Dogs and Language

An interesting tidbit I ran into today:

We're all somewhat familiar with the body language dogs display when they greet each other. The dominant alpha male approaches directly, asserting his authority, while the beta male genuflects, crouches, tucks his tail, and may even end up on his back, exposing his neck in acquiescence, making sure the alpha male knows he has no intention of challenging him. With his "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist" opening to the world's dictators, the President is exhibiting classic beta male behavior, in essence rolling over on his back and exposing his throat to them to make sure they know he has no intention of challenging their authority.

On Reading

Some books, I'm talking about novels now, knock you off your feet in their own way. I'm reading one of them, title unimportant, I want to come back to this post 6 months, a year from now, not knowing what book it was.   How does he do that, I am asking, about the author's knack for constructing the narrative, so that it keeps the reader wanting more, always unsatisfied, always hungry.  And I'm not sure how to describe it.

More than anything, I am wondering at the make up of the narrative where the author announces some action, hints of it, and then leaves without explaining what happened next until much later.   That is the mystery to me of how he does it and gets away with it.   Not many writers do it, know how to do it  (I reckon).

From reading Amazon one star reviews I see that many readers hate this kind of narrative, are frustrated by it,  demanding straightforward stories which proceed from A to Z, with little if any ambiguity.  I'm not talking about the mystery genre either, which to me is still a straight through narrative most of the time, with a few easy to see though and digest tricks.

It's one of those things when you cannot say, oh, I see what he's doing here, and cannot think that you can do as well or better.   Although it sometimes looks easy, or gives the impression that the author was careless or forgetful,  I suspect that it took a lot of intricate effort to construct such complex stories.

Tattoos and Telephones

I was with a friend, a woman of 60, and four others, 60 to 75 years old, sitting under a parasol at a long rectangular table, chomping on hot dogs, sipping Coca-Cola and warm beer, talking about nothing in particular, when I made the mistake of offering a remark about sailors and tattoos vaguely apropos something somebody said.  Immediately, the conversation topic derailed onto the old  track of how awful these young people are nowadays.   Tattoos, cellphones and obnoxious music! Heaven help us! We were heard by other patrons sitting nearby in this outdoor cafe, and I felt so embarrassed for myself and the group, that I discreetly scooted over to the edge of the bench in a vain attempt  to show the accidental witnesses around us that I'm not with these people, I don't know them, I just happened to be sitting here.

At last, my friend rescued me, quite unexpectedly so, unexpectedly because I had known her to pick up another old folks talk theme in her conversations, that of exchanging complaints about one's aches and pains, and offering the names of pharmacological remedies, and so she rescued us this time by ordering in a commanding voice of a high school teacher, "Stop you all kvetching like a bunch of old people!"   After a brief silence, conversation returned  to the safe topic of nothing, and all was well again.

I was thinking about this incident the other day as I read Joseph Epstein's essay in the Weekly Standard "Toting the Dumb Phone".   Yes, Epstein, a noted critic and writer,  is old, and yes, he kvetches about young people and their smartphone cellphone mania,  but doesn't he make a few interesting points?

I own a cellphone that Mr Epstein would have described as a dumb homeless model, the number of which I don't remember,  known to only a handful of people, a cellphone that never rings, except as on two recent occasions when I'm in the company of someone whom I've just told that no, my cellphone never rings.

I sometimes bet myself five dollars walking down a busy street that for the next two blocks I won't see a young woman who's not talking or typing on her smartphone, and I often win and have to  transfer a five dollar bill from my left to the right jeans pocket.   But thinking some more about it, it occurred to me, that this new phenomenon of people, mostly women, on the phone in public places is perhaps not due to women's well known tendency to chat and talk endlessly,  but it is a fashion statement and a status symbol to be demonstrated to everyone around like a new hairdo or a pair of earrings.  Look, I can afford a smartphone, I have friends to talk to.

Can't Think of a Title

The Last Hand

I hang around in the space  between the low art of popular music, not even what is considered the high art of the low art, such as Broadway or Cabaret song, but country, folk and Americana,  commercial stuff, and the high art of top shelf literature.  It's been always this way and I won't change it.

And so, I'm looking forward to the new/old album of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait, heretofore unreleased recordings from 1969-71.   This release tells me that Dylan, who unlike many artists, retains complete control over his catalog, must be going through another period of writer's block, and has no new material  to show us (his last album Spirit was a collaboration with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.)

A writer I've read before is having a novel published in two weeks, its title "The Last Hand", as in a card game, you won't see it on a bestseller list, so stop looking, and he has some interesting things to say in a recent interview.

He argues that there is no present and no future, that only past exists for us, or at least for him.  He writes in pencil, and erases, doesn't cross out, because by crossing out a sentence, he says, he couldn't write the sentence any better.  Why does he writes so little?  Because, he says, after he finishes a novel, he has to throw its weight off, has to stop liking it, to avoid repeating himself.  And when he starts thinking of a new novel, he has to think of it as a beginner who doesn't know how to write. Because being convinced that one knows how to write, he tells the interviewer, is the first step toward defeat.

A Ghost in This House

Every couple of weeks or so during a weekend I meet some friends, or better said, acquaintances, in a park for two or three hours. The children play, adults talk, I take photographs of the group.   Later at home I upload the photos to my computer, and e-mail the best ones in batches of five.  Two weeks ago I took 65 shots, yesterday, while thinking that I was taking fewer, I ended up pressing the shutter 85 times.  Well, three pics were of shadows on a wall and not of these friends/acquaintances.

You're never in those pictures, I was told.  Indeed, the photographer is never in the picture, and in the roughly 15,000 I have taken in recent years, I'm in only a handful.  A ghost.  I am a ghost in this house, as the minor hit song by a long forgotten country band Shenandoah  said, a song that gained its well deserved reputation, when diva Alison Krauss loaned it her weight and with her band which includes the great Jerry Douglas recorded it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKXhIMgTsrE

And there, in the background of one of the photographs I snapped yesterday, is a young mother I noticed in the park, pushing her son,  one year old, I estimate, on a baby swing.   I was standing above our group's blanket with a baby and a mom on it, looking in the direction of that swing, and noticing the graceful movements of this mother 30 feet away from us.  She must be a dancer, I thought, or had trained as a dancer.  She was unself-conscious, unaffected, even after she apparently noticed (or not) my rude gaze.   I didn't get a chance to speak to her, she was later joined by an older couple, her parents probably, and they soon walked away, while I tried to verify or discredit my above observation by watching other young mothers there.   And in  doing it I remembered what I had already known, that most of us move about gracelessly, as if we were carrying the weight of all our troubles and tragedies on our shoulders.

From Here to Internet

Paint It Black

No colors anymore I want them to turn black 

(The Rolling Stones - Paint It Black)

Henry Ford told his managers in 1909  “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. And so, between 1914 and 1926 Ford Model T cars were all painted black.  (Earlier, several colors were available.)  I remember a surprise when I first saw a Mercedes Benz that was not black.  Nowadays, most Benzes one sees are any color but black.  On the other hand, the newcomers to the luxury automobile market, such as Kia, Hyundai and Nissan offer their top of the line sedans in black.  The Fiat 500s that have recently become available in the United States, come in all kinds of happy colors, is black among them?  I had to check: YES.  But no, I haven't seen any black ones.

I don't see many black cars of any make any more.  Most in this corner of the world are silver, grey, blue.   Yesterday, in the 10 minutes I spent in front of a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall waiting for the right moment to snap the photograph that I posted last evening, over a hundred cars passed me in both directions, and only three of them were painted red. I didn't count the black ones. 

Johnny Cash was called "The Man in Black".  He is quoted as saying: “I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.”

To my knowledge he didn't explain what "our hypocritical houses of God" he had in mind.   Roy Orbison wore all  black as well, but he wasn't called "The Man in Black".   What would the two of them say today when countless stage performers dress in black?

My grandmother, who spent most of her life as a widow, dressed all in black. At least during the few times that I saw her as a small boy, terrified of her presence. 

Since when has black ceased to be the color of mourning?  And what fashion dictator decided it?   So many American women dress all black. Don't they, or do they realize that black repels?

Ring of Fire for Lease

Quiet Flows the Don

I needed the services of an attorney, and lacking recommendations I searched the telephone directory and picked one whose offices were located at Consultation Lane, which turned out to be a cul de sac on the edge of the Financial District.   There, in the client waiting room,  I met Don who told me he did investigative work for the attorneys in the office.  He hailed from Canada and was a traveler and writer of articles which had been published in several magazines, including National Geographic.  My legal matter was straightforward and didn't require Don's services, but we became friends and I soon thereafter introduced him to our gang of rebels and outcasts where he fit right in.

Don drank Jim Beam, always in moderation, smoked English cigarettes, Cuban cigars, when he could get them, and a pipe that he had inherited from his grandfather (he said), all of it in moderation as well.   He told us that he took his life's motto from the Russian novel by Mikhail Sholokhov titled Quiet Flows the Don.

And he did flow quietly. But his stories didn't. Don told us stories of his travels, adventures from Alaska to Patagonia and everywhere in between.  I had a chance to read his articles and hear his tales.  While written (and told) in a journalistic style fit for mainstream newspapers and magazines,  almost all contained mysteries, mystical events, unexplained phenomena, and borderline supernatural occurrences.

I don't remember much of it, all this took place years ago, and I don't know what happened to Don.  One day he just disappeared.   The law office didn't know where he went, and people who knew him told us conflicting tales, one that he ended up in an insane asylum in Chicago, another that he settled on a ranch somewhere in Canada.

Shortly before he left, he visited my pad bringing a fifth of bourbon, and we drank and smoked weed, listened to music, when I asked him about his stories.  I had always wondered how so many incidents, so many strange things, could have all happened to one man.   He told me. Pointing to his head, he said: "Made it up, brother."

Comedy Team

I ran into Roger, whom I hadn't seen for a decade and a half.  We worked together for something like two years, maybe less, drank beer and played pool on Friday evenings, until it all ended rather badly.   We started out about the same time, Roger in December, right before the company Christmas party when the management brought Chris Isaak to entertain the employees, and I in early February, forever regretting having arrived too late to attend that show which included Chris' original guitar player Jimmy Wilsey.  The manager, a lawyer by trade, assigned me to the same team as Roger, and soon we became a dynamic duo, twice as  productive as the rest of our colleagues, a feat noticed by the management, and, as things went there at the time, unappreciated.

"We should have formed a comedy team," Roger said, when I saw him last week, an idea that had occurred to me more than once since those days.

I could only nod in agreement.

He was the funniest man I have ever known.   Our job was hard, stressful, and as I mentioned, unappreciated, most of our teammates didn't last at it very long, quit and moved on to other things.  Roger dealt with the pressure using his natural talent for humour.  There was nothing that anyone could say to him that he couldn't turn into a joke.   I quickly caught on to his brand of humour and contributed with my own talent for puns, limericks and absurd asides.  Together, we were the life of the office.  There were times that we were on a roll with a non-stop comedy routine and Roger, who smoked, would decide to go outside for a cigarette break, so I plus one or two other guys, all non-smokers, would follow him, just to continue the act that was going so well.

"You could have been the straight man," he said.

I'm not sure how we could have developed an act, perhaps I'd be the straight man, or I'd be the banana man.  When I think of various famous comedy duos, the roles  in each of them are slightly different from all the other duos.   We of course didn't have a comedy club act, but thinking back on it, we could have developed one if the idea had occurred to us.

But it didn't.  The management above us changed, more than once, the company fell into a turmoil,  Roger became upset about some trifle having to do with a management decision, stopped speaking to all his mates, and soon quit in the middle of an economic recession with no other job prospects.

"Yeah, we should have thought of forming a comedy team!" I said to Roger.

47 Endings

A review of a book about Italian fascism published in the weekend Wall Street Journal contained the following sentence:  'a former mistress was locked up in an asylum with a diagnosis of "graphomania." '  The word 'graphomania' is catnip to me and I jumped on Google immediately after folding the newspaper.  But even Google, which we like to think knows everything,  couldn't help. I found that a woman named Ida Dalser, who persisted on claiming to be il Duce's wife (because the reference was about his mistress), was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1926 where she died in 1937,  and there was a film titled Vincere made about her life, released in  2009 and directed by Marco Bellochio, but nothing in English about the diagnosis. (Whether the information about it comes from the reviewed book or from the reviewer's other sources is not clear.)

Imagine getting arrested and locked up for graphomania.  Who of current bestseller writers would remain free to continue peck at her keyboard? And who of us billion of Internet keyboard warriors?  But then, what is "graphomania"?  I have heard the word used most often by published writers and journalists, including such luminaries as Milan Kundera, referring to it without ever defining the term, and, frankly, sounding as if they were envious of the proliferation of writers and would-be writers.  The term is however seldom seen in the English speaking world, it is more of a European concept to separate the professionals from the hungry amateurs.  I have my own private definition of it, and recognize it when I see it - bad grammar, excessive use of adjectives, clichés,  received or conventional wisdom, muddled thinking, and similar sins, but I've no idea if all that is graphomania by anyone else's definition.

One long article I recently read, posited that the difference between professional writers and graphomaniacs was in the amount of effort that each put in his writing. As an example, the author cited Ernest Hemingway who considered 47 different endings to his novel A Farewell to Arms (it was initially thought the number was 39, but Hemingway's grandson recently discovered an additional eight.)  Thomas Mann said that writer is a man for whom writing is harder than for other people.  Marcel Proust would run out of his house during a German air raid to find out the correct pronunciation of an Italian word.  François-René de Chateaubriand could spend 12 to 15 hours crossing out what he had written.  The recent novel The Orphan Master's Son took Adam Johnson six years to complete.  Such examples abound.  Writers sweat each sentence, bleed it out, graphomaniacs in the meantime produce volumes, and what better outlet than the Internet.  Let it bleed!  (Always, those Rolling Stones' references.)

39 steps or 47 endings, graphomania or Nobel Prize in Literature, don't you miss the times when you could just run out of the house to find out the correct pronunciation of an Italian word?

Spoonful and Aspirin Dreams

I dreamt that I entered a club in London called 'Spoonful'. It looked like a big high school gym, wide space, high ceiling. I was to play there later with the Rolling Stones. What instrument? The owner, a tall, lanky guy told me the Stones played there in 1968, long before my time with the band, and that he was as poor now as he was then. He didn't look old enough to me to have been around so long.  I went out for a walk with a friend.  When it came time to return, we couldn't find our way through the streets of London. No one could direct us. Not being able to find my way is a theme that returns often in my dreams.   Yesterday, I read a story written by a journalist visiting Bucharest who couldn't find the grave of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and didn't get much help from the Romanians, which was surprising as they are now revered by many of their countrymen.

I have noticed that medications which have nothing to do with your psyche, liked blood pressure, thyroid, pain pills, affect your dream life. A Mexican psychologist, whom my then spouse mistook for a Russian, once told me that a medication having to do with my psyche would not affect, would not change my thoughts. I didn't believe her, and, since as a psychologist she couldn't prescribe it, I never had a chance to test her thesis.

All of that happened. The rest I made up. I'll tell you how.

I am reading a novel by Italian author Claudio Magris, titled Blindly.  It is a difficult, confusing read. A man, or maybe two of them, relates the events of his life to a psychiatrist.  He or they covers two centuries, adventures in  several countries and on two or three continents, all of it fascinating while nearly impossible to follow.  At the same time, I am listening to the recent albums by a Texas singer songwriter named Ray Wylie Hubbard.   He too is a teller of stories, his songs are more like wild rants than Tin Pan Alley moon-June hit material (no wonder Ray Wylie has remained on the margins for four decades.)  Somewhere on the Internet he raves to whoever will listen, or rather read, about his current experiences, stream of consciousness stuff, all lowercase without punctuation, more fascinating tales.  And there, he recounts how he came up with the idea of a song titled "Snake Farm".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jNWPUFNA2U

And so, reading Magris and Hubbard inspired me to make things up out of scraps of memory, random observations and stories I read and hear about.  Making things up and stealing ideas is better than recounting stories of your real pain and misery, of crouching in a dark corner weeping, of making a fool of yourself time and time again. Let my missteps be mine alone to know about, they're none of anybody's business.

Voices

Voices speak to me in three languages translated into bad English, which I need to translate for myself into understandable English, I mean not necessarily good English, just understandable to me.  "Do you hear voices?" asked me Dr Z, who's now retired, informed me the Chinese doctor who sits in his old office. Retired is also Dr A, the surgeon who operated on my hand, messed it up when I couldn't move my fingers after two weeks, smashed the cast and operated again, the second time succeeded, and warned me that I wouldn't have feeling in my little finger.  On that prediction he was wrong.  Price paid for careless drunkenness while bicycle racing.

I was wrong when I hooked up with this woman whom a good friend called 'dame' after he met her in my absence, I should have gotten the hint then, but I was blinded, after all she initiated the relationship,  maybe women initiate all relationships, despite what men believe, anyhow,  afterwards the director of the club that she made me join told me that she knew the first time she had seen us together that we weren't made for each other. Why didn't she tell me then?  I remember I was wearing a leather jacket, Wranglers, looking like a Marlon Brando wannabe, David Beckham haircut, sneering at the stuffiness of this establishment, hell what did I expect!

I walk down the Avenue looking around me, passing a guy pushing a garbage can which he leaves on the side of a building and walks back, I keep glancing around, I see something across the street, a tattoo shop called "The Sacred Rose", next door to it a Japanese sushi restaurant, colorful signs in the windows of both storefronts, the man asks me if I'm lost and looking for some place, I tell him, no, I just see potential photographs, that's how I word it, he asks where my camera is and I tell him it's in my backpack, but I'm not sure it's there today, the backpack feels light and these DSLR cameras are heavy.  I don't find a picture in the scene, there have to be three interesting elements in every photograph I figured a long time ago, and here I only see one or perhaps two, so I keep walking, still looking around,, up and down.

I cross the street in front of the station and I spot a small silver cross on the ground, it looks to be made of metal, I bend down to pick it up, it sticks to the asphalt, it takes me a minute to get it off,  luckily no cars drive by, I know I have to have it, it's some kind of a sign, I peel it off at last,  it's thin, made out of aluminum foil, the patterns on it tell me it is a religious symbol and not a sticker from a fruit, vegetable or some other product.   I keep it, move on, lose it somewhere immediately after taking a photograph of it at home.

Walking Away

I met him again. The fellow I ran into on a walk yesterday afternoon. This time at his place of work.  In the morning, I drove to the grocery supermarket where he works, to buy a loaf of the sliced bread I eat for breakfast.   They didn't have it, it's one of those items that aren't delivered on Sundays, and I had to set the empty shopping basket down and retreat.   Walking out of the store I ran into him,  I still don't know his name, or he mine, I asked him "Where's your dog tag?" meaning the name tag that all employees there wear, and he said that he had left it at home.

Then he asked, "So you're walking away?"  I explained my breakfast toast mini-tragedy, he informed me about the delivery schedule, and then he said, "Did you ever walk away from a situation?" I like the way he thinks, getting inspired by what's happening around him there and then.   I answered, "Oh yes, not once, not twice!"

He said, "So have I, man!" And added, "And I'm not sure if all this walking away has led me to better places. It's not the same as running away, mind you, just walking away from the games people, women, play with you like you're a toy, or something,   I've walked away from the Caribbean, then from New York, not just from those physical places, but from situations there that I couldn't continue for some reason, or because something stronger was calling to me somewhere else, but perhaps I could have stayed and gotten into better situations, just like you theoretically could substitute another bread for the one we don't have on the shelf today. That's not what I'm suggesting, pardon me, just hypothesizing."

Ah, the chess player.

Botvinnik

I decided to take a walk, and six blocks from my house I ran into a guy I knew by sight from the grocery store where he works.  A black man around fifty, congenial and helpful when at the store.  We stopped and chatted.  "Do you play chess?" he asked. "Haven't played for a while, why?" I answered.  "You look like Botvinnik," he said.  The long dead Russian chess Grandmaster.  I remembered seeing this man play chess on the third floor of Central Library.  He told me a few things about Mikhail Botvinnik, dead since only 1995, as it turns out.

And then, he asked: "Do you ever see people on the street who remind you of your old friends from years back?"

"Sometimes," I said.

"I do all the time.  I see people, women, men I used to know in high school, close friends, girlfriends, way back when I lived in the Caribbean.  There is no way they could be here, and yet, I think I keep running into them, and they don't look like they ought to, thirty years older,  but about ten years older, as if they were thirty, thirty five at the most now.  Naturally, these people are not my old friends, but lookalikes, or near lookalikes."

"They say that everyone of us has a double somewhere in the world," I said.

He laughed. "Yes, and that double appears to be fifteen years younger than the original."

"Which would mean that we don't acquire a double until we're fifteen years old, right?"

"That makes perfect sense!" he said.

Nobody Knows You're a Dog

I was tired of being me, tired of my stumbles and failures, especially of my most recent Big Failure, and I decided to become somebody else.  These days it isn't hard to change identity - with Internet you can become anyone you wish, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, as the old cartoon reminds us.

Identity changes have always interested me in literature, from Dumas' Count Monte Christo, to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Antonioni's brilliant film Passenger.

And so, I signed up for an obscure Internet forum, created a new e-mail address and joined a social network there.  I uploaded a photograph of myself showing my face in the shade, and provided the required minimum of personal information, not all of it entirely true, plus a humorous while ambiguous introductory paragraph.  I was a new me.  Apparently the new me turned out in some way attractive to some, because shortly afterward I received e-mails from other participants of that forum, male and female, and proceeded to exchange correspondence with them, some of them, anyway.  I didn't have to initiate any contacts, people (dogs?) contacted me.

I continued to avoid revealing much about myself, and recalled only certain isolated episodes, embellished or not, without identifying their locales or my own personal details.  And I was a different person to different correspondents.  But not because of the different tall tales that I made up.  In fact, I made up very little, just avoided sincere confessions, except when it fit my mood.  Some of these exchanges led me farther than I ever intended, with women inviting me to visit them where they lived, on the other side of the continent or even overseas, and I began to feel on the spot, cursing myself for getting into those relationships.   And I wasn't as aware of what I was doing as this report suggests - I just flowed along without much reflection.

This lasted for months. I wasn't planning to travel anywhere, visit anyone, even if I half suggested to someone or other that I would.   Then, I fell ill.  Cold, flu, bronchitis, I've no idea what it was, but it involved high fever, weakness, much sleep and hallucinations.  I didn't see a  doctor, but I stayed in bed for a week.   It passed, as everything does, and I woke up one morning fresh and healthy.  And forgetful.  I forgot most everything about my other identity, about my correspondents, about the forum, its Internet address, my fake name, my e-mail ID there, and my password to it.  Perhaps with some effort I could have recalled enough to get back to it, but I lost all enthusiasm for this project, adventure, or whatever you want to call it.  I still don't know what these things were.

Fine Porcelain and Paper Plates

At my favorite cafe there is a shelf where people can leave unwanted books for others to pick up. A wooden case on the inside wall with four shelves, each to hold perhaps as many as twelve books,  two narrow ones for paperbacks, two wider ones for full size hardbacks, the shelf contents always changing with popular novels, non-fiction manifestos of years past, obscure economics treatises, no romances, thank you, this is a university town, but no Nabokov either. Last week I noticed an old paperback copy of Stendhal's The Red and the Black (it's still there), and one time I picked up a software instruction manual, which I immediately returned seeing that it referred to a computer program release a dozen years old.

Yesterday afternoon, weary of the intensity and relentless sameness of the novel I was reading there sipping my Earl Grey tea, sameness, understand,  not different from any sameness of any novel, long and short, that's just the nature of long books, and so, seeking a temporary change of mental images, I got up, walked up to the shelf, and picked up a hardback copy of what looked like a popular novel from the airport bookstore genre, its dust jacket giving away the category right off, with the name of the author in large, thick typeface at the bottom

Jonathan

Somebody

above it a cheesy picture of two silhouettes on a dim lit boulevard, and in much smaller letters the title in

Two Words

the famous author's reputation sells the book better than the title or anything.

I brought it back to my table and opened it at random on page 178, which by some cosmic coincidence just happened to be the same page number where I had stopped reading my top shelf literary novel, and I began to read.  The hero, named Darryl or Darrell,  I assumed the principal character of the novel, is thinking:  (recreated from memory)

I started out with a woman who loved cooking, prepared exquisite meals, served them with fine wines poured from crystal decanters, the food laid out elegantly on fine china, one hundred year old silverware, monogrammed napkins, candles and incense, she demanded that I wash my hands before siting down,  Haydn playing on the stereo, after dinner teas served in precious porcelain cups, sweet pastries, Italian liqueurs, the works.  

And how did I end up with a woman who hates the kitchen, uses paper plates and cups, yet somehow her sink is always full of dirty dishes, and when she does cook she burns the food because she goes to watch TV in the other room and forgets about it, then has to drive to town to get greasy take out, cheap no-brand beer, television still blasting in that other room, radio blabbering on in the kitchen, cats (three of them) meowing, neighbourhood dogs barking, next door neigbour revving up the engine of his Ford truck. 

Turns

As you wander through a labyrinth, with every turn that you take, you leave behind not only the path you chose not to take, but all the paths, surprises, choices and dead ends that the other path would have led you to. At least in a labyrinth, you can always back up and choose that other path,  still make those choices, as time and will permit.  It's only a game.

"Napoleon Bonaparte"

I  rid the house of the firearms - the Remington shotgun and the two pistols, one of them an antique Colt 45 that hadn't been fired in over 50 years, but I figured it could still be fired, so out it went.  Maybe that was a mistake, out here in the country where we have wild life - foxes, wild cats that we call pumas, and the folks I work with in the city call mountain lions, rats of course, some say wolves, but I'd sooner believe in werewolves than in the presence wolves around these parts.  One hundred years ago outlaws wandered these roads, today the only outlaws are people in nearby towns who build additions to their houses  unapproved by the county. Still, I haven't fired any of these weapons for thirty years except at the county shooting range in the hills, and I don't expect that I would have to fire them in the future.

But a house with a half crazy woman is better off without firearms tempting her overheated emotions during one of her periodic moods of explosive rage.  "Why don't you just divorce her and move out?" asked a neighbour, one of the handful of people aware of my domestic situation.  I would, but then I'd lose my job with the church in the city.  The church wants me married, what can I say.  They know nothing about what's been happening here, except that the children had grown and moved out, and our family never much associated socially with my bosses or co-workers, the distance from the city being one of the reasons.  So I'm sticking around.

"What are you scribbling this time?" she asked "Another story about guns for the slush pile at the New Yorker?"

"Yeah, another one about guns," I admitted, "Absent guns. For the collection".

She liked to tease me about the New Yorker, which printed one of my stories, and rejected six others.  Or was it seven? That single success opened a door  for me to the publishing world, and I was now completing another story for a collection to be printed next year, while I continued to struggle writing and re-writing  my Great novel.

She laughed.
"You always think about guns even absent ones."

"I don't always think about guns any more than Napoleon Bonaparte always thought about guns," I retorted.

"Do you know what Anton Chekhov said about guns?"

"No, what did he say?"  If anyone knew, she would with her degree in Russian literature, and her job at the University.

She said it in Russian, and translated into English "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

"Really?" I said, pretending I hadn't heard the quote or its variants before.

At that moment we heard a loud explosion outside, like cannon fire. It was the city garbage truck paying our apartment complex a Saturday morning visit.   The racket would last for another half hour as the truck proceeded to empty, load and compress the contents of all the garbage chutes of our  block.  I slipped on my sneakers, closed the door behind me, took the elevator down and walked to the cafe down the street.

The Wolf King

I found an old note among the stack of my papers.  The writing on it is obviously mine. Obviously, because it is unintelligible. Still, while I can, after some effort, discern what it says, short notes referring to jokes, four of them, I can not recall the jokes themselves. It's been a while.

I can however recall the occasion when I used this note, and will try to describe it below. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. As I said, it all happened many years ago.

I walked out of the cafe where I injected my daily dose of caffeine, and saw sitting at one of the handful of tables outside my good friend. I had prepared this note as a reminder of these four jokes for the next time we saw each other.  Our relationship at the time was mostly about relating to each other jokes we had heard and not much else.  I sat down next to him, he was sipping his espresso, reading the  novel  I had recommended a month or so earlier.   I remembered the four jokes without having to consult the note in the back pocket of my jeans and recited them one by one.

In exchange, he told me four jokes of his,  and as always we had ourselves a fun time. I told him then that I was out of jokes,  and was about to get up and go on my way, when a pedestrian approached our table asking if we could spare  a cigarette.

My friend pulled out a pack of Winstons, I my pack of Gitanes, and he took one of each, saying, "Thanks, why not!" stuck the Winston in his mouth and asked for a light.  I then reached for the gold lighter that I had found, some said stolen, the previous year while working at a downtown hotel, and I lit his fag.  He inhaled like he hadn't smoked for days, and then asked my friend, "What are you reading, mister?"  My friend flashed the cover of the book and said, "A book narrated by a dog."

"Ah," said the stranger, "I haven't read a book narrated by a dog since Jack London."

"'Call of the Wild' is not narrated by a dog," corrected my friend.

"Whatever," replied the stranger, "but I did spend time with wolves!"

"Oh," I said, disbelieving, "are you a foundling?"  I remembered stories, legends of children raised by wolves, was he one of them? I look at him more carefully now.  He reminded me of the photograph of John Phillips on the cover of his solo album The Wolfking of L.A., recorded after the breakup of the Mamas and the Papas quartet, the brilliant work hailed at the time by critics and completely ignored by listeners, a failure leading to the destruction of John's career.  The same pose, the same dangerous look.

He laughed, "No, I was a zoologist working on my Ph.D thesis up in Canada.  Befriended a pack, wrote about them, defended my thesis, got my degree and lost my job. I was too animal like, you might say. Or that's what they told me, anyhow."

He continued.

"I've been inside their holes, their caves, man. Once they're used to you, you become their buddy. But you have to earn their trust and never show weakness. Never.  Wolves will stay away from anything they don't know, so they have to first get used to you, and that takes time.   Once they approach you, sniff you, and get to know you, you have to go through a ritual with them.  Get on your knees, and let them lick your face, let them put their jaws around your head, put their tongues in your mouth, they are measuring you. Don't move, don't ever make sudden moves. After that, everything is copacetic."

"Like women?" said my friend, and we all had a good laugh. I let the stranger have the rest of my pack of Gitanes.

 

Dream Institute

Everybody's Writing

Everybody's Writing.  A conversation overheard.

--  Whatever it is that you need, love, money, time, it doesn't need you!  Remember that.

-- You oughta put this golden thought in your book!

-- Too late, it's already at the publisher's.

-- In your next masterpiece then.

Dreamtown

There are mountains and a sea where  I hang my worn hat.  The climate stays mild (in spite of all the apocalyptic hysteria out there.)   I wouldn't trade this geography for any other, though I'd trade it for a similar one somewhere else on the planet, if someone suddenly offered.  Fat chance.

There is a town in the foothills that I visited a long time ago, passed through on my way to the mountains or to the desert beyond, no sea and no views of the sea from up there, but it looked mighty attractive, so that I managed to remember the brief visit. Remember that it exists, but forgot its name and its exact location.  No memory for names. There was a pretty, hilly downtown there, Victorian architecture, greenery, a church, clean streets, friendly atmosphere (or so I thought at the time.)

More recently, when I was considering a move, I recalled my fond memories of this town and decided to try locating it online to check it out and see if reality would confirm the memory.  I didn't have much to go on, only the vague recollections described above, and I haven't succeeded in my search, I haven't moved (for some other, unrelated reasons.) Even with Internet's search engines, online maps, satellite and street level photos at my fingertips, I couldn't find this place.  Did I dream it?