Listen to Jim’s audio podcast: https://youtu.be/PbvgQnbWTdM

or read his story below…

A few eons ago, I was a Mad Man in a three-piece suit, horn rimmed glasses, full head of hair and skinny as a rail. And I had to attend these conferences as part of my mad world. Here’s an entry from the Red Clay Diary…

LEMMINGS

 I am sitting in this convention banquet room inside this convention banquet hotel within this convention banquet town, and I am listening or trying to listen, to the most boring speech ever conceived by humankind.

The words are beginning to float around the room like disembodied specters of things that no longer look like words because the life has been sucked right out of them by the passionless and precise and uncaring speaker who produces them with great pride and certainty, in the sure knowledge that, because he FEELS these words are important, they must be equally important to everyone else sitting in the lifeless room.

And so the words continue to meander in the air and overlap and bounce against one another in their pale green soulless journeys, and not one person in the room is even the least bit interested in these words. But each person, for a dozen different reasons, sits politely and dutifully and tries to look interested, and those who are not trying to look interested are not doing so because they are expending every ounce of energy simply trying to stay awake, or at least LOOK as if they are staying awake, each wishing that they had remembered to paint lifelike alert eyeballs on their eyelids so that when they closed their eyes those around them would believe they were still awake.

As I sit here in this acoustically alive but soul-deadened room I realize that the people sitting around the circular table I’m sitting at are beginning ever so slightly to rise up toward the ceiling, and then I realize that the table itself is beginning to rise ever so slightly. But upon blinking my drying eyes to refocus and assure myself that I am not dreaming, I notice that it is not the people rising, it is not the table rising, it is I who is descending.

I am, without even trying to, starting to slip slowly lower in my chair as if I’m wearing something smooth and polished, as if the chair seat is smooth and polished, as if I can’t keep myself from slowly slipping under the table.

I hope nobody’s watching my descent, for I have no desire to stop sliding under the table.

Soon, the table is above my head and the people are all invisible except for their waists and fidgeting legs that I can now clearly see under the table. I finally am sitting on the floor under the conference table and I am now leaning forward to get on my hands and knees, and I find myself crawling on my hands and knees toward the convention room exit, unable to stop myself.

And the speaker is oblivious to this because the speaker is conscious only of his own self-important words, and he is delivering them to the audience BECAUSE HE CAN, because he outranks everyone in the room, and they are as surely prisoners of his implied power as I am.

But I continue to crawl on my hands and knees toward the door, only to look back over my shoulder at the conference table where I was sitting moments ago, and I discover that I am still sitting at the conference table, or at least the nearly transparent husk of my body is still sitting there, but in reality my soul and my spirit and my pilgrim energy are crawling on their hands and knees toward the exit, wading through those ghostly meaningless words still issuing forth from the speaker.

I glance back to see if I’m still in two places at once and I see something remarkable and very logical happening—slowly but surely, each person at my table is slipping dreamlike to the floor and beginning to crawl on hands and knees, following me to the exit. Each face as a glow of expectancy, each is smiling hopefully, so happy that someone has lowered himself and started an exodus they moments ago could only dream about.

And, before you know it, everybody in the convention room at this hotel is crawling toward the exits, and after a while the speaker is the only person left in the room, oblivious to anything but his own gossamer words, and he continues to speak to the ether and, as far as I know, is still standing there speaking to this day

Jim Reed © 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Listen to Jim’s audio podcast:

https://youtu.be/OCWqwewwfEs

or read his story below…

IN MY SOUTH…

IN MY SOUTH… 

People just come right out with it. With an engaging smile.

We scratch when and where it itches.

A speed limit is a suggestion.

IN MY SOUTH…

Socrates (SEW-crates) and Socrates (SAH-cruh-tees) are the same person.

GO-eeth and Goethe (GER-tuh) are the same philosopher.

It’s pronounced WALL-mark—not WALL-mart. We don’t know why.

Arab (A-rabb) is a place and Arab (EH-rubb) is a person.

Geezers are sexy.

IN MY SOUTH…

Accumulating sounds more dignified than collecting or hoarding.

We pretty much want to be wherever we are—and don’t you rush it!

Dentists hand out lollipops.

IN MY SOUTH…

The second “t” in the word Contact is always silent.

We never, ever make Mama mad.

“How’s your mama ‘n ‘em?” is the kickstarter to a friendly and successful conversation.  

IN MY SOUTH…

We respect women who spit and pick their teeth in public.

Spitting and picking your teeth in public is mandatory.

Chawing and kissing can go right together.

IN MY SOUTH…

You can wear a tie to go to lunch, but you have to leave your jacket at the office. White short-sleeved dress shirts are required.

You never allow guests to leave your home without escorting them to the car and chatting about this and that for another forty minutes.

Y’all is both singular and plural.

IN MY SOUTH…

Grits is a sacred food…and can be singular or plural. So there.

Grit is always true.

Ma’am and Sir are polite and gentle and respectful terms.

And so it goes. In my South, the only place I’ve ever lived, local folks and local customs and local habits continue to amaze me and make me feel right at home.

What would it be like to live anywhere else? Y’all tell me

Jim Reed © 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

How to torture a roomful of balanced and unbalanced executives:

Carefully, slowly, meticulously disassemble one styrofoam cup.

They can’t arrest you for disassembling one styrofoam cup, but you can exact revenge on just about anybody you wish to annoy, through the simple act of using the weapon at hand.

Way back when, way back Then…I worked in a mythic kingdom named ExecutiveLand. It was in ExecutiveLand that I learned the finest forms of guerilla warfare…a type of warfare that can bring strong grownups to their knees. I learned this fine skill from another executive, Hamp Swann. Now, Hamp Swann was a true scientist, an engineer who really knew things, as opposed to executives like me, who knew very little but pretended to know a whole lot.

Hamp and I used to have to attend these regular management meetings called the AEC (administrative executive committee) at ExecutiveLand. These were really boring meetings, because they consisted of a group of leaders telling each other how carefully they planned and executed things that always succeeded–whether or not they really succeeded, and whether or not they actually spent any time planning them.

Kind of like cabinet meetings.

Anyhow, most of us who had very little power would find ways to survive these meetings–we’d look alert but would be largely brain-inert, since we didn’t really care what went on. We were the realists–we knew that no matter how many meetings were held, the chief executive officers of ExecutiveLand never varied from their actions (They would tell us we were conducting participatory administrative activities, but invariably they’d wind up doing exactly what they intended to do before receiving our input…they’d do this because they could.)!

Anyhow, we juniors would play little games with one another to keep from falling asleep or bursting into tears or jumping across the large meeting table to strangle somebody. This was our therapy.

Hamp Swann didn’t play these games because he was a truly independent thinker and did not need our ideas to figure out what the right thing to do was. One day, Hamp, looking intensely interested in the goings-on of the meeting, began dismantling a styrofoam coffee cup. There are many ways to accomplish this task, but Hamp’s method was simple: he started at the rim of the empty cup and slowly separated the foam into one continuous strip, the way you’d peel an apple. This is a very noisy procedure, particularly noisy in a solemn room of solemn senior executives who hope that all the juniors are acting solemn and hanging on to their every word in silent adulation.

Screeckkk…screeckkk…screeckk…the styrofoam noise slowly infiltrated the subconscious and unconscious people in the room. At first, the screeckkk wasn’t noticed, because all the seniors were so self-involved and all the juniors were trying to stay awake, but eventually, the screeckkk started making people uncomfortable. Hamp was dismantling the cup absent-mindedly, so he didn’t even know it was making a sound, plus it was in his lap, so nobody knew where the sound was coming from.

Screeckkk…screeckkk…screeckkk. Now, people were looking around for the source, each person still not knowing whether anybody else was hearing the same thing. One executive adjusted his hearing aid, just in case it was static. Another shifted in his chair to see whether it needed oiling, yet another looked nervously at the ceiling insulation to see if an insect or rodent had been self-invited.

Then, there were the other juniors like me. I found this event to be the most entertaining one I’d experienced in years, so I started yearning for popcorn, since I can’t watch a movie without something buttery and salty and crunchy in my mouth.

I won’t tell you the ending of this story–you’ll just have to ask me. All I know is, the Great Styrofoam Cup Dismantling Caper has stayed in my memory for decades, and nothing, but nothing, about the intended content of that solemn meeting lingers.

I dream of the day when somebody will stage a production of styrofoam cup dismantlings…a wonderfully chaotic symphony orchestrating the simultaneous screeckkk…screeckkk…screeckkks produced by hordes of cups large and small, each tuned to its own cacophony, its own joyfully annoying disruptive sounds

Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/hardwarehitch.mp3

or read it below…

HARDWARE HITCH

Hitching up his trousers by grabbing his belt up front to cover a lower layer of belly fold, he struts into the hardware store as if a potbellied stove were still radiant, as if a cracker barrel still dropped crumbs onto an oil-soaked concrete floor, as if laughter and storytelling were still saturating the air.

Faint fragrances of topsoil and fertilizer and WD-40 and unfinished lumber and old rubber flanges remind him of the odor of Lifebuoy soap and metal filings from key-makng machines that used to dominate hardware stores more years ago than he dares to count.

His Daddy and his Daddy’s Daddy hitched their pants up, too, way back when, in search of nomadic waist lines.

But this new hardware store no longer attracts hitching-up men because the potbellied stove and cracker barrel have been moved aside to accommodate central air and heat, more display space, additional stock turnover, busier and less-connected customers.

Gossip and news and palavering are unknown here, so the store proprietors don’t have any idea what’s going on in the surrounding neighborhood.

Instead of sharing eye-to-eye anecdotes about neighbors and common issues and genealogies, the proprietors and customers now obtain their gossip and news on talk shows and via social media.

Chatter and noise caulk the previous silences but tell the pants-hitcher nothing about life-saturated happenings…the newborn baby down the street,  the latest success of a nearby friend, oh so important life-changes and twists of fate that overlie daily flesh-and-bone existence.

Former cracker barrel potbellied men still come into the store and hitch up their pants, but they are methodically processed by clerks whose eyes glaze past them, into the virtual-cloud mist 

Jim Reed (c) 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Listen to Jim’s 3-minute podcast

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/icehotasphaltsummerday.mp3

or read his memory below:

ICY HOT ASPHALT SUMMER DAY

Way, way back, on an Alabama summer day…

 Hot concrete under tender bare feet makes you dance…first one foot down while the other foot’s up, then the other foot down while one foot’s up. 

The only relief comes when you hop onto the cool prickly grass next to the concrete sidewalk, let the green blades slide up between your toes and press against your soles, sigh a loud sigh of relief, pause a moment, then dance right back onto the concrete sidewalk, because that’s the only way you’re going to get to the asphalt road. 

Once on the asphalt road, you start dancing again, because asphalt is dark and more heat-absorbent than concrete, only the texture is different and the tarry pebbles make hash marks on your feet when you finally find a bit of shade to stand under where the asphalt is cooler, or at least lukewarm.

The reason you’re standing here on the ridged asphalt is because you can hear the milk truck coming and you have to be right there on the asphalt in just the right place in order not to miss the milkman’s rushed schedule.

Finally, you see the milkman and his vehicle lumbering stickshifty along, creaking to an idling halt while he emerges, lifts a metal tray of thick-walled bottles filled with Perry Creamery’s pasteurized homogenized milk, trots up the sidewalk, not even aware that it’s hot because he has on these thick-soled military shoes made of hard leather, stitched tightly to harder leather.

He clanks the new bottles down on my front porch, picks up the waiting empty bottles, and heads back to the milk truck. 

By this time, out of nowhere, several summertime barefoot kids about my age have gathered around the back of the truck, dancing on the hot asphalt and waiting for the treat of the morning: free crushed ice.

The milkman dips his large hands into the trunkful of finely shaved ice supporting the fresh milk bottles, and breaks off hand-sized hunks, doling them out to each streetkid.

We immediately scatter to the hot morning air, sucking our chunks of ice, biting into them and getting the only cool surge of the day, since none of us lives in an air-conditioned home. 

Maybe we remember to say “Thank you” to the milkman, maybe sometimes we forget, but we are grateful for this assumed and taken-for-granted small free favor granted us each time the milkman and his freshly produced pasteurized homogenized milk comes our way. 

It’s another ritual in our tiny neighborhood, one of many rituals that serve to hold us all together and make us feel somewhat secure, ignorant of what lies ahead way beyond the hot-asphalt smalltown mornings of our very precious and very fleeting childhood

Jim Reed (c) 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast