Looks like Bedford Falls in summer, don't it. We're flying off tomorrow morning because my youngest vunderkin has been accepted to college here, so we are going to look and see if they want to give her scholarship. It's also trade tuition for where I still work. So it could be free except for room and board. It's 50 miles from Woodstock. Wonder if they still have the streetcar rails running down the main street. I was telling her that the other young things from back there will be in their Easter dresses with their white gloves and Easter bonnets. Probably not. Sos, I'm afraid it will be Wednesday before you hear from me.
I strongly recommend this site: Great and interesting stuff
Not a great photo. Its a Meetup Group of Bluegrass musicians that meet every week end to play. The banjo and I are in love. Its like Boy Scouts for little banjos. We're gonna have fun.
I decided at twenty I would hitch-hike over to Paris Illinois from Bloomington Indiana to see my father who I had only seen once (at my high school graduation) since I was twelve. My mother had put a restraining order on him because she feared he would try to kill her. (Which he might of- but that's another story. I wrote a book about all of that "It Knows You By No Other Name" available at Amazon) Anyhow, I got as far as Terra Haute Indiana and the sun was going down, so I went to a Salvation Army Flop House for the night. It was late when I checked in and they lead me back to a large room filled with bunk beds and a lot of men snoring. I was given a bunk and told I couldn't sleep in my shoes. (I was afraid someone would steal them in the night- I had heard stories) In the morning there was a long line to the one bathroom and you had 15 minutes to pee and wash up and then a long line at breakfast. I skipped the breakfast part, I had money to buy my own. One night is probably enough for a lifetime. I'd rather sleep out beside a highway. You understand why the homeless don't want to go to a shelter.
There's a story by Flannery O'Conner where a crazy girl goes to the line of guys waiting to get into the flophouse in the evening and calls out Papa and they all break ranks to come to her. I'm glad I missed the line going in.
We just watched a old remake of The Member of The Wedding (Carson McCullers novel and play and two movies) I thought I was getting the one with Julie Harris, but it was the remake, which wasn't bad. The end of this version Frankie runs away and ends up back at the bar/restaurant. It made me think of one night in Bloomington Indiana when I was 15 maybe? The little group of us guys that worked at the A & W Drive-In would do this little number where each of us would tell our parents that we were staying over at one of the other guy's house and then we'd all go down south of town at a place called Shit Creek and camp out and drink and smoke dope. I can't recall exactly what happened, but myself and Steve Shertzer found ourselves downtown with none of the other two or three and we both had told our parents lies and we both had no alcohol and no dope and it was too late to try to go home. I lived 10 miles north of town and he lived 5 miles south of town. I remember we were trying to get a college student to buy us some Vodka, but we had no luck. And somehow we ended up in the alley behind the city jail and the guys up in the cells were talking to to us. We had money and we getting tired so we checked into a sleazy hotel and shared a room and a bed. I wonder now what the desk clerk thought. There were no questions asked. I was 6'5 or 6'6 by then and everyone thought I was older. We slept with our clothes on, because we were so weirded out by the circumstance.
I walked into New Orleans in '73 with backpack and a little money. I found a large place (by poor standards) over on Rampart Street that had one large room and a little kitchen and a bath down the hall. I luckily found a job the first day at the first place I walked into - a high end printing shop on Carondelet- I thought I wanted to be a printer. The bad part was the little place on Rampart smelled of urine and cigars and you could see the courtyard below through the little kitchen floor and the landlady didn't allow guests up to the rooms (I was on the second floor) I scrubbed the walls and the floors, but the smell just wouldn't go away. Also I was a horny 21 year old. So I moved to Decatur St. to a one little room deal. It looked a little like this. I lived on the bottom floor next to the main building. (Behind that white street door there) The room was lousy, but the landlord gave me rent credit for fixing it up, it had two windows and you had to go outside and into the main building to take a shower in the morning. The landlord liked me and bought me curtains and liked to get get up so he could hear me sing in the shower in the morning and he always made sure that I had my own roll of toilet paper (just in case there wasn't any in the bathroom). - I've always depended on the kindness of strangers- An older gay guy had the bigger apartment next to me and we were friendly. Upstairs was an middle-aged alcoholic printer and next to him a divorced drunk cop down from Ohio. The two guys upstairs adopted me and we drank together some times. The printer would start with whiskey & milk about 5 PM every day. I got tired of it after a while and wanted some green, so I moved out of the Quarter to way up on Dante Street in the river bend area up past Tulane. The ceiling of the room collapsed shortly after I moved out as I described earlier.
When I came to Los Angeles, I was following my wife who had come here to take a job as a mother's helper to a rich Sikh woman who had just had a baby. She had brought our daughter with her from where we lived in Tucson. She had rejoined the Sikh religion while we were there. We were have trouble finding a place to live that we could afford and were offered a room in a house that was a Sikh single womens' ashram. I smoked tobacco and ate meat, but not on the premises. Had an interview with this dude
over why he thought it was necessary to give every one new names (like my daughter). He was the guru and not very bright - he had been a professional wrestler in India before immigrating to LA. He told me that United States people didn't know who they were and America was a great melting pot. All the women were given kaur as a second name and all the men were given singh. I was known to the community as Dan-singh.
I learned about yoga, which I do now regularly.
Anyhow, the Sikhs do not believe in cutting one's hair, so at night it looked like this around the house
which I didn't mind in the least bit, being the hair idiot I am. The house broke up because one woman went to India and another moved back up north to her boyfriend and my wife and I found a gig being apartment managers.
All that knife business doesn't mean I was a pacifist for life. I think I was afraid I was a coward at heart. It didn't stop me from taking the guy down out in front of the Drug Crisis Center when I was twenty or grabbing a hammer and running out into the middle of the street in front my of apartment on Louisiana Ave in New Orleans because there were two guys at it out there. (they were friends, higher than kites, wrestling for the hell of it in the middle of the street) Or fighting off a hold-up guy in Tucson (my life was at stake then) or chasing a neighbor down an alley and punching him for scaring my twin toddlers in Venice (he was screeching at them and my wife for letting them blow a kid's whistle in the middle of day) I'd prefer not to battle it out with anyone. That includes ex-wives. One used to throw tantrums and leave scars.
There was a book by Harlan Ellison called "Rumble" which was a fictional account of his hanging with a street gang in NYC. This was his first book. What left an impression was a tall tale about how he couldn't afford to buy a switchblade so he oiled a pocketknife and learned to flick it out real fast with his thumbnail so it looked like a switchblade. I worked on this as a young teenager, and it may be possible, but I could never do it. We all had Cub Scout knives or hand me downs from our Dads or older brothers. We were white trash, but my mother refused to admit it because our house was clean. There were a couple of brothers in our neighborhood that came to school all bandaged up because they had gotten into a razor blade fight with each other. There were bullies around our neighborhood, kids that would try to take your stuff or kids that wanted you to do their homework, or kids that just wanted to prove themselves. I was always the tallest, so if they could make me say uncle, I suppose it proved their manhood. I had run-ins. And behavior I have yet to explain to myself very well. There was a kid that wanted to fight and I ignored him. One day a buddy and I were walking over to a little deli a few blocks from school for lunch when we were jumped by the kid and two of his friends. One of the kids tried to hold my arms, but I shook him off pretty easily. The kid looked scared at this point, but he had his fists up. I told him I wasn't going to fight him. He hit me. So I got down on one knee and told him again, this time with a smile, that I wasn't going to fight him and I was saying uncle.
He hit me again and screamed at me and then left with his friends. My friend didn't understand why I didn't fight. He would have helped. I don't know why I did what I did.
I was working at a drive-in restaurant and one of the jobs I had was to sweep the gravel off the edge of the parking lot (have I written about this before?). I was out there one evening and one of the car-hops came over and we were just sort of taking a break and she'd heard about the almost fight and wanted to know why I hadn't knocked his block off.
I preceded to tell the tale about poor (Johnny) who had challenged me a couple of years ago and, boy, I felt awful afterward because it turned into a knife fight and poor (Johnny) ended up in the hospital and I would never forgive myself. All of this very understated. And everyone believed me then.
I wasn't ever bullied again.
I assumed it was because everyone believed I was a pacifist and that I wouldn't fight or really give in.
One night out at the quarry where we would swim sometimes after work, we were just sitting around and shooting the breeze, and one of the guys just casually asks me how was it to kill a guy? And did I spend time in jail for it? He had heard I was real good with a knife.
To do this one correctly, you need to start off early on Saturday morning and you have to live in Venice. You walk over past the Venice Circle and up to the beach and the Boardwalk. You turn right and watch all the vendors opening their stalls. You are early enough so you beat the crowds for breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe. Then Small World Books behind it and then you stroll. Its about 10-12 blocks to the end of the booths and shops and then you keep walking. It becomes just the beach and play sets and volleyball nets and people passing on bicycles. You soon end up at the pier in Santa Monica, which is worth a walk down and there's a merry-go-round and aquarium and rides further out and the you do a turn through downtown Santa Monica, walk on the Palisades, stroll around the Promenade and hit the other bookstores, there's also the Santa Monica Library over on 6th and stuff to look at. Then you turn south again, come back down by the Santa Monica Auditorium and then you make it over to Main Street
More little shops and a community garden and yoga if you are in the mood. There used to be a couple of thrift stores, but those are long gone.
You reach Our Lady of Venice. Her legs used to move. And further on
The Chiat Day offices that belong to someone else now. If you do this right, you've gotten a tan from being out in the sun all day, you've had breakfast and lunch and your feet are tired so you want hit your apartment before finding your friends or your lover for the evening.
I walked this every Saturday for a good year until my life began to change again. The last time was only a few years ago with my nephew and his girl friend and my daughter. We ended up on the bus coming back south from Santa Monica because I had worn them out.
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In a universe far far away in a mythical land, the King would interview on his own behalf and he would hire the bimbo that would decorate the court and reassure his aging masculinity by letting him talk to a cute younger thing during the day and he could watch her walk away. There was no glass ceiling for aging people because they were already dead by this rime. And Human Resources really typed up the paperwork themselves.
The weather was nice this morning and I began to daydream things on my way to work on the bike. It's about a half hour ride so I have lots of time to think. I wondered how far you could get on a bike in a week. I've done a 50 mile day several times, so that's pretty reasonable. That gives you time to stop and have meals and to smell an occasional rose, or even browse a bookstore. So a two week trip, say would mean maybe a 600-700 mile trip. Where would that get you? Maybe LA to San Francisco? These days you could carry a iphone or something like it and do a blog and take photos and upload them to the blog and interview people and do a mini modern age Huell Howser.
The other thought at the end of the day, was to start a correspondence with someone like Silvers above with the New York Review of Books about why they do not review self-published books, ever. We know why of course, there's no money in that. I looked him up tonight and realized the guy is 80 and probably thinks he's doing mankind a great service and we always need one more review of a new edition of Van Gogh's letters and a review of a very popular movie like Avatar, as opposed to finding the geniuses out there that can't get in and all those little films in the world that never get seen. He's had his.
So both endeavors are worthwhile projects although writing my bike to San Francisco seems a lot more probable than getting this fat old dude to answer a letter.
Bob, I hope you're out there somewhere and doing ok. In 1972, I had quit school and was working in a restaurant and got to be friends with Bob and a couple that were married and living in IU's married students trailers (a funky trailer park of little green trailers and not so much as a fence between them). Anyhow, Bob was the son of a woman that was only 15 years older than he was, a redhead that had come out of the hills to the south of us in Kentucky and I think Bob's father was Cherokee or something like that, but I never met his real father. Bob's mother had remarried (or married for the first time) a truck driver who had played farm league pro baseball for a while. Bob had a summer thing going on with the School of Folklore at IU and he was supposed to go and collect yarns and mysteries from the little backward county in Kentucky where his mother's family all lived. So I went with him. This county was a dry county- meaning you couldn't buy alcohol there, if you wanted to drink you'd have to drive 50 miles to buy it legally or you could buy it from the runners that brought it in. Bob had a cousin, who was married (at 15) and made his living selling booze to the locals. He had been ticketed a couple of times, not for selling liquor, but for driving without a license since he wasn't old enough to have one yet. Interesting guy. We wandered around, collected stories, the usual for that part of the country: haunted houses and haunted hollows and lakes with snakes in them and tall tales about teenage mayhem. We met a eighty year old black baptist preacher and that had built seven churches throughout Kentucky and Tennessee because Jesus had come to him one night and they had a long talk and Jesus told him to build churches so he did. I don't know if Bob counted that one or even wrote it down, but we were polite to our elders and we listened and made no comment. Bob had a cousin that was fourteen and very pretty. We talked. I was twenty and divorced and getting ready to go off to see the world. She proposed to me in the way a fourteen year old would. She looked hurt when I left (I didn't touch her). We wrote a couple of letters and then I then I had a fling with another divorced twenty year old and forgot all about her. I hope she had a wonderful life
For those that don't know me, I've developed type 2 diabetes in my almost old age, but I'm managing it ok. One little pill a day and no carbs to speak of. But there are things you have to take off the list of things you can have:
At The St. Francis Hotel they would bake these fresh every morning and we would go down to have breakfast in the employee cafeteria after working all night and have an omelet made to order with real hash browns from real potatoes and top the whole thing off with one of these, still warm.
(I won't even start with the real carbs that I don't do any more, like potatoes, rice and bread and pasta)
When I was twenty, on payday I would go and get a large one and a pitcher of beer (the place didn't card) and finish it all off by myself and burp.
Junk food of choice for years and years. (Is there a pattern developing here? Did I do this to myself?)
Don't answer that.
This was my lunch of choice when I was home with the kids. I figured out a way to have one recently. You buy no sugar added ice cream, go for a bike ride for 20 miles in the morning, come back and microwave the ice cream until its this and eat. Have vegetables and meat for dinner and then drink a lot in the evening.
It just don't taste right with Splenda and the fruit juice has a ton of natural sugar. You could probably do it with the bike ride described above.
And:
I gave these up ten years ago. (I started with this brand, by the time I quit and I was smoking the lowest tar and nicotine brand on the market) There was a young guy today at the crossing by work that was lighting up one of these in a dark brown box and I had a sudden flash of the taste just before pedaling off on my six mile bike ride home.
O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Bret Hart, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Hamlin Garland, Jack Kerouac, Herb Gold & Neil Cassidy before you were eighteen, right?
Don't read this book until you are at least twenty five. This was also part of my songbook before I took off hitchhiking. I understood Woody better than I did Kerouac. You just have to go. His whole life was just a had to go. Saw Rambling Jack Elliott over in the valley one Friday night a few years ago (took my 12 year old guitar playing son along) and he rambled on about Woody and it became apparent that Woody left at least once or twice to escape the hanging oners, like Elliott. Elliott said he asked Woody how he came to sing the way he did, and Woody told him to go listen to the record. It was all on the record. You wonder if Bobby (Dylan) had read this before he went to NYC? Anyhow, I'm working on the song below (which was one of the song lyrics in the trunk that Woody's wife had) that Billy Bragg and Wilco recreated the music for. It sounds ok on the banjo. I'm also playing This Land Is your Land and In Those Oklahoma Hills
One of the little snippets I've heard was about the things that hid themselves in Woody's hair. He had a thick woolly mat and when he first arrived in NYC he was filthy from riding trains and hitchhiking and his clothes and hair smelled like two day old wet smoke ash.
Marie Bashkirtseff - I'm continuing on with her diary. She's been proposed to at 15, but the man's family wouldn't approve because she was Russian Orthodox and the guy was Catholic. I put this painting on my monitor as the backdrop about a week ago. This was painted about the same time that Fanny Stevenson and her daughter were here taking art classes. Paris and New York were the only cities in the world where women could get art instruction. Of course everyone wanted to be in Paris. Fanny met Robert Louis in the summer at Grez outside of Paris. Marie had an excellent singing voice and wanted to be a singer until TB did in her voice. She wrote volumes. She tried to record every day of her life.
Every one in the world was copying this man:
This was the first song I learned on the Banjo, and I actually play it slower than this- as a ballad- after learning to play it the right way. Outside the city (New Orleans) was fun, I spent a week in a cabin on the other side of
Lake Pontchartrain out in the swampy bottoms and Lamont and I went out to a couple of little town festivals. A couple and I used to go fishing. Anyhow this is the song I'm going to play at my first open mike night next month. Got some others, but this fits well- written by a man who also barely knew the region and written with only a few notes.
She laughed and trees danced
Over roofs, black fences,
And balconies
With shutters shut in midday.
They had smuggled a kitten on the streetcar,
Given it catnip before their bed
Kicked free of covers,
And dabbed its nose with wet brushes
As they watercolored one afternoon.
Another hour struck beyond the door,
And the bells sent the pigeons up to circle,
And the sun grew
In the gleaming chrome of the shopping carts
The artists used to tote their wares to the square.
They had talked of stealing one from the grocery,
--That was a plan, wasn’t it?
The man with the red beard,
The man that broken her marriage
Like you might snap an egg on the edge of a pan-
The man who was to follow her
Here,
Had arrived.
The farm boy knew what she had to do.
He would have her on the Sunday porch swing,
Sitting up straight, folding her gloved hands,
As the bells would call the priests to prayer.
But she wasn’t his to command.
Shadows were growing long beyond the open door,
The artists seemed to shiver
As they packed their things away,
Soon he would have to decide
If the dark would draw him out
To stalk her streets,
Or if sheer fatigue could lull him to sleep,
To dream about what might have been.
He would find the dawn
Either way,
His sacrifice perfect,
His splintered heart angry and empty,
He had followed her, only to curse
The red glass of their window,
Reflecting the sunset lost.
And he had slept- such as it was-
Dreaming of axes and blood
While staring wide- eyed like a snake
At stars frozen in endless night.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Goya, Witches Sabbath. Don't know what it means other than the obvious. Discovered yesterday that the person that made me leave main campus has flown away to Stanford. On her broom no doubt. I just applied for her job. Am interested to see if I even get an interview. Having daydreams of going back, while the folks I work for now love me, keep giving me more money and more responsibility and I like them a lot. Would I go back and worship the devil? Probably. I loved the action. All this won't happen. They won't call me. They weren't ready for me when I was there.
Off in one of those alternate universes, there is this well house on the Indiana University campus. If it had a real well, it was long sealed off by 1965. It had stone benches inside. It was a good place to go neck with your girl friend if there was nowhere else to go. If you kissed a girl here you were going to marry her, so the tale goes. Me and my buddy, my fellow newspaper boy, would turn in our money on Saturday morning from our routes and take our profits and buy every comic book we could find and junk food and come up here to sprawl on the grass and read the comic books.
This statue is nearby now, I think. I've never seen it in person. But the real guy used sit near the well house and admire the view. He was Chancellor or President or whatever the title was. He had made a point of getting the grounds people on the campus to plant and maintain every species of tree and bush that could grow in the Indiana climate. He would sit out for a while every morning just admiring the view. Anyone could go and talk to him. I talked to him several times when I was a kid.
It looks like Hoagy in frozen in time back there too. Of the world travelers that attend conventions and trade shows, they say that flying into Indianapolis is like flying into 1950. I believe it. There's a lot of different versions of Bloomington and Indiana. For me it will be 1969-1970 and skinny-dipping in the quarries and hippie music and hippie smells
There was this famous professor and he had a lot of money from the king and so he sent away for some other wonderful professors that happened to be married to each other and who always wore black and spoke with funny accents like Marlene Dietrich. They might have smoked cigarettes as well, but of course not in public because they were famous dentistry professors. How does one become famous dentistry professors, you might ask. Well, one publishes, writes scholarly papers, does television and movie things, gives interviews and acts at all times like they are the state of the art. Our famous professor got them to come because he promised them a state of the art dentistry laboratory to hold their state of the art classes in. And he hired a state of the art dentistry laboratory builder to build the state of the art dentistry laboratory. How does one become a state of the art dentistry laboratory builder, one might wonder? One doesn't know because the state of the art dentistry laboratory builder just showed up one day and told everyone that he was one. He might have even been an acquaintance of the famous professors that wore black and might have smoked cigarettes, but of course not in public. After a year, the laboratory wasn't done, and everyone wanted to know why, so the king sent our guy who bought things to go look at the laboratory. It really looked like the state of the art, all stainless steel with monitors that were supposed to rise magically out of the tabletops and were wired to a camera pointing at a dentist's chair so that the entire class could see in one mouth all at the same time. And built-in laptops with stainless steel tops and of course wireless mouses. Sadly, none of this worked. Some of what had been imagined by state of the art dentistry laboratory builder only existed in a foreign country where everyone spoke with funny accents like Marlene Dietrich and were not licensed or certified by our king and also had funny looking electrical plugs. Some of the other things that our state of the art dentistry laboratory builder had imagined didn't exist at all, like laptops with stainless steel tops. So our guy who bought things called people that he knew and didn't know and figured it out. There was a great guy who brought his 12 year-old-son along to help because school was out that day and the son helped by pulling wires out all over the laboratory and discovering that none of the wires were connected to anything. There was a computer guy that talked with a funny accent like David Carradine who helped figure out how to fake a laptop with a stainless steel top. Our guy who bought things, who wasn't really supposed to giving anybody his opinion, spent several months helping the famous professors. Our guy that bought things got to do what he did best, he bought things, showed them to the famous professors, then returned them and then bought other things to show to the famous professors. Eventually, the famous professors ran out of things that would not work, so our guy who bought things, bought things that worked. So, finally, the state of the art dentistry laboratory was finished and all the famous professors were very happy, except that they didn't have their stainless steel mouses, but they are still full of hope that one day they will have what they want.
This was across the street from the Indiana University Law School. I was transfered here because the guys I worked for, tore down the A & W drive-in that I was working at so they could rebuild it. This place had a full old fashioned soda fountain. They made their own ice cream, had syrups in dispensers to make cherry cokes and strawberry shakes (and malts) and on and on. I was a soda jerk par excellante here. Each lemonade was made with its very own lemon. There were floats and parquets and freshly ground coffee beans for each pot of coffee and home made rocky road and bits of strawberry or blueberry in your shakes so it was impossible to drink them with a straw. I learned to play pinball here, met my first wife (who was a waitress) here. They had musicians in to play on Friday & Saturday nights and they put in a pizza oven. My freshman year in college I got free lunches for making all their ad posters. Hoagy wrote the first draft of Stardust here on a piano in the front corner. Ernie Pyle wrote for the IU student paper sitting in here drinking coffee. The place was begun by these brothers, the Poolitsons and sold in '68 or so. My middle name was awarded me because their son Chris had gone to college with my father and was our family doctor. An alum showed up one afternoon with three 50 yard line tickets to a big IU football game for the brothers, only to find me and the bad news that they were long gone. He handed me the tickets and left. I gave them my buddy who was off work that day and he scalped them at the stadium and made us each about 35 bucks, which was good money back then. It had a jukebox, and I can't hear these songs without smelling the place. A cook, who played rugby for IU took one of the waitresses he was seeing up on our little stage to dance in front of everyone one Saturday afternoon when they were making up. They had a fight about marriage. She did and he didn't want to. He played this song for them to dance to:
Once upon a time at the collage in a universe far far away there was this guy and he had made a lot of friends all over the campus and his job was to get things for people and he took pride in his ability to do that. So the college in its infinite wisdom,(and what a wise college it was, because that was its job, to be wise and to teach lots and lots people things they didn't know) decided it needed to order a very fancy trailer that would purify drinking water so that if there was a disaster and the drinking water was compromised, they would be able to purify the tainted water for everyone so they wouldn't have to go thirsty. One of this guy's people ordered it and it was supposed to show up on a flatbed truck so they could scoop it off with a fork lift and roll it away to where it was supposed to sit for the awaited disaster. It appeared in a closed trailer truck with no ramp. So the guys with the forklift didn't know what to do. They couldn't fork lift it out of the back door of the closed in semi trailer. So word was sent out across the vast campus to find a loading dock so that they could back the semi trailer up to it and unload the trailer that purified water. No loading dock could be found, because it turned out that the semi truck was a special truck and it was too tall for all the loading docks at the college. Then one very wise Receiving Department guy remembered that there was a building being remodeled that did have a loading dock that was tall enough because the building used to be a department store warehouse, so our first guy (whose job it was to get these things and make everyone happy) made the truck driver clear his passenger seat (which was in effect the truck driver's office and home away from home and in fact our guy was the very first person ever to sit in that passenger seat in that cab ever) and our guy climbed in with him and directed him to the building they were remodeling and then went in and got the construction guys to move all of their trucks so the trailer could back into the dock. Then our guy realized that there needed someone to receive the trailer out of the truck since this building was under construction and not even open yet, so he called the forklift guys and asked them to send four guys over to help and then he called his great friend in Central Receiving and asked to borrow four of his guys and when they all showed up, the ten of them (our guy and the truck driver included, because the truck driver wanted to go home) pulled the trailer out of the semi truck. There was a ramp that went down from the dock to the street, and our guy knew he had to take the opportunity by the trailer hitch (so to speak) because he knew that it would take months for the very wise college to figure out how to get the trailer from the dock to the street. So he convinced these other eight guys that they had enough muscle power just to roll it down the ramp. The truck driver was done, his goods were dispatched, all of his belongings were repositioned back into his passenger seat and our guy had signed the papers. So as he drove off, the nine guys very carefully, with very worried looks on their faces dragged this rather large four wheeled trailer with all of its fancy interior equipment down this forty foot ramp so the trailer would be ready for someone to come with a truck and a trailer hitch and trail it away to proper spot. (It reminded our guy of the scene in Matewan where the scab guys in the factory surround a deer so they can force it outside and back to the forest).
The guy with the college that was in charge of this trailer said thank you. And our guy went back to his office very sweaty to finish his day.
I related this story to someone at my new job and was told I was weaving a tall tale, and I am.
There was this van that seated 12 and was very old and beat up and dinged and our mechanic bought to fix it up and put a new engine in it and then discovered it was too large for him to park it at his house so he put it up for sale and I bought it. I was in the middle of staying home with the kids and taking in other people's kids for after school and summer and it worked well. It was old and I didn't care if food or drinks got spilled. There was a fold up table. It took us all over the city and to the beach. Later it took the Boy Scouts camping.There were problems with it. It stood 6'8" so there were parking structures it couldn't drive in. I had to park across a major street from a LA Mall and dodge traffic to go buy a toy horse stable and carry it back because all they had was underground parking with a 6'7" clearance. If a door was left ajar and the inside light was left on, the battery would die in about an hour. It got 10 miles to the gallon. It died on the mountain trying to get up to Lake Sabrina and had to be taken down to a mechanic who didn't fix it and my son and I took 5 hours to get home because the thing would die every 15 minutes on the road and we would have to stop and let the engine cool before we could drive again. Turned out to be a dirty gas filter. Finally, as Camp Dan ended and every time something needed to be fixed it was $600.00 to $1,000.00 a pop, I sold it to a couple who wanted to use it for their daughter's girl scout troop. Hopefully, it is still out there somewhere hobbling along having fun. Getting ice cream cone spots on the ceiling and hiding week old Burger King leftovers in the compartment on the armrests in the very back.
Well, it happened. She took poison and died. Good good book. I had forgotten much in 35 years. Even in translation it breathes, its cynical, and a real masterpiece of demeaning one's characters and the writing is to die for. Its supposed to be exquisite in the original French. Somehow in my brain the good doctor was the one elected to the Legion, not the pharmacist. I read Anna Karenina shortly afterward (probably shouldn't have) and think of her end in connection with this book. Tolstoy wrote his twenty years later. Ole Leo had a bit more compassion in his soul. A couple of years ago I read Salambo (it was my last Flaubert) because I had a good antique copy on my shelf for twenty years and the remainder of a literary art group that had met once a month in west LA for twenty years was going to doing the book. I was dumbfounded by this group of intellectuals that did not understand that the princess lost her virginity at the end of the book. And as I was rereading the good Madame, I began to wonder if there were whole groups of lost souls wandering the earth that did not understand that she slept (MADE LOVE) with her lovers in this book. They couldn't write explicit sex scenes in those days.
What do I know? (I've been giving advice to my kids for years on how to get an A on their papers, by sucking up to the common and accepted thought in place for most of their barely there teachers. 'Fitzgerald was a romantic, Hemingway was a realist' school of accepted public pander.) They've been making As. How about Flaubert the father of the naturalist school of Zola and Frank Norris and Dreiser and Steinbeck and Hem.
Anyway, I'm still going on with our young to die Russian French painter. She was proposed to at 14 and was taking it seriously, but had the sense to realize that love at 14 can be very different later. The words to came out of her. She would go back to her room at night and try to capture the day in pages and pages
They have been running this commercial of late with this guy polishing an perfect old green pickup while he talks about some designer drug that cured him of his ills so he can polish his truck again. Really stupid, but there was one in my life in 1968 that belonged to the guy that was the manager of the restaurants where I worked. You had to double clutch it every time you shifted. One of my summer jobs was to drive around Bloomington and collect used glass gallon bottles and bring them back to be washed and spruced up so they could be used to sell gallon servings of A & W Drive-In Root Beer. In August, the humidity is about 115 percent during the day and a few summers would have spontaneous thunderstorms in the afternoons. So please imagine the back of this piled high with glass jugs and sitting on the steepest hill in the midwest and the sweat dripping off my face and tshirt and the thing slips out of gear and I am rolling backwards down hill. Luckily there was no one behind me, and I clutched and clutched and clutched and finally popped into first and started moving forward again (after a giant jerk). Didn't even crack a jug.
When Marti and I got engaged and were planning to move to Utah, we bought an International long bed pick-up. It looked like a big box. I drove it delivering pizzas that winter in Indiana and came out from a college dorm and at first couldn't find it. It had slid down the hill about two blocks without hitting a thing.
We had stock racks for it that a friend built as a wedding present so we could move all of our stuff to Utah.
I looked for a picture, but couldn't find one that did it justice. Just think big square box. I left it in Utah.
Little bears have a way of intruding. Went to the Boy Scout Court of Honor last night and of course had to stay for the whole thing. It's turned into a lot of silliness which is why the troop has grown so large. The scout master now requires a great dramatic smackaroo on Mom from the Scout with every rank advancement award and they have ribbons for the Moms to wear that the kids' Mom pins are pinned to. And there has to be photos taken of each and every kiss. Gave out Personal Fitness Merit Badges to two boys and got my 10 year service pin. My backpacking buddy is still there every Monday night. I watch him talk to the little kids. His son has moved on from the troop like mine. One afternoon, I was sitting doing watercolors with him and he said he missed being able to be swung around in the yard by his Dad. (He's as tall as his Dad now, as is mine.) I should tell him next time I see him that his Dad and I both miss being able to swing kids around in the yard. I guess I'll be back camping with them before long.
My not-so-little bear calls from NYC and wants to know if I'll take a look at his paper on Aristotle before tomorrow (it's due tomorrow) so I'm editing (only slightly) the thing. Asked my whizz kid "Editor" that is still at home if she wanted to do it, but couldn't get her on board. Not a bad paper. He thinks, doesn't believe in himself enough to know and realize that he thinks in areas that somehow belong to the old man. I smattered philosophy over so many years with ins and outs and happenstance readings, I didn't really want to tell him I didn't remember what I should have read and didn't. Read Plato. And Suzanne Langer. (A lot of Suzanne Langer) A little Aristotle, a little Confucius, a little Apollonian and those little satyrs from Fantasia, a little Calvin & Hobbes, a little of the guy that leap to his faith off the World Trade Center, and the guy that the novelist John Gardner liked (I read "On Moral Fiction" I think)
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