hear brakes squealing and the dull thud of crushed bumpers as drivers reacted instinctively to the sudden presence of large-denomination banknotes in their right-of-way.  “YEAH!” he bellowed, head craned backwards out his window.  “HITTING A MEMBER OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS IS A FEDERAL FUCKING CRIME!”

He was giggling as he flopped back onto the white leather bench, spittle flecking his lips.  “Federal fucking crime, that’s good,” he hissed between chortles.  Without warning he glared again at his daughter.  “You’re not throwing money!  THROW THE FUCKING MONEY!”

Her voice was a whisper as she struggled to express herself. “We need the money, dad.  Mom’s sick.” She instantly knew it was the wrong thing to say, and was already shrinking back into the car seat as he bellowed in her face.

“Mom doesn’t know what it is to be sick!  I’ll show you what sick is!  I’m the sickest motherfucker on this fucking highway, is what sick is!” His hand plunged violently into the bucket, searching for more bills, grabbing what he could as the car veered into regular traffic. “Here!  Take these and throw them the fuck out there!  Hit something, goddamn it!” Her hands were shivering as she took the bills from him; she watched him watch her, making sure she didn’t hold anything back.  She did as he’d told her, using both hands as if she were hitting a backcourt forehand, the wad of bills breaking apart as soon as they escaped the confines of the car.  He laughed at her, his mouth a wet wound.  “Do it again!  Practice!  Makes!  Perfect!” His spit mingled with her tears as she dug out the last few bills and, with visible reluctance, dropped them to the blurry blacktop beneath their racing wheels.

“That sucked!  For God’s sake, do it again, and do it right!”

“I can’t.  That was the end.”

“What?!!!” He stood on the brakes and the massive vehicle fishtailed to a stop, straddling the 1 and 2 lanes.  The air was thick with the stench of burned rubber and the quivering fury of a man beyond redemption. “WHAT?” he screamed again, inches from her face, as traffic quickly surrounded them and backed up down the highway.  Voices could be heard outside, querulous, angry, but none of them real enough to penetrate the tension that filled the leather-lined interior of the Bonneville.  “That was your last throw?  And you just DROPPED THE CASH?  Who do you think you are?  WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” He was kneeling on the front bench now, looming, dwarfing her as she hunched over her empty money bucket.  The car idled slowly forward, across the HOV lane, and crunched to a stop against the center divider.  He was bereft of other words, seemed all at once to understand he’d overdrawn his whole existence.  Weeping, he asked her again, “who do you think you are?,” but he knew who she was.

“I’m… I… I have to pee, daddy.” The shame in her voice was enough to choke them both.

“Yeah, honey, I know about that.  I understand.  You gotta do what you gotta do.  Use the bucket, honey.  There’s nowhere else to go.  I promise I won’t watch.” He waddled around like a canard, still on his knees, and stared out the driver’s window at the looky-loo backup growing on the other side, at the approaching red and blue strobes of emergency vehicles converging on him from both sides of the highway.  Behind him he heard his daughter squirm her way out of her cotton panties, shuffling the bucket into position.  For a moment, all was quiet.  When her stream began to hiss astringently into the tin bucket, he put his head on the dashboard and let himself weep.  For once he was true to his word.  He did not watch. 

So that’s my time-barred entry to the stale contest.  Screw it, I liked it.  Up next: a poem I’ve been working on for a few weeks, on a theme that McSweeney’s just recently made fun of.  Dammit.  I’ll post it anyway.  Whatchu gonna do, stop me?

As a child I sometimes summered with my family, and, later, without them, at an exceptional example of a peculiar institution, the Jewish summer camp.  I don’t know how it went for the gentiles out there, but the other Jewish kids I knew who went to such camps tended to have had experiences similar to mine: even for those of us who were only nominally Jewish and overtly non-religious, camp was a good time.  The songs - even those to which language posed an intelligibility barrier - were beautiful; the services, even when formalistic, were inspirational; the crafts were fun and the games were joyful.  I’m sure many of us there weren’t in with the in-crowd in our downhill homebody lives, but up at camp we were all BFFs. 

Okay, that’s an over-idyllicization of things, but jewcamp truly was a good time for me.  Some of that goes to the credit of the idea, getting kids out-of-doors and making them hug each other in natural settings; some, to the credit of a good camper program with lovely music and engaging activities; but for me, mostly, it was about the location.  I grew up - gratuitous plug - going to Camp Hess Kramer, and I still can’t imagine a better place to spend a week or three. 

Jewcamp was almost always out in the woods someplace, or up in the mountains or off by a lake.  As a mini-me I even went to a daycamp improbably held in a large local park, with which I still fondly associate the smells of eucalyptus pods and fresh-mown dewy summer grass.  Those were good times at Camp Kineret in the ol’ North Hollywood Park - but it was no Hess Kramer.

CHK had all the typical campy stuff, but set them in a sprawling campus of coastal oak and sycamore straddling a seasonal creek that tumbled down Little Sycamore Canyon to the Pacific from the rugged and broadshouldered mountains of north Malibu.  At dawn, in rustic cabins where we lay in sleeping bags on steel-frame cots, we awoke to cool air rolling down the hollow; in the evening, salt-seasoned breezes welled up from the ocean that crashed just on the other side of Highway 1.  And in the sultry midday calm, as we walked from the dining hall to the assembly hall to the poolhouse to the residences and even sometimes around the old (now filled-in) duckpond, or as we snuck among the cloistered sanctuary’s pine benches and rock-hewn ark under a gracous bower of boughs, or if we skirted the rules and followed the creekbed down to the highway underpass and to the very apron of the sea - my point is, everywhere we went, it smelled good.  Scrub sage, wildflowers, the pollinated dust on the wide sycamore leaves and coating the vibrant vines of poison oak, and even the rough purity of the earth itself - all of these were components of a language that articulated an evershifting vocabulary of scents that linger with me still, arousing multisensory memories at the fleetingest whiff even today.

CHK was one of two extraordinary camps among those seaside mountains - the one strung along the creekbed down in the canyon and oversheltered by trees.  But a winding road led from their front gate up the sere shoulder of the bluffs to a second, newer camp.  Hilltop occupied, as one might imagine, the summit of the mountain at the foot of which CHK lay.  It was newer, more compact, and smaller, though certainly well-appointed with its own pool, stables, art studios, and all the other requisites that make summer camp a consummation so devoutly to be wished.  Upon its heights (which I lately learn were a mere 750 feet above the sea), the wind blew drier and hotter, the stars blanketed a wider sky, and the roar of a more distant surf sounded incongruously closer.  Hilltop never occupied quite the same place in my heart’s hallows as CHK did, but it was a wonderful and fragrant site regardless. 

Both camps were run by the same synagogue and operated in concert; occasionally, they’d even schedule some sort of event together where the denizens of one camp would be hauled up or down the mountain to join forces with their chaverim at the other campus for supper and some evening activities.  These were festive affairs full of fellowship and kumbaya (and actually we did sing that song often enough in my 1970s camperdays to make the reference unironic).  And the thing I want to concentrate on now, apart from the songbooks and acoustic guitars and heartfelt 20-part harmonies, apart from the kosher meals and lengthy saying of grace thereafter, apart from the slightly-musty cabins and the delights of getting candy from the commissary and the astonishing spectrum of life and sound and scent that filled my days when I went camping on that mountain, whether atop it or below it, what I want to retrieve from the matrix of memory, is the trucks that hauled us up and down that hill.

There were four or so of them, and in my day they were crude old machines, dating back decades and so long in use on the mounain as to have absorbed some of its organic and geologic qualities. Red or green with rust-resistant paint, stentorian and implacable, these trucks smelled of diesel fuel and motor oil, and promised neither luxury nor comfort.  I never rode in the cabs so I can’t say much about the driver’s experience, but the cargo beds had wooden floors and plank-fence sides and gates,and were utilitarian to the point of being crude.  We’d pile in, 20 or 30 of us to a truckbed, and hunker down as best we could without seats, straps, or safety devices.  With a throaty roar the trucks would rumble to life and nose out onto the two-lane road between the camps.  It felt as if the ride took quite some time - checking now, it seems the camps were barely two miles apart, but the road felt much longer than that.  However long it actually took, every minute was exhillirating.

We’d be jostled, shuddering as the powerful transmission ratcheted up into cruising gears.  Around me, counselors led singalongs or did storytelling Typically this sort of activity would have had my full attention - but not on that twisting strip of blacktop.  Instead, my eyes raked the hillsides, locking on flashes of color - white wildflowers, red poison oak, purple manzanita branches, a million shades of tan rock.  The warmth of my fellow campers packed in around me did not distract me from the crepuscular chill in the air of the oncoming evening, which sharpened the herbaceous medley of smells whipping past me.  I could taste the sage and fennel on the breeze, and was attuned by the truck’s vibrations to the vibrations of the landscape through which we passed.  I sought out rays of setting sunlight in the cusps of the ridgeline beneath which we rolled; I felt my camp-cultivated spirit expanding into the boundless vastness of the mountains.  It was a road I’d traveled countless times before, in open trucks and schoolbuses and my own family’s car, but the fascination never faded for me. Riding up that hill in the bed of a cargo truck, I invariably felt uplifted and humbled, expanded though minimized, entirely alive in a way to which my suburban upbringing had no parallel. 

When we’d arrive at the sister camp’s campus the big old trucks would shiver into silence and our hosts would greet us with cheering and songs, throwing the bolt-latches that had secured us aboard.  We’d hop out of those plank-floored cargo beds to another exciting part of our camp experience, and that was all very good, and I do not mean to diminish it in any way - but it always came to me as something of a letdown.  Camp was fine and camp was fun, but it could never hope to replicate the richness of experience I underwent with the scented wind in my hair in the back of a cargo truck, plying a Malibu canyon road on a sweet summer evening. That feeling transcended any human relationship or construct of which I could ever dream, and enclosed me in an embrace that overwhelmed me with both tenderness and power. 

Those were evenings I cannot allow to escape my memory.  Those are the memories that call to me now.  With these lines, I hope that someday when I need them, I can call on them again. 

Plus, of course, I was a confirmed fan of British humor, and took full advantage of the opportunity to immerse myself in it.  To begin with, there was Python - I’d known about them forever, as a 13-year-old measures such things.  There were also the Goodies, too, but they already seemed a bit juvenile to me. Flanders and Swann had by then already ceased to produce new material for my delectation, perhaps in part due to Flanders’ demise some years earlier, and I’d already memorized both their albums long before; but then I discovered… The Goon Show. 

Sure, they were defunct, but I’d had no prior exposure to them and in their day they’d been remarkably prolific and even more so silly.  Sillier than Python, sometimes, and that was saying quite a bit.  As their medium had been the radio broadcast, my visual impairment was no impediment to my full appreciation of their funny noises and non sequiturs.  Harry Seacombe was their straight man - they gave him some good lines but mostly he was singing welsh Zeppo to their other-Marx-Brothers, consisting of: Peter Sellers, before he achieved renown as Jacques Clouseau, squeaking and jabbering in a dozen hilarious dialects and cracking his colleagues up on-air; and most significantly for me, Spike Milligan.  He wrote most of their scripts; it was his twisted, ridiculous vision that the Goons evoked.  His funny noises were the funniest; his silly voices, the silliest; and his nonsense, the most nonsensical.  I didn’t have many role models at age 13, but Spike Milligan was definitely a few of them. 

Since I felt compelled to get out of our isolated Oxfordshire village occasionally, I’d go on those bus tours with my mom and sister even though I couldn’t see much while on the road.  I made up for my limited access to the outside world by expanding the inside one - that is to say, I read a lot.  I read Catcher in the Rye, the Narnia Stories, a bunch of things I no longer recall… and Spike Milligan’s autobiography.  Following the example of T.E.Lawrence, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom verbosely described his experiences in Arabia during WWI, my man Spike wrote about North Africa during WWII, where he served without apparent distinction as a foot soldier.  Except, instead of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this was more like Four Fingers of Fleam.  He was always getting into trouble and goofing around and generally making the living hell of service to the Queen against Rommel sound like a good bit of fun with a spade and a gun. 

And thus it was that, one relatively less-overcast day, Mom and sis and I set out from wherever we started such things, as passengers on a right-hand-drive bus that took us to the Plains of Salisbury, a vague greenness flashing past the window next to which I sat, where I clutched a book the reading of which while in motion experience had taught me would nauseate me, but the eventual consumption of which I eagerly awaited.  In the interim I watched England zip past, lulled by the rumble and thrum of the diesel engines and the cottony indistinctness of the landscape.  We were headed, though, to a site which promised an experience as clear for me visually as historically.  Megaliths benefit little from clear distance vision - roughly-hewn, massive and looming, they’d be the opposite of my trips to murky churches with their delicately-worked reliquaries kept yards away behind railings, details obscured by distance and darkness and visual defect.  After visiting (but not seeing) too many of those, I was relieved to be on my way to open fields and huge crude monuments.  I was in the mood for something obvious, and Stonehenge was not reputed to be excessively subtle. 

The bus arrived, in 1977, at 2000 BCE.  We pulled off the highway and could see the circle of orthostats and trilithons standing nearby, shadowless under grey skies.  Even I could see them clearly against the meadow and horizon.  Toward the, obedient, if not druidic, we all marched - the busload of tourists, mom, sis, Spike and myself.  Spike, of course, accompanied us in the form of his penguin-edition autobiography, but in my myopic world his voice was so clear that he really seemed to be there with me - more than the other historical spirits haunting those earthworks, at any rate.

In 1977, historical preservation was a work in progress. Some sites kept visitors far from the erstwhile action, behind barriers and between the lines.  Stonehenge wasn’t like that then.  It was just a bunch of big rocks, after all - what could late 20th-century tourism do to it that nearly four thousand years of just sitting there hadn’t?  I guess someone figured out the answer to that question because within a few years fences went up to block visitors from the immediate presence of those brooding stones.  I got there before all that.  When I visited Stonehenge, I walked right up to the circle, around it, through it, between its elephantine elements, under its looming lintels, dragged an impertinent finger along the mottled flanks of an unnatural formation more ancient than its own constructed ancientness by virtue of its geologic pedigree, caressed surfaces once wrought by hands so long since gone as to be lost to history’s history.  For a while there, I was dwarfed by its magnitude, physically and historically.  I was a blip, a wafer in a sedimentary formation that began before the past and extended beyond the future, an enduring chain of ages all linked together by the presence, there, of those stones, eloquent in an unknown language, marking seasons and years like Foucault’s Pendulum made permanent, and I was less to it than an equinoctial sunbeam or a solstice moonrise.  For a while, was was really there, in it, within it, of it.  For a while, anyway.

But I was also thirteen, and I lived on a steady slow simmer.  I could only take so much of anything.  Before our tour group had been called back to the bus I had reached my megalithic limit.  I had been well and thoroughly stonehenged, and I was ready to move on. But the bus was across a broad field and likely still locked.  I couldn’t tell, with my inept eyes, whether the driver had left me a way back to my cushioned seat, and I didn’t care to walk away from those chilling stones all the way across the meadow just to find that at the end I’d have to come back again.  I was stuck at Stonehenge, for a little bit more of our respective slices of time. Thankfully, I was prepared for such an eventuality.  I had my friend to keep me company.

And thus it was that my clearest recollection of Stonehenge, after treading its ancient paths and breathing in its antique air and letting its granitic impenetrability seep into the palms of my hands, after familiarizing myself with its utter mystery till I had neither room nor patience for further quiet contemplation of its majesty, was when I found a huge stone sinking on its side into the English turf, and I clambered sacrilegiously up onto it with my book and read about Spike Milligan’s misadventures.  It wasn’t a great book, as such things go, but I’d had a crawful of greatness by then.  What I wanted was comfort, distraction and the accelerated passage of time.  Stonehenge couldn’t provide those, with its frowning stones, overwhelming presence, and timelessness.  However, I knew how to do for myself what the monument could not do for me.  It was not the lesson I’d gone to the stones to learn, and it was not the only one I learned from them - but it does seem to be the one that’s lasted the longest.

Moral: What you take away is what you bring with you, not what was waiting there for you to arrive.