Rest in Peace, Doc Watson

I frist heard Doc Watson on an album my mother owned, singing "Froggy Went a Courtin'"  I was too young to separate the musicianship from the personality of Doc.  There were interminable verses, filled in with Doc's funny voices and sound effects.  I didn't realize he was a great musician, I thought he was just someone funny that I'd like to know, maybe an uncle.  Here's a video of two lost greats - Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson playing in an impromptu pickup band in Doc's backyard.  It starts with a commercial, I'm sorry to say, but what the hell.  Listen to the music, but listen to the intro first: how completely ingenuous and without pretense these men are.  I stand by my earlier pronouncement.  They were great musicians, of course, but more than that, they were people you'd like to know.  Maybe in heaven I will.

Moping

Okay, I'll admit.  Last week I was moping.  I'm over it now, but I was moping pretty hot and heavy for a while there.  The reason was I learned I'd torn my ACL for the second time, and now over the summer, instead of running a triathalon sprint with my daughter like I planned, I'm going to have surgery and physical therapy.  So I moped.
I'm over it now, and I apologize to everyone, especially my wife and my friend Mike Burr to whom I subjected the intensest bombardment of mopiness radiation.
At this point I will digress to tell a seemingly unrelated story from my childhood, which at the end of, I will tie together in a way that will not only return to the theme of my torn ACL and my erstwhile mopiness, but touch on some universal of the human condition and give the reader a thought to ponder.
Here goes.
One Christmas I got a lunchbox.  Those were simpler days, of course, but I don't want the reader to infer that was all I got; I got a host of other goodies; nevertheless, it's the box I recall.  It was black with two chrome snaps, exactly like the one used by Ralph Cramden on the Honeymooners.  Better yet, it had a matching thermos with a twist-off cup and lid which I imagined carrying tomato soup.  School was out, but I played with my lunchbox all morning.  Actually, "played with" is too strong a phrase; the lunchbox was a passive though crucial part of my game.  I stowed it in my tricycle's back basket of and pedaled like wild around the carport.  I was heading to work!  I was running late!  I'd nearly left my lunchbox with its thermos of tomato soup!  In short, I was playing Ralph Cramden, or if not him, an amalgam of mildly comical adults in the midst of their busy lives with places to go and things to do, unlike me who had no better use for his time than pedaling a tricycle with an empty lunchbox around the carport .
I took a sharp turn and tipped over.  I was unhurt, but from the direction of the lunchbox, I heard an unexpected tinkling.  I unscrewed the thermos and discovered that in addition to its screw-on cup and lid it had another, unsuspected chamber which unscrewed as well.  When I did this, out issued a rain of little silver mirrors.  I understood nothing of the the principle by which a thermos maintains the temperature of liquids, yet I knew without needing an adult to explain, that in some way I had broken it, completely and irreparably, and that while it might appear a thermos to the outward and casual eye, it was a thermos in fact, no longer.
Nothing can match the matchless shame of a five year-old.  I told no one.  I picked up each silver shard and threw it in the garbage can, something in my throat and stomach as dark and heavy as the thunderclouds that rolled in just then to cover the sun.  I came in with my mutilated lunchbox and concealed it in a way that would appear I was only neatly putting it away, useless now and lighter by the weight of its missing inner chamber, and yet as heavy and joyless as the sky and my sinking stomach.
Even had I dared to share this crime with an adult, I could not have articulated my emotions, and I'm not sure I can now, but what so upset me was not just the thermos itself, but the news, which was still news to my five year-old heart, is that I lived in a world in which things got broken, and when they did, often as not, the guilt for breaking them would fall on me.  The adult world, I foresaw, was more than a mildly comical rush to important destinations: it was a world in which loss and shame were integral and increasingly frequent themes.
I think that's why I moped about my ACL (See, I told you we'd end up back here.)  Just the same news, still capable of disheartening me now that I'm older by a factor of ten.  Things break and tear.  Nothing lasts forever.
I'm heading to the Y today to do some weights.  I'll swim and ride my bike, and next year, by golly, I'll do my triathalon.  I'm fifty-three and a torn ACL can't keep me down long.  You get over an ACL. 
It's that first broken lunchbox you never get over.

An Open Letter to Vickie Anderson on Whom I Had a Crush in Ms Hussein’s Third Grade at Ft Pierce Elementary

Dear Vickie:


I do not know if you will see this letter, or if you do, if you will remember me. Part of me earnestly hopes you do neither. I sat one seat to the right and rear of you in Miss Hussein’s third grade class in Ft Pierce, Florida; I moved the following year to Georgia, and you had entered school in March, so our paths crossed only briefly. Nevertheless, I remember you well.

If you have our class photo, I’m in the red bow-tie second from the back, third from the left. I am smiling broadly, which means the picture was taken before the April Ho-Down. Next to me is Darren, my best friend, or rather who had inserted himself into that slot without asking; I was drawn to Grady, the gregarious red-haired hooligan, second from the right in the front row, but once during recess Darren struck up a friendship out of the blue, which I was too polite to rebuff. I knew letting Darren glom onto me ruined any chance for a real friend at Ft Pierce Elementary; because of his body odor that suggested he’d had an accident in his pants, others would naturally assume that either I had a bad smell myself, or – just as unforgivable – that I liked people who did, or – nearly as unforgivable – that I didn’t know the difference.

Please don’t think me callous and shallow for this, just the opposite; I accepted Darren as my sort-of best friend in spite of the social handicap entailed. My vegetarian mother raised me to be unusually sensitive of others; when passing the second graders en route to lunch, we traditionally chanted, “Second grader babies, second grader babies,” to the nasal tune of “Yanner-nanner-nanner.” When returning, fourth graders passed us, who likewise chanted, “Third grader babies, third grader babies.” I saw through the hollowness of this, and while not enlightening my peers about mindless perpetuation of pointless cruelty down the generations, I did not participate in the chanting either, which I think indicates my good character. Moreover, for Valentine’s Day, I deliberately selected my largest and nicest Valentine for Jackie, the fat girl whom everyone picked on. To be strictly truthful, I don’t recall anyone ever actually picking on her, but I believe many had planned on doing it, and I’m sure in the fullness of time, they did. I also admit that Valentine-giving in Ms Hussein’s class was anonymous so Jackie never knew whence the card came, but I’m sure it cheered her to receive what was clearly a very large and nice Valentine. In the spirit of perfect candor, I will go on to say I may have taken part in chanting “Second grader babies” one time, but I stopped after that first occasion, and I think my honesty in coming forward with this now, when I don’t have to, speaks very well for me.

I was too shy to talk to you, and if you had a crush on anyone, it would have been Grady, for which I don’t blame you. He was a swaggering rascal with a sense of rough justice for which he was universally admired. My one fond fantasy was taking your hand at the April Ho-Down and dose-e-doeing you across the gym floor, flanked by clapping third-graders. That was all I wanted or hoped, that I could hold your hand, which I knew would be cool and soft and fit in mine like a small tame bird. All week our class fashioned bandannas and cowboy hats out of construction paper, and festooned the gym with gaudy construction-paper chains. Ms. Hussein put on an album of grade-appropriate Ho-Down music, “Turkey in the Straw” and “Froggy Went a’Courting.” Your first dances, of course, were for Grady, but Grady was a rover, as we all knew, and soon his attention was elsewhere. Darren was dancing with a partner of his own, and I was alone. This was my moment. You were sitting at the sidelines, raising a paper cup of Hawaiian Punch to your pink lips, and I went over. I bowed in facetious formality and offered my hand. I believe you were on the cusp of accepting it, and the record, which had finished “Coming Round the Mountain” fell silent except for a sibilant hiss.

I have mentioned my mother was a vegetarian, these days quite common, but in the late ‘60’s still considered eccentric, one of the drawbacks to a diet of beans and rice being the associated flatulence, especially in young digestive systems already prone to gaseousness, especially at times of anxiety or social pressure.

Vegetarian farts have no smell; this is not just my opinion or wishful thinking, but a generally acknowledged truth. The report however, amplified by my standing slightly bent over and the echoing gym walls as well as the silence between songs, ruined whatever tender memory I might have treasured. For a few beats there was a lull, and then the record broke in with “Oh, Susanna!” which seemed an ironic commentary on what had just occurred, and then the gym burst into gales of laughter as I turned heel and slunk hot-faced to the punchbowl.

The class construed this catastrophe as a daring jest on my part, that I had been “saving up” and waiting for just the right moment to let fly in gallant mockery of all the sham pretense of April Ho-Down, and also in mockery and contempt of you, Vickie Anderson, the prettiest girl in third grade, and I was coward enough to let them do so. For this I am ashamed, not for the fart, which I couldn’t help, but for letting you and the others believe that I was making fun of you. My mother got a job in Georgia, and we moved away that summer, which came as both a relief and an additional burden, that I never got to mend fences with you or explain my actions.

Forgive me now, Vickie. Forgive me now.

– Man

Another Reason I Never Made it as a Cartoonist

My Monkish Fantasy

The other day I told Nancy I thought I'd like to try out being a monk.
She gave me one of those looks of hers I have so much difficulty interpreting, where the eyebrows flex and straighten, one side of the mouth goes up, and one side goes down, like she's studying a very large, multi-segmented insect and can't decide whether she finds it comical or repulsive.  "Yes," she said.  "Become a monk.  That's exactly what you ought to do."
She was in the process of cleaning out the silverware drawer.  Somehow every fork, knife, and spoon, as well as the inside of the drawer itself had become coated with melted butter pecan ice cream.  I know it was butter pecan because when she opened the drawer, she asked, "What is this?"  I came over and dipped a finger in the liquid and tasted.
"Butter pecan," I told her.  She had just returned from a business trip to Orlando and, as seems so frequently the case after coming home from such junkets, was not in the best of moods.  She did not acknowledge my helpfulness in identifying the liquid, and in fact seemed more displeased than otherwise, so I steered clear of her.
My monkish fantasy strikes me whenever Nancy is away on business.  There's a monastery somewhere nearby where laymen can check in for an extended stay to share the tranquil spirituality of the brothers.  Wouldn't that be lovely?  But then, why go to all the trouble of moving into a monastery when one can adopt the monkish lifestyle in one's own home?
Whenever Nancy's going to be gone for a week, I imagine myself falling into my role as Brother Man, a humble, godly monk, going about his daily routine with the humble godliness so characteristic of him.  I would start with a simple breakfast of oatmeal (I would not call it porridge, that would be overdoing it.) after which I would wash the bowl and pot with simple prayerful mindfulness of all the Lord's gifts, as I watched my neighbors, the birds, go after the suet treats I have hanging from the eaves outside the window.  Then, light exercise and tending my simple garden, until lunch, when I might have a leafy salad with berries, and on special occasions, chunks of wild-caught grilled chicken.  Again, I would clean after my repast, then journaling, reading, and meditation for supper, for which I would enjoy maybe a nice lean piece of fish, snow peas, and that little pasta that looks like rice.  Perhaps a single glass of picturesque red wine and one of those apples like Cezanne painted where you realize the apples in those days weren't as good as what we have now.  I would clean up a final time, give the floor a good sweep, return the broom to the broom closet, and read until "lights out," when I would pull the chain on my beside lamp (my beside lamp does not have a chain except in this fantasy) and sleep until my routine began again.
Somehow it never works out this way.  I get derailed.  I think it begins when I wake up.  I realize how foolish it is, and wasteful of time, to make the bed when I'm only going to unmake it by getting in a few hours from now, so I leave it as it is, as no doubt Jesus and Siddhartha once did themselves.  Then for breakfast, it seems equally silly to go to the trouble of oatmeal, when we have perfectly nutritious single-serve containers of yogurt in the fridge.  I eat a couple of these, fully intending to throw them away, but getting absorbed in Internet searches for important information and games of free cell, I somehow neglect this.  Lunch comes and I'm famished.  I don't have leafy greens, and actually don't care for that sort of thing, but it strikes me as almost as good to have a "walking salad," apple smeared with peanut butter and raisins.  I've already gotten out the peanut butter and had a sample tablespoonful, when I realize we don't have any apples.  Nor crackers.  Nor white bread.  Only an atheist will eat peanut butter on whole wheat.  So I eat the peanut butter straight from the jar along with handfuls of raisins.  A half-eaten jar of peanut butter with a spoon in it, a bag of raisins - some spilled onto the floor, where my office chair steamrolls them into large black dots - join the yogurt cups beside my computer while I hone my potentially-vital minesweeper skills.
For supper, I'm craving a good juicy rib eye.  I've spent the last four hours watching reruns of the original Dark Shadows, from which I'm gathering additional research for an as yet unspecified future project, and I find it laughable anyone could waste time on such jejune entertainment.
I cook rib eyes the way my mother did, thrown into the oven still frozen with the broiler set on high.  Knowing that dinner will be awhile, I get out the box of butter pecan ice cream.  Conscious that I still have not tidied my meager breakfast and lunch things, I decide to save dirtying a bowl by eating the ice cream straight from the box as my steak broils. 
The fascinating thing about Dark Shadows, a show with many fascinating qualities, I have begun to realize, is just how many episodes there are.  Although it ran for only a short time, there was a new episode each day, so there are hundreds of them.  They had gotten past the part where Barnabas Collins attempts to cure his vampirism with blood transfusions, and into the episodes with the parallel universe when I notice a smokey haze filling the intervening distance between me and the TV screen.  I leap from the chair, realizing the delicious aroma of cooking steak has become the delicious aroma of burning steak.  I turn off the oven and extinguish the flames, and enjoy my steak - carbonized on the outside with little bloody ice crystals at the core as I watch the further adventures of Colinwood.  The thing is, that the episodes move with such arduous, excruciating slowness; it's like watching an old man climb a flight of stairs: the cane goes on the first step, a pause for reflection, then the left foot joins it, another pause, then the right foot, a pause, then the cane goes to the second step.  Finally, I have to call it quits, as vital as this research is, because it's nearly midnight and we still haven't caught sight of the extraterrestrials the script writers have been hinting at and dancing around for the last three hours.
The next morning I arise, and knowing this is the day Nancy returns, make the bed.
I enter the living room, and then begins the tempest to my soul.  I think it's seeing it through her eyes that makes it so terrible.  Much of the wreckage I can account for, even if I don't remember it being quite as bad as it now appears, but some of it is frankly mysterious.  For example, what possessed me to leave all these clothes lying on the floor of the shower?  It's almost as if some evil and extremely messy vampire had visited and left his calling card.  The greasy steak plate, the yogurt containers, the raisins, and peanut butter are easily taken care of.  The odor from scorched beef is harder to deal with, and expending an entire aerosol can of freshener - which upon studying the label more closely proves to be hairspray - does little to amend the problem.  This however pales in comparison to the sight of the gallon bucket of butter pecan ice cream which I neglected to put in the refrigerator and is still sitting on the counter. 
Thank goodness, when I pick up the container, I discover it's empty.  It looks as if the good Lord is watching over me after all.
All of which makes me think of how pleasant it would be to be a monk for a little while.  I think I'd be good at it.

What Chickens Taught Me About Writing

We writers worry if writing is too hard. After pounding our heads against the same obdurate wall for too long, it’s natural to think that maybe we’re taking the wrong tack – maybe instead of pounding, if we felt along that same wall eighteen inches to the right, we’d find a handy latch to an unlocked door. Or maybe we’re working on the wrong thing altogether: maybe this story, or poem, or essay doesn’t want to be written. Or not written by us, anyway. If it doesn’t come natural, maybe we shouldn’t do it.

But we’re also worried if writing is too easy. If the words flow out like un-stoppered dishwater, then maybe dishwater’s what they are: filmy, tepid, thoroughly-used.

So is writing supposed to be easy or hard? When should we be concerned and when cocksure?

A couple of days ago, I opened the pop-door of my coop to check for eggs, and saw my chicken Sorche in the act of laying an egg, not as rare a sight as beholding the Eastern Gossamer emerge from her cocoon, but unusual enough to take a careful visual inventory when it happens. There was no mistaking what she was up to. She was not lying down as you might expect, but half-standing, knees bent at 40-degree angles. (You must recall that chicken knees bend backward to ours, for an accurate image of this.) Her breathing was calm, her beak set in a resolute frown, her eye – normally as expressive as an average collar button – wore a look of determination mixed with pensive reflection, an expression that I can only describe – and now as I’m about to write it, the word becomes obvious – as brooding.

Chickens do not rank high among nature’s nobility. When speaking of the avian kingdom’s glory and wonder, chickens do not spring readily to mind. They are not bright. They are poor flyers. Their plumage could not be called magnificent, or even gaudy. Seeing chickens trot across the yard for leftover grits will bring a laugh to the lips of even the most careworn. But at that moment, Sorche had dignity; I do not lie or jest, there was a solemnity to the moment to which I was an uninvited witness. I closed the pop-door at once, and waited until she emerged a few minutes later, worthily tired and a few ounces lighter; then I reached back in and extracted the still-warm egg from where she’d left it in the straw.

Here is the thing I keep returning to – how humbly yet seriously she went about this daily chore. Granted, Rhode Island Reds are bred to do exactly this, and I know she doesn’t choose to lay eggs, but still – ! She goes through the miracle of childbirth every day, and she neither complains, nor brags, nor frets if she’s doing it right.

And this is what Sorche has taught me about writing – it isn’t much, but how much wisdom can you expect from a chicken? It’s hard to articulate, but it has something to do with patience and humility. So I’m going back to work now; I’ll close the pop-door of my office, grit my beak, and brace myself against the impact of the muse, and I won’t leave until something comes out of me. And I’ll try to learn what every chicken already knows: just because it comes natural doesn’t mean it comes easy.

Another Reason I Never Made It as a Cartoonist

"I'm a little horse this morning."

So We Can Also Assume the Pope is Catholic

These commercials are very disturbing.  I cannot even tell you how disturbing they are.  After the adorable animation in which mamma bear brushes fecal matter off her cub's butt with a whisk broom, we get a demonstration leading us to infer that bears have dingleberry wads weighing up to one pound.

Thinking of Chris

Whenever we talk about our childhood, Chris recalls the various tortures she inflicted on me.  I do not deny these occurred, but they do not form as prominent a feature in my memory as they seem to in hers.  Perhaps part of the reason these incidents loom so is because my now-defunct comic strip, "Sibling Revelry," featured a brother and sister, not unlike ourselves, and I frequently drew from childhood experience.  Let's face it, bad stuff makes better entertainment than good stuff.
But sitting in the doctor's office waiting to have some fluid drawn from my knee (see previous blog) the classical radio station played an organ piece, and a scene from my childhood flashed back.  I do not know its name, but it was ponderous and turgid and you could almost see Lon Chaney's skeletal delight as he leaned back, elbows locked, pressing down the keys with heavily-veined hands.  It was a piece Chris and I used as intro music when we recorded vampire melodramas on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  We'd start off with a good creepy blast of organ music, then ad lib an encounter in an old castle replete with plenty of squeaky doors and crashing thunder (the latter of which required a good mouthful of spit to do properly, not unlike machine-gun fire.)
Another thing we liked to do was put on little skits for my mother.  I can't think of why Mur tolerated this, but she'd sit there acting for all the world as if this were the best entertainment you could hope for, as Chris and I improvised goofy rambling scenes about desert islands or detectives or whatever.  Maybe part of the reason was because Mur set us up to perform for Meemaw and Great Aunt Bessie whenever we went down to visit.  We'd have to sing "Senor Don Gato" or "The Bold Fisherman," which at first we dreaded, but later secretly looked forward to.  Mur was an early contributer to our love of being in the spotlight.
We were both avidly interested in drawing, and once Chris challenged me to see who could draw a better hand.  Our maid was to be the judge.  I labored putting in the parenthetic wrinkles on the knuckles and the little white scallops at the base of the fingernails.  Chris drew four aces and a king.  Chris won.
Chris began drawing these gorgeously funky words in the shapes of what they were describing, so that "bird" for example, looked like a bird, where the letters were so puffy and interlocked, all the negative space closed up.  You've seen the sort of thing, I'm sure, but in Sandersville, Georgia, 1970, it was the coolest thing since Sesame Street.  I tried my hand at it, but wasn't much good, so instead Chris and I started drawing mazes.  We'd fill an entire sheet of notebook paper with narrow twisting corridors, no wider than a pencil shaft, and present them to each other to solve.  What generosity that was!  An hour toiling on a labyrinth of coils and serpentines, that would be ruined once the triumphant pencil stroke found its way from the little bubble of "start" to the pirate x of "end."
All this is pretty random, and if you've read this far, you're a better audience than I deserve.  But it's the sort of thing that goes through your mind when you hear a snatch of music you haven't heard in years.  What would childhood have been like without my sister?  I cannot imagine.  She is in every corner and nook of my past.

More Proof of God

If anyone out there is curious, I have yet more proof of the existence of God.
I just found out that I've been invited to be a Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop this summer.  This is officially a big deal, and it makes you feel pretty darn swanky joining an elite group of writers who've shared this honor.  One has a tendency to blow on one's fingernails and brush them on one's lapel.  I don't know why one has this tendency, but it's definitely the tendency one has.  Then I was walking outside to put up the chickens for the night, and I saw a low-flying hawk.  Seeing hawks makes chicken owners nervous, and watching it, I missed a step and twisted my knee and ankle.  Just a sprain, but when I woke up this morning, I really couldn't walk.  I write this laid up on the couch, a bag of frozen peas on my knee.
We went to the doctor and he drew a syringe of liquid from my knee the color and apparent consistency of a raspberry smoothie.  This is how he determined I had probably "torn something."  Later this week, I'm scheduled for an MRI to find out exactly what.
Mind you, all this drama occurred because I stepped down funny.  This is not a sexy injury like playing soccer or rock climbing or something.  This is the equivalent of tripping over a penguin.
This is how I know there's a God; He's a big one for keeping you humble.
Thanks for the reminder, Lord.  Message received.

What Does Nabokov Look Like?

I've been reading a book on Nabokov, and I've noticed something: I have no idea what he looks like.  I wouldn't know him if I bumped into him on the street; not likely, I know, but imagine someone who admired Mark Twain, say, who if asked to describe him said, "Well, uh, I'm pretty sure he had a moustache."  Maybe it's just me, but look at these pictures and see if they don't all seem to be different people.  I mean, I know he's a bald white man, but is it really the same bald white man?  Hell, I'm a bald white man.  Maybe I'm Nabokov.

An Oldie but a Goodie: Caring About Characters

This morning, I'm reposting one of my old blogs on why we care about fictional characters.

I’m teaching my high school class The Great Gatsby. (In addition to being a world-famous and justly-beloved novelist, I teach high school. We all have little pet dreams, I suppose; mine has always been to be a high school English teacher; I just write novels to pay the bills until the teaching thing works out.) Anyway, you remember Gatsby, right? It was the book they assigned in high school only you just watched the movie and read the Cliff’s Notes. So we get to the part after Daisy, who is driving Gatsby’s car, runs down and kills Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby, who has been carrying a torch for Daisy for the last five years is naturally going to take the blame for the hit and run. And Daisy, that bitch – sorry, there’s no other word for it – is going to let him do it! She won’t tell a soul it was she, not he, behind the wheel, and she’s going to let him face, a legal expert tells me, five to twenty-five years hard time for a crime she committed.


The thing about it is, Daisy is nothing more than ink spots on a page, but when they’re arranged in certain configurations, it still outrages me.

This sort of thing happens all the time; we read about purely fictional creations – creations we know are fictional in a book with a big fat warning – “a novel” – and a disclaimer like, “Any resemblance between characters in this book and actual people living or dead is purely coincidental,” and in spite of all this, we still worry if Inspector Mudge will unmask the killer or Rodney and Darlene will find true love. That we care so much for people we know full-well aren’t real is like… Well, imagine a magician saying, “I’m going to reach through a hole in the top of this trick hat, through a hole in the top of this trick table where I have concealed a specially-trained rabbit which I will extract from the hat as if he had materialized from thin air.” And then the magician doing exactly that, and the rubes in the audience saying, “Gaw-lee…” as they rub their slackened jaws in stupefied amazement.

But stories get this sort of reaction all the time.

Have you ever shouted – or wanted to shout – a warning to a character in a movie. “Don’t hide under the bed! It’s the first place he’ll look!” Or been unable to sleep because you needed one more chapter to see if Bilbo was going to outsmart a dragon in a cave. News flash, Bubby. Movie characters can’t hear you. And in The Hobbit, there is no cave, and there is no dragon. There’s the word dragon. The word cave.

Humans have this weird, almost pathological, ability to empathize. We feel sad to hear a stranger has died in an earthquake, happy when some frumpy lump turns out to have the voice of an angel, concerned when a kid floats off in a runaway balloon. (Later we’re furious – but equally entertained – that the whole thing was a hoax.) At some point, we don’t even care if the people are real, so long as the events are interesting.

I think this surely must have started at the very dawn of man. Two cavemen – not Geico cavemen, the real thing – we’ll call them – oh, what’s a good caveman name? – Lamar and Loomis. They have been chasing this one mastodon across the tundra for the last week. Lamar got a good spear thrust in him, and he and Loomis left the rest of the tribe, trailing him, skirting the face of a retreating glacier. It has been a lean winter, and no opportunity for meat can be allowed to slip by.

Of course being cavemen, they have no concept of a “week,” they just know it’s been a long time since they’ve seen another human. They also know they lost sight of the mastodon two days ago, but they’ve been following its tracks. Loomis claims the footprints show signs that their prey is seriously wounded and weakening, but privately Lamar isn’t so sure. Loomis says you can tell a lot from an animal’s tracks, but Loomis says a lot of things.

To make matters worse, the spring rains come early and Lamar and Loomis take shelter under an outcropping. It is very cold, and they are wet. And it is dark of a darkness none of us in our light-polluted world can ever imagine. Shut yourself in a closet, put a bag over your head, and close your eyes. It’s darker than that.

The situation is desperate to say the least. So Loomis begins talking – just nonsense, anything to take their minds off themselves. Silly stuff, the first thing that pops in his head. There’s a guy named Raindrop, and he’s on his way down the side of someone’s face, and he runs into Flea. And Flea and Raindrop have a conversation, oh, about a far-off land neither has seen, called Big Toe, and the two of them decide to set off to find it.

And at first Lamar is just listening because you can’t help listening when it’s dark and raining and cold and you’re lost and your belly’s empty and you don’t know where your next mastodon is coming from, but little by little Loomis’ magic begins to take hold. Lamar begins to wonder, will they make it to Big Toe, and if they do, what will happen there? And Loomis – who, if you remember, is making the whole thing up – begins to wonder himself, and not that it makes their lives any better, not really, but in the cold, dark, lonely rain they find themselves wondering and caring about two products of their own imagination.

And that was how the whole thing started: the wonderment we have at a story.

Do Flea and Raindrop reach Big Toe? Do Lamar and Loomis get their mastodon?

A Few Random Tweets

Cardinal @redbird                                     1m
Whoit cheer, whoit cheer, cheer-cheer-cheer

Catbird @kittybrd1                                      1m
mew, mew, cack

Brown Thrasher @thsh101                      2m 
Smack, churr

Cardinal @redbird                                      2m
whoit cheer, cheer-cheer-cheer

Mourning Dove @sadbird                        2m
Coo-coo.  Coo-coo-coo-coo

Cuckoo @kookoo                                      2m

@sadbird  Cuckoo?

Mourning Dove @sadbird                        2m
@kookoo Coo-coo.  Cooo.  Coo-coo-coo.

Ostrich @ausieos                                       2m

Mook.  Mook.  Moo.

Cardinal @redbird                                     2m
Whoit cheer, cheer-cheer

Turning 53

Something very strange is going on with mirrors.  I haven't mentioned it up to now, because at first it was only a slight change, and then when it began to become noticable, I hoped I was only imagining it, or that the phenomenon was only temporary.  Later, I hesitated saying anything because I feared people would doubt my sanity because what I have to say is so bizarre, I myself have difficulty believing it.  No matter the consequences, I must speak up; what's going on with mirrors suggests something is going radically wrong with the space-time-continuum, something inexplicable that may threaten the very universe.
First, let me describe myself. 
I am five-foot ten inches tall, with green eyes, brown hair, and a 32-inch waist.  I mention my waist size because this will illustrate the puzzling and dreadful change that has come over mirrors.  I am not muscular by any means, but I'm reasonably fit.
When I look in the mirror instead of myself, there's a strange man.  He offers no threat and seems good-natured enough.  When I raise my arm, he raises his just as if he were my actual reflection, but he is clearly not.  For one thing, he's bald.  I, as I have mentioned, have brown hair.  What hair he does have, has a little brownish to it, but it's mostly gray.  I have nothing against bald men; long ago I resolved that if in the fullness of time, I lost my hair I would accept it gracefully, but I decided I would never go bald with two side-walls of hair over each ear and a shiny dome with a few stray hairs clinging to the top, like Larry from the Three Stooges.  And this is precisely the way the man in the mirror is bald, so you can see, it is clearly not me.

Moreover, his face has an unearthly puffiness.  It's almost - not quite, but almost - like my own face, only filled out, as if I'd gained twenty or thirty pounds.  It is not a face that would cause people on the street to run in terror, but studying it closely, as I have had opportunity to do, reveals a multitude of little horrors.  At the corners of the mouth, for example, are these marks in the skin - not tatoos, but little trenches or grooves.  One might almost call them lines.  My actual face is very smooth, almost babyish in fact, so unless a maniacal surgeon has been at work on me while I slept, there is no accounting for this.  Then there is this strange lose tissue joining his jaw and neck.  I do not know what this is, but it looks scarcely human, and leads me to suspect mirrors may have become visual portals to another planet, if not a parallel universe in another dimension.
When I take off my shirt, the result is even more startling.  Again, I am no Adonis, but I am reasonably fit.  In Romeo and Juliet, the nurse describes the handsome Count Paris, as a "man of wax."  The man in the mirror, however, resembles Count Paris if he'd been left in a hot car for several hours on a July afternoon.  There is sort of a melted look around the chest and torso, whereas the middle is thickened, and somewhat jiggly as if a semi-liquid substance were stored there.
If this had only occurred in one mirror, perhaps I might treat it as a harmless, if mystifying novelty: but it is not.  It is all reflective surfaces.  Even digital cameras have been affected.  I come forward with this now, hoping that others who have noticed similar alarming phenomena will speak up.  I don't know what, if anything, can be done, but I do know that we can no longer remain silent.

Times Are Tough All Over

A recent study reported that those in the Arts - writers, dancers, musicians, and artists - have been hardest hit by the recession.

To: Bill Wordsworth
Poetry Dept

Mr. Wordsworth:

It is with deep regret we inform that your services in the poetry department will no longer be needed.  This decision was made on purely economic grounds and does not reflect the fine service you have done for our company, but revenue shortfalls have required us to reduce our staff.  Some on the board even questioned the necessity of having a poetry department at Haliburton in the first place.  Your service in writing verse to commemorate the joys, the sorrows, the transient glories of our little industry will always be appreciated.  One of your haikus in particular stands out for me, I hope reading it reprinted here brings you solace at this time:

First azure, then black.
Tar streaks on waves, rise and fall.
Dinosaur revenge.

Wishing you the best of luck in your future endeavors,

David Lesar
CEO

Honey Do

Nancy is in Orlando this week at a conference, and I must admit, I was looking forward to some time as a "bachelor," when I'd have a little extra time to write and read, have a chance to watch my DVD of Bubba Ho-Tep and my only responsibilities would be scraping the steak grease off the stovetop before she got home.
Before she left, she said, "Don't forget - take up the trash Monday and the recycling Tuesday."
"Check."
"And write the cleaners a check.  They'll be here Thursday."
"Got it."
"And could you clean out the pool?  I told the neighbors they could use it Monday, but I want it looking nice for them."
"Right."
"And could you see what's wrong with the sprinkler timer?  It doesn't seem to be working."
"Will do."
"You may have to go to Lowes for a new one."
"I will if I have to."
"While you're at Lowes maybe you could get some new rubber stoppers for the rain barrel.  The old ones fell out."
"Good idea."
"Are you going to remember all this?  Do you want me to write you a note."
"I'll remember."
"Which day does the trash go up?"
"Tuesday.  No.  Monday.  I'll take it up Sunday night just to be sure."
"I'll write you a note."
So now I have a nice handy note reminding me of the various things she'd mentioned plus one or two more she happened to think of. 
It's almost like having her here.

Mothers' Day

It has been ten years this month since I lost my own dear mother.
Mur, we called her.
I realize now how much she shaped my life.
She was the first sounding board for my writing and promised to be my biggest fan and harshest critic.  And she was.
She taught me so many things: reading, chess, palmistry, poetry.
And always to march to the beat of my own drummer.
By always marching to the beat of hers.

Killer Openings

By "killer" I mean openings that kill your chances with an agent.
Agents must read through mountains - this is no hyperbole - of manuscripts, and learn to skim first pages with an eagle eye for any warning sign that says they need bother proceeding no further.  At the Grub Street Writers' Conference, where I recently presented thanks to the kind offices of my agent, Sorche Fairbank, one session was called "Literary Idol," a hilarious, brutal, and very useful exercise.  Writers submit first pages of manuscripts, which a professional actor reads for a panel of three agents.  As agents hear a line at which they would stop reading, they raise their hands.  When two hands go up, the reading stops and the agents explain their reactions.  I don't know how many pages were started, but it was quite a few, and only two pages made it all the way to the end.  Here are some things I learned.

Six Ways to Kill a Story on the Opening Page

1. Cliches.  Not too many of these showed up, but agents get more tired of these then the rest of us, being subjected as they are, to more frequent doses.  The problem is, readers are more apt to know when they're reading a cliche than a writer is when he's writing one.  Someone ought to invent something akin to a grammar checker that would also check for cliches.

2. Starting stories with someone waking up. The alarm clock ringing is a logical way to start the morning, but not such a hot way to start a story.

3. Over-the-top emotional reactions.  If you've got a scene fraught with emotional intensity - Joe says he wants a divorce, Barb says she needs an operation - that's all fine, but the reaction to it has to be measured and believable.  One agent referred to it as "amping up."  Don't amp up the scene with corny histrionics like screaming, throat clutching, tears rolling down cheeks, etc.

4. Lenghty description.  More than once, the panel of agents called a halt to a piece which was actually quite nicely written but devoted a paragraph to the wind outside, or the color of the leaves, or some such.  In general I find you want description folded into the action any way.

5. Paying attention to the wrong stuff.  If there's a lengthy expostion about the family cat, for example, and the agent senses the story isn't about the cat, the agent's going to figure you don't know what the story is about.  One agent advised knowing in advance what you want each scene to accomplish and sticking to that.

6. Purple writing that misses the mark.  Heavy alliteration and mangled metaphors tell an agent you're trying hard but not successfully. Tell a good story and tell it clearly is usually the best thing.

Biographical Notes: Part One, The Early Years

I have compiled these brief notes in hopes that when I achieve the pinnacle of fame, which seems my natural destiny, some future biographer will find them useful.

Man Martin was born in Ocala, Florida, in 1959, where his father was a high-ranking official, and his mother, a famous (some say infamous) socialite and taste-maker whose salon was considered de rigeur in the demi-monde of the Central Florida literary set.  During the anarchist uprising of '66, an assassin's bullet found Martin's father in the midst of composing his great monograph exploring the genus of the cabbage palm, and Martin's mother fled with Man and his sisters - his brother Homer had already enlisted in the Resistance where he would win several medals of valor and the Distinguished Service Pin - to Fort Pierce, where she opened a fashionable tea room, serving, among others, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and Frank Zappa.  But two years later, the Germans rolled in, and the Martins had to flee once more.  Man, nine years old by this time, had already written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein, one of his mother's patrons, who'd seen an unpublished manuscript, pronounced it a "work of genius."  Unfortunately, in the hurry and confusion, the manuscript was left behind.  Ezra Pound, who briefly occupied the house in the summer of '70 is believed to have found Martin's incohate notes and used them to fashion his own masterpiece, Look Homeward Angel, which he published under the pen name of Herman Melville. 

By this name, the young Man Martin had
already written several novels

Man's sister Helen had meanwhile discovered radium and won the Nobel Prize; unfortunately, owing to a bureaucratic mix-up, the check was sent to the neighbors, and times were tough for the Martins.  Within two short years, they'd eaten the last of their sled dogs, and were seriously considering a case of pickled beets they had in the pantry and whether anything could be done to make these edible.  Man's middle sister, Chris, writing under the pen name of George Eliot, had written some unflattering limericks about the commissar, in which she compared his nose to a corndog.  The family had to flee once more, but by this time, they'd done so much fleeing, they were getting used to it.  Chris changed her name to Nettie and embarked on an ambitious project to level the Taj Mahal and build an exact replica in the precise spot where it had once stood without anyone noticing.  It is unclear whether she ever succeeded.  Meanwhile Man had written five more novels and an opera.  Alas, the notes for these were also left behind, and when Man asked could they please go back and get them, his mother said, they couldn't turn back now, and he should have thought of that before they fled, and he'd leave his own head behind if he didn't have it screwed on tight.  The novels were later found by Wagner who turned them into operas.  George Bernard Shaw found the opera and turned it into a play.  This was was later adapted into a novel by Thomas Pynchon.  The film version comes out this Spring.

NEXT: Adolescence, A Troubled Time

The Freedom Trail

The Old North Church, whence Robert Newman
held up two lanterns, not as a signal to
Paul Revere, but as an additional signal to
the Colonists that the Regulars were coming.
(The British soldiers) When Newman got
down, British soldiers were trying to break in
the door to find out what was happening, so
he scooted out the back window by the altar,
called a "Newman" to this day in his honor.

I spent the weekend in Boston, where I presented at the Grub Street Writers' Conference.  I arrived early, with the express purpose of taking a walking tour of the "Freedom Trail" a two-and-a-half mile long course, passing some of Boston's most famous sites.  I didn't hire a tour guide, but, especially in the early parts of the trail, encountered groups of school kids led by somebody in broadcloth and a tricorn hat or some other period costume declaiming about some point of history.  In the graveyard where the victims of the Boston Masacre, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and John Hancock are buried I got to overhear three times about the inaccuracy of Longfellow's line, "The British are coming!  The British are coming!"  The standard joke at this among tour guides is that it would be like someone shouting, "The Americans are coming!  The Americans are coming!"  One tour guide improvised with "The Humans are coming!  The Humans are coming!"
It would be easy to go on in this vein, waxing comic about Boston's history, and there is something deeply silly about walking two miles to stand in front of a building where something happened two hundred years ago.   But by golly, I won't make fun of this.  Who's the poet who said, "Lives there a man with soul so dead that never to himself hath said, 'this is mine own, my native land'?"  Any American who isn't stirred to walk the streets of Boston just needs more stirring, that's all.  When people were just starting to consider the possibility of genuine rights, the Bostonians got it.  They opened the first public school in the colonies, stipulating that Indians be educated free.  In the same burial ground as John Hancock, so wealthy he once tossed gold coins at passersby from his phaeton, lie African Americans like Crispus Attucks and Phyllis Wheatley.  Bostonians fought from mixed and often far from honorable motives, but it also produced men like John Adams who acted as lawyer on behalf of the British prosecuted for the Boston Massacre.  They were not afraid, the best of them, to give their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor.  Walking the Freedom Trail reminded me of the best of what it means to be American.  God bless Boston.

Maurice Sendak 1928-2012

I am not the only blogger today who will write about Maurice Sendak.
I was seven or eight years old when my mother came home from the Ft. Pierce city library saying, "You're going to love this book!"
You will not need to wonder what book it was.
My mother's favorite part - always a poet at heart - was the line where Max sailed in and out of weeks, and for most people it was the monsters - "Let the wild rumpus begin!" - but for me it was the transformation of Max's room into a jungle: the dresser and wall paper that sprouted into lush undergrowth as Max danced, astounded at his own good luck or else his incantatory powers.
Sendak never equalled that book.  He continued prolific, and his last book was published only eight months before his death, but it is for Where the Wild Things Are he will be remembered.  To create a classic is no small thing.

Tom Lerher

I thought of Tom Lehrer the other day, and decided to share this videos.  Lehrer, a math teacher at Harvard, wrote a series of classic satiric songs for a show called That Was the Week That Was.  I owned Lehrer's records and listened to them, as a friend expressed it, "until the needle wore through the other side."  Tom Lehrer was like a Mad Magazine parody brought to life, he was my introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan before I'd heard of Gilbert and Sullivan.  Listen to "The Vatican Rag;" can you imagine The Capitol Steps - that rather insipid parodic group - coming up with anything this inspired?  Many of his songs were topical, such as this one, but he also wrote morbid delights such as "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" and "My Hometown."  What's even better - I cannot say why this should matter - Lehrer looks exactly as I hoped.  When I first saw Robert Benchley, after reading his sprightly essays, I was taken aback by a pudgy, moustached man, instead of the wiry lunatic I imagined must travel on stilts.  I still haven't gotten over Garrison Kiellor.  But hearing Lehrer, you imagine a cross between Harold Lloyd and Groucho Marx.  And by golly, that's just what he looks like.

Poultry in Motion

I have WAY too much time on my hands.

Opening the Pool

I will say this one time, and one time only, so listen up.
Anyone who owns a pool is a major dumb-ass.
They are ruinously expensive, not only in terms of money outlay for chemicals, equipment repair, water, but in man and woman hours.  Nancy and I recently opened the pool.  Pulling back the cover which had concealed it all winter, we found 50,000 gallons of green water, filled with an assortment of leaves, pollen, miscellaneous crap, and one poor drowned squirrel who evidently found life too hard to bear and took the coward's way out.  Then began, as Shakespeare puts it, the tempest to my soul.  Nancy and I began to vacuum the sucker out.  This means running a nozzle along the bottom of the pool as it drains out your water and sucking out leaves and detritus at a rate of one fistful every twenty minutes.  Did I mention we have a 50,000 gallon pool?  The procedure is monstrously tedious.  I once heard about a Zen master who trained his students to have patience by mixing sacks of barley, wheat, and rice, and having his students separate them back out with chopsticks.  Cleaning the pool is more tedious than that, with the added benefit you have to do it standing up.  In fact, I'm considering renting out the pool when we open it to prospective Zen masters.  Nah.  A Zen master wouldn't be able to take it.  He'd go nuts.
When I was a child in Fort Pierce, Florida, we had a pool.  I was only seven at the time, so my responsibilities were not running on the pool deck and lying with a straight face if anyone asked if I'd peed, so I didn't understand when my mother, Mur, would complain about it.  Years later, when we moved to Sandersville, Georgia, Mur had a dream, which she told me about.  In her dream she was relaxing in a chaise lounge, sipping a gin-and-grapefruit.  There was a beautiful, kidney-bean shaped pool with sparkling azure water.  The pool deck was bordered by mimosa trees, and Mur sipped her gin-and-grapefruit, watching the pink and white parasol-shaped flowers drift through the air and alight on the water, sending out delicate ripples in all directions.
A nightmare, she said.

Much Ado About Nothing

Benedick and Beatrice

The other night I took my wife out on a date.  This is kind of a big deal.  When you've been married thirty years, it's easy to forget how to set up a date.  But a friend of mine at school, Manning Kent, reminded me how important it is to find ways to renew the fun in a relationship, so I told Nancy to clear her calendar for Saturday night, and made us reservations at the Shakespeare Tavern.  As it turned out, we had something to celebrate - we found a tenant for our condo.  When we left for the show, I programmed our destination into the GPS, so it gave us turn-by-turn directions.  I honestly think Nancy was surprised when we arrived at the Shakespeare Tavern.  I know she was pleased.  If you live in Atlanta, or visiting, and you've never been to the Shakespeare Tavern, you really should go.  It's very casual, as Shakespeare should be; you eat dinner and watch a play, usually a production of Shakespeare.  We had a nice dinner, drank some beer, and watched Much Ado About Nothing.  It's a good show for a date; Benedick and Beatrice, played by Andrew Houchins and Erin Considine, got the best laughs, but the villain, Don John, played by Jacob York, was my favorite.  There's something so cool about a Shakespearean villain.  They actually going around saying things like, "I'm a villain," and York clearly savored every evil moment.  Don John is an Iago-type villain who pretends to be your best friend and have your interests at heart, just so he can get in your head and destroy your peace of mind.  Anyway, everything comes out alright in the end, although I can never get over the fact that Hero marries Claudio even after all the crap he said about her, but then, how else can you end it?  But the best part of the play, the very best part, was getting to watch it with Nancy.

Another Reason I Never Made It as a Cartoonist



"Don't mind me.  I'm just passing through."



Me Versus Freud: The Uncanny

Sigmund Freud is my dear close personal friend, but somewhat obsessed with S-E-X, and not surprisingly, he says that the experience of the uncanny, which is different and more subtle than terrifying or horrifying, has to do with confronting repressed fears, usually sexual.  He writes about the recurrent theme of losing one's eyes in the short story, "The Sandman," which I've never read, but I know there is indeed something particularly uncanny in this; I used to feel a little shudder of horror at a lullaby that ran in part, "Birds and the butterflies, pecking at his eyes."  In one version of Cinderella, crows peck out an eye from each of the stepmother and stepsisters as they enter the church to watch Cinderella's wedding, and then upon their exit, return to eat the other eye.  

R Crumb's strangely bloodless eye sockets in as Eggs stares futiley at his paper creep us out, as does the lump of one eyeball descending the crow's throat.  Freud, predictably, says this sort of thing represents castration anxiety, and, well, okay... what the hell, why not.  You can't deny there's some sort of sexual revenge going on in Cinderella, and we needn't doubt that Crumb, who digs the toe-jam from the darkest corners of the id - incest, murder, canabalism, cacphagy (look it up) - might have a sexual subtext at work.  But with respect to Dr. Freud (Siggy, we used to call him in grade school) I think he might be barking up the wrong complex.

The German word for the uncanny is unheimlich, which means something like un-homely.  When Dorothy tells Toto they're not in Kansas anymore, she's expressing the German idea of the uncanny.  Freud does some brilliant etymological analysis leading to the conclusion that the root heimlich means both itself, "homely," and its opposite - "secret," and so unheimlich, also is its own antonym.  The uncanny, for Freud, is the unfamiliar, which points us back to that which is familiar, but repressed.

This is all well and good, but the English word for uncanny is not unheimlich, it's uncanny, and uncanny's roots mean, not un-homely, but un-known, or more like un-encountered.  (I won't use unfamiliar because the root familial lends support to Freud's thesis.)  I think it's this measure of un-knowledge that constitutes the uncanny, and here I'm going to use Freud's own ideas against him.  One of our developmental stages is the acquistion of the reality principle: we learn that the world won't give us what we want all the time, but that if we can conform our behavior and expectations to the way the world works, we'll get at least some of what we want, some of the time.  This principle rests on the bedrock that reality is a real thing, that it is rule-bound and to a large degree predictable.  But what if the world isn't that way?  There's no reason why it should be, after all: reason itself, which justifies so many other things, can't be justified by reason.  What if the world isn't reasonable, what if it's irrational and crazy?  What if it's unknowable, un-encounterable, in short: uncanny?

That's why I think the thought of losing our eyes is so troubling: it isn't that they represent gonads, it's that they represent the ability to know.  When someone grasps an idea, he has an "insight," when he explains it to us, we "see what he means."  There's a children's story that always troubled me, not in spite of its ridiculous ending, but because of it.  A normally well-behaved brother and sister meet a gypsy girl who offers them a magical toy if they will misbehave at home.  In spite of the love they have for their mother, they do so, causing her great grief.  (The father is evidently dead.)  But the gypsy refuses to give them the toy because they haven't been "bad enough" yet, and so the siblings get into worse and worse antics, and the mother warns them, tearfully, if they keep it up, she will leave them and be replaced with another mother, one with a wooden tail and glass eyes.  (There's those eyes again!)  But the children don't listen, and finally do something so terrible, they're convinced the gypsy child will give them the toy.  They run off to meet her, but she isn't there.  They wait until the sun sets, but she never returns.  They go back home, disappointed and uneasy.  As they approach their house in the darkness, through the window, they catch sight of their new mother's glass eyes glinting in the firelight and they hear her wooden tail dragging on the floor.

The ending isn't scary in the normal way - it's not as if the new mother shows any ability to harm them, it's just that it's so uncanny.  It's illogical, it makes no sense, it isn't possible.
Freud would say this is sexual too, and ok, if that's the way he wants it, but I'll cling to my notion that the uncanny has more to do with the potential for terrible unknowableness than the fear of a wiener-snipping.  At the beginning of Night of the Living Dead a brother and sister are arguing as they visit their father's grave (Okay, Freud, shut up, you've had your say!)  And in the background, way against the horizon, a shuffling figure meanders slowly, weaving in and out of our field of vision.  He's so far off, we can barely see him.  And we know, we just know, he's a zombie.  It doesn't make sense that he should be, there's no reason for a dead person to be up and walking around - and that's what makes it uncanny.  One more example, Gregor Samsa, as rule-bound and reality principled as any man who ever walked, wakes up from a troubled dream to find himself changed into a monstrous vermin.  This is the uncanny and our peculiar horror of it.  When we were very, very little we struck a bargain with the universe that we would be have reasonably in accordance with its reason, but what if the universe never kept its side of the deal, and after all, why should we expect it to?  What if instead of an orderly if unsatisfactory clockwork of cause and effect, and this therefore that, and one-thing-at-a-time, it's a bedlam of eyeball-eating crows and mothers with glass eyes and wooden tails?

Going With

At my school a lot of people have started using "may" in the most bizarre way imaginable; when they make a request, instead of "Will you..." or ""Would you..." they'll say "May you..." as if they wanted to know if I had permission.  I think they got it in their heads that "may" is a more polite word and so throw it in as a sweetener like artificial dessert topping on meatloaf.  Many of these same people in another context drop F-Bombs until the conversation is a leveled and lifeless field fit only for cockroaches.
Just when I thought "may you" was the most nerve-jarring abomination to offend my ears, someone came out with "go with," as in "I'm going to get some beer.  You want to go with?"  Unlike "may you," "go with" is used by the sort of people who ought to know better, the same group who used the maddening construction, "waiting on line."  If you're one of these people, I apologize, but it really drives me berzerk.  What the hell do you think you're saving by making people's heads twitch waiting for an object after the preposition?  Like a lot of seemingly minor phrases, "go with" carries a large suitcase of unspoken meaning, "I'm too hip and casual to bother with unneccessary pronouns because my intention was clear the moment I reached 'with;' heck, I didn't even notice there was supposed to be a 'me' in there, but if it'll make you more comfortable, I'll insert a 'me' for you, if you're really that big a square, but wouldn't you really just rather hang out with a trend-setter like me who leaves out pronouns in such cool way and go with?"
I've been formulating a response for the next time someone springs a "go with" on me.  Here's what I have so far:

"Want to go with?"
"No, I'd rather stay at."

"Want to go with?"
"Yes!  Oh, wait.  You mean with you.  I was hoping you were talking about some other people."

"Want to go with?"
"Eat a large bowl of upchuck, you trend-sucking jackanapes!"

But I can't decide which one I like best.  Can you?

Franzen: Let Me Teach You How to Write Good

Merle Franzen writes conspicuously at the downtown Chamblee StarBucks on Side Street (just across the other StarBucks on Side Street).  He is the author of several self-published e-novels, an e-collection of poems, an e-cookbook, and is at work on an e-autobiography, tentatively titled E-Me.

A lots of people ask me if I have any rules for writing, and over the months since I've been a dedicated novelist I've boiled the whole thing down to five simple principles.
1. If you run out of stuff to say, you can always have your main character or someone think about stuff.  In my last e-novel, for instance, my main character Chet Barkesdale, Private Eye, spends twenty pages just thinking about what to do with all that lint that comes out of a dryer.  And I tell you, it's fascinating!  And when he stops thinking about that, he thinks for another ten pages thinking about the fact he's got nothing to think about.  I could write stuff like that for weeks!
2. Write what you know.  This is very important.  For example, I try to base all of my characters off of me in some way.  Like, you take Bart Chetsdale, Wild West Sheriff.  He's exactly like me if I was a sheriff in the wild west and had been trained in secret Indian ways by Bear Breaks Wind, a full-blooded Pawnee medicine man and then taught to sling two six-shooters by "Bad Bob" Bobby Bad, the ornieriest six-shooter slinger ever to sling two six-shooters.  And a lot of Bart's thoughts are just the sort of thing I think about all the time.  Like dryer lint.  Did you know it can be used for fuel?  I held a match to some of that stuff, and it went off like, WHOOM!  Singed off my eyebrows.
3.  Always have a surprise ending.  Nothing worse than a dull, predictable ending, which is why you got to be sure to do something different.  For example, in my e-sci-fi thriller, after twenty pages thinking about stuff, Clarke Dalebeck, Starfleet Captain, foils the evil Nimrodians by throwing a flaming lint ball in their faces and burning off their eyebrows!  No one saw that coming, boy!
4.  Use plenty of exclamation marks!  I don't know why more people don't do this!!  You take an ordinary hum-drum sentence like: "Look at all that lint."  You can make it a real hum-dinger by throwing some exclamation marks on it.  "Look at all that lint!!!!"  CAPITALIZING EVERYTHING WORKS, TOO!!!
5. If you completely run out of ideas for story, take something someone's already written and do a word search, replacing out all the names of stuff with whatever you want.  I've already written several e-masterpieces this way: "The Lint of Mount Kilamanjaro," "Moby Lint," and "Checksbeck of the D'Urberlint."