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THE POPE OF SOUTHTOWN SERVES HIS FLOCK

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Jim

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THE POPE OF SOUTHTOWN SERVES HIS FLOCK

I’m standing in place at Express Oil, awaiting my audience with the Pope of Southtown.

My burgundy beat-up bookmobile is giving me fits, but I am a person of loyalty—I will nurse and patch and compensate for this old vehicle till one of us rattles one last time.

While Burgundy Bookie and I stand in place, we gaze at the actions and interactions that take place in graceful but purposeful slow motion.

One longtime mechanic, Philip, moves among a flock of customers who depend upon his seasoned abilities. We are at the mercy of Philip and the other specialists who greet us and patiently minister to our mechanical needs.

One petite woman stares up to him for a blessing, “Oh, my car’s still doing that, that thing. Can you fix it?”

He smiles, stares off into the distance as if seriously contemplating the response he will eventually give. Like a good diagnostician, he pays attention to what the customer is saying. He takes his time to consider the correct answer.

At that moment, he receives a cellphone call, which means he is now juggling three cases at once—mine, hers and the tinny-voiced human in his palm. Yet other congregants await his ministrations. Each of us is the most important human on the planet in our own minds.

I arrive at Express Oil just twenty minutes earlier, when the lot is still barren. Now, suddenly, the customers are lined up and Philip is gesticulating, scratching his head, dispensing advice on what he knows and what he does not know and what he will eventually know and what he will never know.

In the long run, these healers of transport are all that stand between us and a broken mass transit system, who save us from random and unpredictable encounters with Uber and Yellow Cab and hitchhiking.

These shadetree sophisticates are part of our family, the family we need to make our clockwork lives run smoothly in spurts.

That’s why now and then I drop off a box of donuts or a fudge pie created by daughter Jeannie. You know, something for the offering plate.

George Carlin nailed it a long time back, “I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”

The mechanics of Southtown have just enough followers to last each day. And that’s always enough and plenty for us true believers

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EYES WIDE SLEEPING SOUNDLY

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Jim

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EYES WIDE SLEEPING SOUNDLY

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….

I’m lying abed in this small plaster-ceilinged bedroom I share with brother Ronny.

The time is longer ago than you might remember, or maybe even before you were born.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….

It is just after sunrise. I am slowly drifting back and forth between slumber and wakefulness. Dreams are fading into daydreams. Reality is creeping in to take over.

My ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s are turning into snorts, then into eyes wide open…

Downstairs, the Sunday newspaper comic strips await.

The comics are everything on Sunday morning. That’s where I learn what those ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s mean. They are shorthand for Sleeping Soundly.

When a comic strip cartoonist wants me to know that a character is asleep or dozing, a row of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s informs me. When a cartoon bubble hovering above Little Orphan Annie’s head is dripping tiny closed circles, I know that this is what Annie is thinking, not what she is saying aloud. And so on.

But I’m lying here in my bunk bed, now fully awake but hoping that if I can visualize those ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s floating above my head, I can convince anyone peeking into the room that I am still asleep. Can’t they see the Z’s?

It doesn’t work, this attempt to make palpable a cartoonist’s Morse code. I try to pretend sleep, but sister Barbara opens the door a crack to call me to breakfast. “I see your eyelids moving. You’re awake!” she grins gleefully. I can never fool Barbara.

I swat away the floating ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s and dangle my feet over the side of the mattress. I’m on the top bunk, so part of becoming fully awake is the jolt to the system that I feel when I leap into the vast space between here and hardwood floor.

Time to pretend I’m awake for another day. Time to do little kid things that little kids do on Sunday mornings.

Time to find the Sunday paper and discover what Dagwood is doing—is he asleep on the couch under ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s? What about The Phantom—does he ever sleep? And Snuffy Smith? I know he knows all about Z’s, as does Pappy Yokum. As does brother Ronny on the bottom bunk. They are my kind of people.

To this day, many decades later, I envy those people, real-lifed and cartooned, who know how to catch a few ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s any time they please. Or at least any time their cartoonist so deems.

Or any time sister Barbara isn’t looking

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THE JOYS OF SELECTIVE INATTENTION AND OTHER UNIMPORTANT IDEAS

Posted on September 10, 2017 by Jim

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THE JOYS OF SELECTIVE INATTENTION AND OTHER UNIMPORTANT IDEAS

Life’s humongous happenings are the things I ponder least.

That’s because I have no control, no input, no influence, no power over the huge events that occur in daily life.

I know but one way to deal with HUMONGOUS HAPPENINGS. More about that later in this little diatribe. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, it is always the tiny unnoticeables that rivet my attention. Things like street signs that do not communicate.

Here’s one: NOT A THOROUGH STREET. What does this mean? The street is incomplete? Is it inadequately constructed? Is it misspelled? Does it intend to say NOT A THROUGH STREET? If so, THROUGH what? Does it suddenly come to a stop just past the sign? Perhaps more communicative would be NOT A THRU STREET. This is easier to read, and there is no confusion about words–thorough and through and trough could blend themselves into an amalgam of meanings. By the time they are sorted out, the driver may have run smack and thoroughly through a trough that runs thru a tough ‘hood.

Here’s another sign of the times: GROOVED PAVEMENT. What am I supposed to do with this instant information? Is it a mysterious command? Am I to spin the steering wheel to conform to the grooves? Or is it another typo? Does it mean GROOVY PAVEMENT? In which case I can really get it on, man, and go with the flow. By the time I process this information, the sign has been long since passed and I’m on my way to the next challenge.

I recommend the highway department consider some new signs designed to entertain and confuse. What about ESCHEW OBFUSCATION? That would kick-start an inner philosophical debate about meaning, context, semantics…a much more productive exercise than the perplexing THOROUGH and GROOVY and THRU directives that nobody understands.

Or, a sign that reads ROAD ENDS would generate all kinds of excitement and stress. Since all roads eventually end, does this mean IMMEDIATELY or sometime in the future? There is no footnote or added explanation to comfort the driver. The sign may as well read LIFE ENDS, since it is an open-ended truism that one may ignore or obsess over. There’s always something new to wring one’s hands about.

The only way some of us get through the day is to employ a technique known as SELECTIVE INATTENTION. Disregarding the warning signs at least allows us to pay more attention to the road and focus less on things we cannot control.

Now about the HUMONGOUS HAPPENINGS.

As I inferred, there is nothing I can do to quell these HUMONGOUS HAPPENINGS. All I can do is exactly and precisely what I know how to do. When HUMONGOUS HAPPENINGS issue forth, I get back to basics and truisms.

I hug my family and tell them I love them.

I make sure my friends, my strangers, know that I actually care about them.

I look people in the eye to assure them that I am PAYING ATTENTION, for one terrible act of violence and abuse is to ignore someone, disavow their existence, disregard them, act as if they don’t matter, fail to listen to them.

The great sin is not noticing someone. The great abuse is not being noticed.

The great joy is the knowledge that you just listened to me, noticed me, by reading these words

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HAPPY UNBIRTHDAY TO YOU AND ME

Posted on September 3, 2017 by Jim

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HAPPY UNBIRTHDAY TO YOU AND ME

What do I get each time another birthday rolls around?

What is my reward? Where is my gift?

More to the point, what makes me think I have a reward coming my way, each time another 365 days pass me by?

What is so significant about our birthdays, mine and your’n? (Don’t let “your’n” throw you–it’s just one of those middle English words that a bookie nerd like me finds swimming among the silt in my brain.)

Speaking of silt, how many hundreds of songs are indelibly branded into my memory?

This is definitely one of them:

MARCH HARE:

A very merry unbirthday to me

MAD HATTER:

To who?

MARCH HARE:

To me

MAD HATTER:

Oh you!

MARCH HARE:

A very merry unbirthday to you

MAD HATTER:

Who me?

MARCH HARE:

Yes, you!

MAD HATTER:

Oh, me!

MARCH HARE:

Let’s all congratulate us with another cup of tea

A very merry unbirthday to you!

MAD HATTER:

Now, statistics prove, prove that you’ve one birthday

MARCH HARE:

Imagine, just one birthday every year

MAD HATTER:

Ah, but there are three hundred and sixty four unbirthdays!

MARCH HARE:

Precisely why we’re gathered here to cheer

BOTH:

A very merry unbirthday to you, to you

ALICE:

To me?

MAD HATTER:

To you!

BOTH:

A very merry unbirthday

ALICE:

For me?

MARCH HARE:

For you!

MAD HATTER:

Now blow the candle out my dear

And make your wish come true

BOTH:

A merry merry unbirthday to you!

***

Now, why is it that I can’t remember where I placed my Diet Coke five minutes ago, but I can recall hundreds of songs like this from my ever present childhood?

Don’t strain yourself—I don’t really need to know the answer to this question. I just want to ruminate and contemplate and masticate…eating my breakfast and thinking useless but entertaining thoughts all the while.

Go ahead and laugh at me. It’s a life I’m stuck with.

And during the best of my times, I celebrate at least 364 times a year.

Quick! Let’s appreciate and savor our unbirthdays with gusto, now and then distracting ourselves with the delusion that all is right with the world.

We do deserve a break from all this now and then, don’t you think?

Lewis Carroll and Jack Kerouac and Aldous Huxley and Steve Martin all know the value of self-delusion. Each has a different way of celebrating silliness.

My way is to share random thoughts and allow you to find your own significance or distraction as a result.

Couldn’t hurt.

Precisely why we’re gathered here to cheer

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ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WILDLING CITY

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Jim

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ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WILDLING CITY

Like a spindly-legged grain of blackened rice, this little critter is dozing at the bottom of my morning lavatory. As I brush my teeth, I contemplate the creature’s future prospects.

Shall I attempt to squash it so that Liz won’t encounter it later? Shall I wave so that it takes the hint that there are larger forces at work here? Will the critter zip away to safer haven?

Most mornings in the wildling city are like that. Decisions must be made. Or not. Every moment of indecision is a moment of decision. As Harvey Cox said, “Not to decide is to decide.”

Moments later, beneath the prickling shower, muffled sounds transmit from the radio, teasing me with snippets of information that I have to string together on my own. Words like Afghanistan…president…teaser…hurricane…blockhead…

The rice-sized spidery critter gathers up what free will is left and flicks itself into elsewhere.

The soap bar diminishes a fraction in my hands, the large towel engulfs me, misted mirrors reflect vague aspects of me, outdoor skies peek in through a high window, morning begs to begin its forward thrust toward eventual dusk.

Later, I spend a few moments attempting to select an easy-rolling, silent shopping cart in order to cruise store isles unnoticed and meditative. There is no cooperation among the metallic wheeled skeletons. My cart squeaks harshly, as do carts of other shoppers.

Strewn about the cavernous arena, other shopping carts call out to each other like feral animals under stress.

The wildling city teems with beings both animate and inanimate, all wending their special fates in indecipherable patterns that, combined, create a global symphony entitled life on earth

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TWILIGHT OF THE GODS MY FAVORITE TIME OF DAY

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Jim

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TWILIGHT OF THE GODS MY FAVORITE TIME OF DAY

It’s a simple act of nature, this eclipse thing. All mythology and mysticism and symbolism aside, an eclipse is pretty simple from the point of view of us earthbound or moonbound species.

In a solar eclipse, the moon briefly cruises between us and the sun. If you are an Earthling, you wonder where the sun went. Oh! There it is. It was just hidden from view for a couple of minutes. During a lunar eclipse, the earth comes between the sun and the moon. If you are a Moonling watching from atop a crater, the sun disappears behind Earth. Eventually, the sun peeks out and things get back to celestial normalcy.

When I was a kid, the skies above were so much more exciting than the earth under my feet. So, every time I got a chance to escape into the night skies, I took it.

Here is one memory of those long-ago days:

When I was a young one just trying to absorb the fact that I’d never be a Babe Ruth or an Albert Einstein or an Edgar Allan Poe or a Gregory Peck, I received for Christmas, sitting there just beyond reach of the carnival-decorated gaudy fir tree, a SPITZ JUNIOR PLANETARIUM, manufactured by HARMONIC REED CORPORATION OF ROSEMONT, PENNA.

It was a most special Christmas gift.

Just looking at it now, in my mind’s eye, it has remained crystal-clear all these many years: a shiny black flexible-plastic globe bifurcated by a yellow rubber equatorial flange that represents the stellar ecliptic and incidentally holds the two half-spheres together. The black globe sits atop a white plastic observatory-shaped base, and the whole thing can be rotated round and round as well as moved up and down to simulate all the naked-eye observable movements of the stars.

To appreciate the planetarium, you had to take it into a pitch-dark, preferably cube-shaped room and slowly turn up the rheostat just above the off-on switch on the front of the base. If you did it just right and just slowly enough, you would suddenly feel yourself transported to the middle of a darkened field in the middle of the night in the middle of the planet in the middle of the universe because, all around you, there would suddenly appear stars in exactly the same positions, the same configurations, as they would appear if you actually were in the middle of a darkened field in the middle of the night in the middle of…etc.

Even if you couldn’t go outside to see the stars, even if it was cloudy and raining, even if you had just come indoors from the humid sunshine, you could still go into that darkened room and be somewhere else in time and space and feel all alone in a crowd of billions of others whose names you did not know.

One day way back when, my sister Rosi got my SPITZ JUNIOR PLANETARIUM out of storage and presented it to me and I took it home and now I sleep again in the middle of a darkened field in the middle of the night in the middle…

Whenever the demon insomnia causes my eyes to flicker open, I can see the old familiar stars keeping me silent company and reminding me that they will always be there and that any problems that seem gargantuan now are minuscule compared to the distant silent coolness and the close-up noisy fury of those suns upon suns upon suns out there. The mathematics and physics of astronomy escaped me early on, but the sheer personal poetry of the tiny points of light so large and so far away still affects me and still makes me remember what it was like to be a small boy and open an incredible shiny gift that pure and lonely Christmas so many eons ago in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

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BONGO MAN DISRUPTS DUM DUM DEARTH QUEST

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Jim

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BONGO MAN DISRUPTS DUM DUM DEARTH QUEST

The idling motor of the muscle car is rhythmic and sputtery. All the windows of the car are down, so that passersby can hear what goes on inside, so that the driver can hear what’s happening all around.

His baseball cap reversed, the driver is leaning over the steering column. His fingers and palms are beating out complex tempos upon the wheel, as if it has suddenly become a set of bongos.

He stares straight ahead at nothing. He is lost within a labyrinth of chuckling carburetor, puffy leaping hands, dipping chin, unheard lyrics, imagined tunes, recalled memories, imagined symbols and meanings.

I walk past the crookedly parked vehicle, not daring to interrupt the flow, the flows, of this bongo dream-man. I am my own reverie, he is his own reverie, and the two of us are just comets passing and bypassing one another, each with our own celestial small wisdoms, each with our solitudes enforced.

Does the bongo man know that my only quest this humid morning is for a supply of Dum Dums to re-fill the take-one-free basket at the bookshop? Dum Dums are not always readily available, so I’m making several stops in my trek. Do I know what back-story drives the idling-motor bongo man to perform his audienceless concerto? Does the bongo man know about Dum Dums and old bookstores and tiny insignificant quests such as mine?

Is each of us equally significant in the schemelessness of things? Do we count?

He counts his beats, I count my Dum Dum blessings, the sad and scruffy parking lot spreads heavy and forlorn beneath us.

And our universes part ways unheralded by time and space and journey

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DISCOVERING AND ABANDONING THE CATHEDRAL OF BOOKS

Posted on August 6, 2017 by Jim

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DISCOVERING AND ABANDONING THE CATHEDRAL OF BOOKS

Diving headlong into the pages of my lifelong Red Clay Diary, I find these notes.

They are both actual and true:

The spindly used and tape-repaired thin-wheeled bicycle is my rocket machine to all parts of the city of Tuscaloosa in the 1950′s. I can hop on that black spider vehicle and escape Eastwood Avenue, Northington Campus and all points east, and ride westward down the breeze toward Downtown and freedom for a few hours.

I yank the front of the bike up to climb curbs, skid parallel to railroad tracks, nearly lose control, then cross several more tracks diagonally to get to the main street of Tuscaloosa.

First stop is the Cathedral of Books, the Tuscaloosa County Library, where the 19th-century Friedman home houses all there is of a public library for the town. Climbing the stairs is like ascending the steps of a Mayan pyramid, for from the top, I can turn and survey passing traffic and pedestrians in the sure knowledge that wherever they are headed, it cannot possibly be as exciting as where I am going. Poor peasants!

Inside the library, it is quiet and creaky, and the odor of musty books is everywhere. Rubberstamped tramping upon library file cards is about the loudest noise. I can spend all the time I want, running my fingers over the spine titles, trying ever so hard to decide what I can actually read by book-return time. How will I ever possibly get to read all those books, go to all those special places that the poor deprived pedestrians and motorists outside cannot even imagine?

I head for the science section, reading all the astronomy and simplified physics books I get my hands on, books by Willy Ley, Chesley Bonstell, George Gamow, Isaac Asimov…then go for the adult fiction area and pick out the authors I have already fallen in love with: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Max Shulman, Thorne Smith–authors who aren’t really writing fiction at all–they are writing about what I know now, what I know might happen, what I hope won’t happen, what I pray will happen.

Then, poetry, making friends with Robert Frost and Sara Teasdale and Carl Sandburg and James Whitcomb Riley. And on to theatre scripts, plays by Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams…

And then, science fiction! Ray Bradbury and his followers, Arthur C. Clarke, Shirley Jackson, Robert Heinlein, Fredric Brown…and Ray Bradbury again. After reading every science fiction book in the library, I find I need more. Is this all there is? Are there no other books in the universe?

Scouring the shelves each time I go to the Cathedral of Books, I finally realize I have read everything I’ll ever want to read of what is here. The librarians are of no help–they can’t understand my passion for more, because I don’t know how to tell them what more is.

So, I finally stop visiting the Tuscaloosa County Library.

For two reasons, actually. I have read everything I care to read there. But primarily, I do not want to return the books I read. It is very difficult to tumble headlong into a book, fall in love with it, live it, then have to return it to the care of impersonal strangers. The book is my adopted child. How can I return a child? Once born into my hands, once borne by my hands, the child is my responsibility.

The solution comes soon enough, out of sheer desperation. I discover the secret of Lunch Money! Mother gives me lunch money each day, so that I can eat heavy chewy buns and glug pasteurized homogenized Perry’s Pride milk and scarf macaroni and cheese in the Tuscaloosa High School lunchroom. None of this tastes as good as words, written words. It doesn’t take long to realize, with a stretch of ethics and logic, that Mother’s lunch money is a gift to me to do with as I please. I don’t really have to eat! This will leave me with enough money to buy a book or two a day.

So, the Cathedral of Books transplants itself to the Drug Store and the Dime Store, where 25-cent paperback books are available by the hundreds.

At Parkview Drugs in the Parkview Shopping Center across the street from school, I walk my fingers through the racks of randomly un-arranged paperback books–some costing as much as 35 cents!–and select the day’s readings. To heck with milk and bread. Man–er, teen-age boys– cannot live by milk and bread alone, much less government-surplus macaroni and cheese!

The great thing about the paperback book racks is, there’s only one title of each book at any one time, and they are never alphabetized or arranged by subject, as they are at the library. Therefore, I have to go through each and every book, one by one, reading the short blurbs on the front cover and the longer blurbs on the back, then the come-on blurb on the front first page, to find out what each book is about. This means I am exposed to many, many subjects and authors I would never have known about at the Library. I have to learn a little of everything to find out anything!

I buy books I’ve never heard about because of those blurbs–and mainly because of the lurid covers each title sports. Illustrators are assigned the task of making the customer want to purchase the book, so even the most serious titles display scantily dressed women and action-packed scenes that often are not even found inside the books. But it works! I read widely and eclectically because of those lurid pictures and come-on blurbs.

I feel quite sorry for anybody who doesn’t know the joy of randomly browsing through hundreds of subjects and titles, learning more and being exposed to more than teachers can possibly imagine or control.

My self-education is a joy and a spine-tingling challenge. I must sacrifice something to get what I want–lunch, for instance–when I have to peddle all the way downtown on a spindly second-hand bicycle to grab that new book off the rack and rush my quarter to the checkout counter before anybody else can snatch it ahead of me.

Drugstores also have enormous magazine racks that display every kind of subject–Scientific American sits next to the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. Mad Magazine can be picked up along with Sky and Telescope and Popular Mechanics. I even read the self-grooming ads! I give up my hair tonic money and my acne medicine money for more and better books, which might explain why studious kids like me are always depicted as being pimply, bespectacled and unkempt. We are.

No matter. I get what I want, and I don’t hurt anybody in the long run. I believe my Mother forgives me, too, for she knows that words give me more pleasure than food and grooming. Of course, if I go too long without using soap, she will draw the line.

To this day, every time I pass through a small town and see an old Victorian House that’s been converted into a library or a bookstore, I have to stop in to see what’s what. Each time one of those little towns has an old drugstore, I go in to explore what’s left of the paperback books and magazines.

And I still find, now and then, something well worth reading that I do not know exists until just this moment, waiting on the rack for me and me alone