It’s Fat Tuesday in the Protestant State of South Carolina, so not much is going on carnivalwise except on Folly Beach, which celebrates Fat/Shrove Tuesday not in the context of the Christian calendar but as another excuse to lure consumers onto the island so they can get rip-roaring drunk. This lack of a Catholic context is underscored by Folly’s postponing its big celebration — Folly Gras — until the more pecuniarily advantageous weekend, this Saturday, the fourth day of Lent.*
*When this post was published in 2015, Follygras was still a thing. It was banned in 2019 because, as they say, things for out-of-hand.
The origins of Carnival are obscure; some anthropologists tie the festivities to the ancient Italian tradition of Bacchanalia (see Livy for some hyper-ventilated descriptions of the festivities) while others dismiss the connection as spurious. Etymologically, most agree that carne — meat — comprises to the root for the celebration, which features feasting and in some cases nudity — chili con carne and carnal knowledge.
Queen Victoria
Sophie Tucker
The ancient celebration of Bacchanalia embraced — if Livy can be believed — a leveling of the social playing field, allowing plebeians to run free through the streets mixing with their so-called social superiors, and Carnival’s tendency for disguise might be akin to this earlier democratization of social hierarchy. Who is that behind that elaborate mask, Rush Limbaugh or the Leatherman, Queen Victoria or Sophie Tucker?
Although I’m not Catholic nor have given up anything for Lent since the ’60’s, I like the counterbalancing of Carnival and Lent as mythic antitheses — each in its way helping us to come to terms with death and therefore life.
Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?
Yeats “Vacillation”
So, on that bright note, I’m headed down to Center Street to see what’s going down. Who knows, maybe the Leatherman will show up.
It appears that handsome, parabola-jawed NBC anchor Brian Williams has gotten himself into a fecal tonne of trouble by claiming he was on a helicopter shot down by insurgents in Iraq during Baby Bush’s war. In fact, Williams flew in a helicopter trailing the one that got shot down. His helicopter did land next to the downed chopper, and they were stuck in the desert for a couple of days getting blasted by a sandstorm so it ain’t exactly life he’s saying he was in one of the Twin Towers on September 11 or that he’s shot smack with William Burroughs.
Unlike many in the press with their pitchforks and torches, I don’t see why enhancing a personal story should disqualify Williams from sitting behind a desk and reading from a teleprompter text that other people have written about what has happened elsewhere — about that plane going down in a distant ocean, that aide worker’s beheading, that great grandmother’s going back to community college at 85 to learn keyboarding — events that he had nothing to do with and therefore couldn’t be exaggerating — that is, unless he is a congenital liar prone to extemporaneous embellishments of teleprompter text.
[Cue Williams with extemporaneous additions in italics]: An 85-year-old grandmother pregnant with quintuplets isn’t standing on her laurels as we see in this next segment.
I can see, though, why some military people and imbedded reporters might resent Williams’ false claims of bravado, and I do think his mealy-mouthed self-serving apology hasn’t done him any favors:
On this broadcast last week, in an effort to honor and thank a veteran who protected me and so many others following a ground-fire incident in the desert during the Iraq War, I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago. It didn’t take long to hear from some brave men and women in the air crews who were also in the desert. I want to apologize: I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the desert. This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran, and by extension: our brave military men and women — Veterans everywhere — those who have served while I did not. [my emphasis]I hope they know they have my greatest respect. And also now my apology.
According to Williams, the fiasco is merely a thank-you note gone cruzy (a word coined by a student of mine in the 80’s that means exactly what it sounds like it means).
Enough about Williams, though, let’s talk about someone more interesting — me. As my regular readers know, I touched upon the topic of “misremembering” just TWO POSTS ago and argued that it’s very possible to imagine having done something interesting and for that imagined event to migrate into the legitimate memory file in the metaphorical hard drive of the mind.
You’re absolutely, positively certain it happened and probably could pass a polygraph to that effect, but as it turns out, your memory is merely an illusion.
Terrified that I too might get called out on faux memories of my own, I’ve gone back and investigated several of my exotic remembrances, and while I find the vast majority to be true, I have also discovered that I’ve been misleading people for decades about a brush with a major celebrity that ends up being a brush with a very minor celebrity. Of course, there’s nothing more sacred to a blogger than his credibility, so want to set the record straight.
So I’m going to offer that memory, explain how it got, to use Williams’ term, “conflated” with wishful thinking. Furthermore, I’m going to offer an apology that places the blame where it rightfully belongs.
Here goes.
note the catwalk between the buildings
It’s a sunny brisk December weekday in the late ’50’s, and Mama has let my brother David. my aunt Virginia, and me skip school to accompany her to Charleston to visit her Aunt Ruby who lives on Warren Street right down from Condon’s Department Store where Santa Claus sits in the middle of the catwalk that bridges the two Condon buildings across the street from each other.
After our Santa visit, we go down King to Woolworth’s for lunch and find seats at the counter and bask in that unique Woolworth lunch counter odor of mayonnaise mixed with fried food. As we sit there, a beautiful blonde with cherry lipstick swishes her way past us and takes a seat with her companion, a hatchet-faced man in a fedora.
Virginia, my aunt but only six years older than I, elbows me and asks, “Do you know who that is?”
“No,” I say, “but she sure is pretty.”
It’s Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. Go ask them for their autographs.”
“I’m scared to.”
Virginia digs her fingernails into my skinny arm, penetrating to the bone, so I get up and ask the couple for their autograph.
“Why in the world would you want my autograph, sweetie pie?” the woman asks while her companion stares down at his menu.
“Well, aren’t you famous?”
The woman smiles wryly, reaches for a napkin and signs it, “Bambi Jones.”
I take it back and say, “It’s not Marilyn Monroe.”
Virginia grabs the flimsy napkin and peers angrily at it. “Oh yes it is,” she says. “That’s the name Marilyn uses to check into hotels so people won’t invade her privacy.”
So for years now, I’ve been telling people I bumped into Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in a Woolworth’s.
Bambi Jones
However, after some digging, I have sadly discovered that Bambi Jones was not the faux nom Norma Jean/Marilyn used when traveling but the name of a platinum-haired stripper whom I guess could have been mistaken for Marilyn Monroe by a 13-year-old aunt desperate for some color in her otherwise dull, black-and-white existence.
Okay, now for my heartfelt apology:
First, I’d like to apologize for my mother’s liberal parenting. The skipping school and going to see Santa was all her idea, and, of course, if she had been a more conventional mom and made me go to school that day, I never would have found myself in the compromised position of being seven and asking a stripper for her autograph.
Furthermore, I’d like to apologize for Virginia’s mistaking Brandi for Marilyn, which is the genesis of my disseminating a falsehood that I’ve spread at family reunions, cocktail parties, and most notably at Woodstock where after taking a triple double hit of windowpane, I told and retold the story for 12 consecutive hours, thus depriving myself the pleasure of witnessing Ten Years After’s killer performance of “I’m Going Home” and costing me a half-dozen friends.
Furthermore, I do sincerely apologize for trying to make your life a little more interesting by putting you several degrees of separation closer Marilyn and the Joltin’ Joe, and I double apologize for now disillusioning you.
Unlike Chris Christie, whose staff immediately began backpedaling when he declared Monday that parents need “a measure of choice” in the question of whether or not vaccinate their children, Duke University trained physician Ron Paul called it like he heard it:
These two extroverted polio victims clearly don’t suffer from Autism
“I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”
He’s probably also heard that evolution is a myth, that earth temperatures aren’t trending upward, and that Davie Crockett “killed him a bear when he was only three.”
Yet Paul comes off almost squishy compared to Wisconsin Representative Sean Duffy who jumped into the fray like a foamy-mouthed unvaccinated Rottweiler.
“I want [whether or not to vaccinate my children] to be my choice as a parent,” he said, adding, ” “I know my kids best. I know what morals and values are right for my children. I think we should not have an oppressive state telling us what to do.”
That’s right. I don’t want no damn government telling me that I can’t have my first grader walk 40 blocks to school by himself or that I can’t leave my dog in my car in the parking lot of my megachurch* on a sweltering Sabbath or that I can’t hold my two-year old daughter in my lap while I weave in and out of traffic on my moped.
*USA Today reports that “like-minded parents who refuse vaccines have clustered in the same communities.
“In August, for example, a visitor who had traveled abroad infected 15 people [with measles] at a Texas megachurch. One of those infected was a 4-month-old baby, too young to have received a first measles shot.”
Counterintuitively, Marin County California is also a likely place to cop a case (see below).
Of course, what prompted this debate is the recent outbreak of measles, a disease that, according to consumer healthday.com, had been essentially eradicated from the US by 2000. In fact, there have been more reported cases of measles in January of 2015 (84) as there were in all of 2013 (55).
A debunked study linking vaccinations to autism has influenced more and more parents not to inocculate their offspring, which I’m sorry to say, has delighted some on the far far left who are hoping that the resurgence of diseases like smallpox, polio, and whooping cough could kick natural selection in high gear and decimate the populations of red states, which in a decade or so could profoundly alter the electoral landscape in the liberals’ favor.
Natural selection at work.
What they don’t understand, though, is that a certain species of liberal also refuses to vaccinate her children, she the flipside of the yahoo coin. For example, Pediatrics Publications reports in a 2000-2011 study of California immunization rates that liberal Marin County California had an “underimmunization” rate of 17.9% whereas Santa Clara County had an underimmunization rate of only 9,2%. Also, unbelievably, “[e]ach percentage point increase in the percent of persons with graduate degrees increased the odds of underimmunization by 2.63.”
Interestingly, higher percentages of Asians and Hispanics are fully immunized .
Nevertheless, the Democrats are jumping all over Christie, Paul, and the like with Hillary and Obama both declaring they believe in science and that vaccinations work. I guess they figure the vegan environmentalist will vote for them anyway.
But, hey, speaking of dogs, did you know there’s such a thing as dog autism? If you’re too lazy TO GOOGLE IT, just check out the accompanying photo.
My late rescue dog Saisy was, as they say, on the spectrum. She avoided eye contact, wouldn’t chase a ball, and snapped at you if you petted her too long.
Could it be that the disorder was a result of her distemper shot or rabies vaccination?
Or could it be that she had been starved, beaten, and tethered to a two-foot chain by her previous owners?
Nothing screams Late Empire Grotesquerie quite like the Super Bowl with its pompous Roman numerals, its pagan half-time extravaganza, its skyboxes stuffed with scores of corporate Trimalchios guzzling and gorging themselves.
Expect a trained raptor to circle the field, a phalanx of fighter jets to scorch overhead in a metaphorical flex of Uncle Sam’s biceps; expect some recording star to over-do the national anthem and several former players or coaches to move their hands robotically as they analyze an interception with all of the gravitas of professors dissecting the fall of the Soviet Union or Lee’s machinations at Gettysburg.
Expect scores of commercials (see below). Some clever, some not. A 30 second spot costs about 4.5 million, or, if you prefer, $150K per second, which, unlike raising the minimum wage, will benefit companies, not hurt them.
Oh yeah, the game. It will be played indoors in a desert in Arizona. Expect four 15-minute quarters elongated by TV timeouts for the long-awaited commercials (see above) that will be subject of many a conversation among coffee swilling workers on one of the most depressing Mondays of the year.
At halftime, don’t count on any wardrobe malfunctions from Katy Perry or Missy Elliott, whoever they are. You can count on, however, fireworks, which cost a mere $2K per minute, and, also throughout the broadcast expect to see attention-desperate adults dressed like lizards, pirates, etc. so they can get on TV.
After touchdowns, I predict the scorer will spike the football or vogue or dance or all of the above.
After the game, expect to be battered by a barrage of clichés mumbled by players taking very shallow breaths.
Prediction: Most of the people in the skyboxes will be European Americans; most of the players on the field will be African Americans.
I’ve come to distrust memories, which, if you want to get technical, are basically chemical/electric configurations warehoused somewhere, somehow in the brain. Over the course of my six decades, I have not always consumed the recommended daily allowance of vitamins.* I also plead guilty to attempting to blunt the pain of my existence by drinking more than the recommended daily allowance of malted beverages — a combination of behaviors that I suspect over the course of a lifetime might fray synapses, make brain chemicals go bad — might muddy memory, desire, dream, daydream.
*My mistyping of vitamins was auto-corrected to “citizens.”
For example, it seems that every time I tell a story, my wife Judy has a different, more prosaic memory of the events, like the tattoo on the palm of the hand of the panhandler not actually being on the palm of his hand but on his wrist.
When I’m telling the story, I’m sure I’m right — can see the swastika clearly slashing across the wrinkles of his palm — but I’ve been proven wrong so many times I’ve lost virtually all confidence in my recollection of events.
This lack of confidence in the reality of my memories is more pronounced the further back I go. For example, did I dream this up, or was there in my hometown of Summerville, SC a [what in those days was called] colored man who travelled the streets in a mule-pulled buggy equipped with automobile tires? In my mind’s eye he’s wearing a slouching felt hat. But who knows? Maybe I’m confusing him with the image of Mississippi John Hurt on the album cover.
Then there was a [what in those days was called] retarded man whom everyone called Pepsi Cola, because he’d come up to you — in this case me, an 8-year-old — and ask you to buy him a Pepsi Cola. I think even though he was a grown man, he lived with his mother, so he didn’t roam around the town but might accompany her to the Piggly Wiggly where he’d wander off. You could tell he wasn’t “right” by his head bobbing and slurry annunciation and the repetitive, obsessive poverty of his diction.
But the absolute king of the Summerville town [what in those days were called] idiots was a man whose Christian and surname I’m not going to repeat for his family’s sake but whom everyone called Beakie.
Although he seemed much younger than my mother, she told me that they rode the same school bus and that he would try to impress the girls by sticking pencils so deep into his gums that they would embed and stick out.
In my junior high days, Beakie rode a bicycle back and forth along the sidewalks of Summerville, and he wore national guard fatigues — or was it that he only wore a national guard hat, the kind that Fidel Castro wore back in the day?
Anyway, what earned Beakie his notoriety was that he would trade firecrackers to naive newcomers to town for a pair of their underwear and a photograph of them. He would say, “I’ll give you 50 pack of firecracker for your drawers.” If successful in the transaction, he would tie the underwear (always tightie whities) behind his bike, place the photograph of the victim in the underwear, and pedal his bicycle all over town.
There was a band in town who actually played a version of “For Your Love” with these lyrics:
For your drawers, for your drawers,
I’ll give you 50 pack . . .
It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Is my memory of Beakie coasting by on his bicycle dragging drawers and a polaroid of some sucker a legitimate memory or concoction?
This evening, I thought I’d take a break from ranting about the vast abyss of metaphysical meaninglessness and instead whine about minutia — first world problems — those irritations that seem like big deals because our having plumbing, heat pumps, disposable income, and oral hygienists at out beck and call has spoiled us, as my grandmama used to say, rotten.
For example, aptly named Yahoo, the homepage I more or less am forced to use because it’s tied to my email account, has turned into little more than a tabloid, a digital National Enquirer. The top story under a blue banner blares this eye-catching headline: “Dwarf Stripper Finds Love with Army Sergeant.”
Beneath the photo of that tiny temptress is a headline that provides the shocking revelation that Mr. Pawdy Johnny Manziel’s teammates consider him a turd. (I might be wrong about this, but I think Manziel had more missed team meetings than completed passes in the 2014 campaign).
Oh look! SNL’s Blake Shelton will try anything! Okay, Blake, here’s a challenge: see if you can steal the dwarf stripper from her true love, the Sergeant.
Further down, I could, if I dared, click on the link that invites me to “take a Luminosity fit test,” to learn just how close I am into slipping into early dementia, but I dare not, because not only don’t I want to know, but also I’m terrified that if I took the test, the science team with “40+ years of combined experience” would start bugging me with emails for the rest of my non-Alzheimer-ridden life. Wow, 40+ years of combined experience! Given that six scientists are featured on the site, they average an eerily Satanic 6.666666 years each!
After listening to the SOTU address the other night, I’ve decided that If I had the dictatorial power to outlaw any adjective in contemporary English usage, it would be 21st Century – as in 21st-century economy, 21st-century technology, 21st century classroom.
After all, we’re a decade and a half into the century, so, c’mon, let’s drop the term and simply say current economy, current technology, etc., or future economy, future technology. I’m certain no one will think you’re talking about the 5th century BCE when the conversation turns to contemporary pedagogical practices.
As a teacher, I hear the phrase 21st Century education or 21st century classroom virtually every day, thanks, I suspect, to Thomas Friedman,* whose bestseller The World Is Flat spawned scores of educational entrepreneurs seeking fortunes by informing parents and teachers in books and lectures that books and lectures are relics of the past.
21st education, they say, demands “new building blocks for learning in a complex world,” and for students “to survive and thrive” in “[this] complex and connected world,” teachers must ditch abaci, slide rules, TRS-80s, and equip classrooms with state of the art technology. We need to abandon lectures and tests and embrace project-based, collaborative learning so we can produce technologically literate capitalists who, though they might think the Ottoman Empire is an HBO mini-series, know how to collaborate and find answers to their questions in a rapidly changing, increasingly interdependent world.
You see, I got the rap down myself.
my classroom
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against technology. For example, in the accompanying photo of my classroom, you can see I use a table and chairs.
(Technology is, after all, defined as “the embodiment of a technique,” so strictly speaking chalk, slate blackboards, bobby pins, and bongs all fall under the category of technology).
Tables, invented by the Egyptians circa 3300 BCE, are not common in contemporary classrooms, unlike puzzle-like individual desks that interlock in threes for group work; nevertheless, I find that having students sitting in an oval facing one another facilitates polite discussions, as King Arthur himself realized, he being on the cutting edge of 6th century CE innovation.
Around the table we can tackle a subject in depth, learn from each other, disagree, counter argue, explain, and question without the distraction of open laptops and cell phone notifications. And, by the way, how do you efficiently provide students with all the information they need to fully understand a comprehensive subject without lecturing? How am I going to provide them with an overview of 18th Century British culture unless I explain empiricism, deism, coffeehouses, etc? And by lecture, I mean Socratic lecturing, asking questions, soliciting opinions, not merely standing there behind a lecturn droning on about Juvenalian satire or neoclassic architecture.
As far as introducing students to technology, it seems to me that the authors of these books must not hang around many 21st century children. Whenever I have problem with hard or software, I can count a student coming quickly to my aid, and it has been my experience that sometimes they are even more adept than our IT department (which is excellent) in quickly finding a solution.
On the other hand, their vocabularies have shrunk appreciably since I started this gig in 1985, as have their attention spans, which I blame on quick-editing on Sesame Street and ear buds. (Click HERE on my invaluable guide to childrearing).
Of course, this minor irritation of people echoing the 21st century cliché is bound to abate as we get further and further into the century. I suspect that the denizens of the American dystopia of 2075 will have stopped using 21st-century as an adjective, as they scrounge around the depleted planet exercising their 2nd Amendment rights because their grandparents voted for politicians who didn’t believe in science, but, alas, I won’t be around to enjoy not hearing it.
*The same Tom Friedman who from the Op-ed pages of the NY Times urged us to invade Iraq and depose Saddam because it would engender the spread of democracy across the Middle East. So much for his soothsaying.
Last spring, I drove my 83-year-old Mama and her 83-old-friend Jean Thrower to the funeral home for Mary Boyle Limehouse’s visitation. Afterwards, I took them out to eat, and for some reason, they were talking about all the new cars on the road and how the auto industry must be booming. Perhaps this is something you notice in a small town like Summerville, South Carolina, because I hadn’t noticed that Charleston’s roads were suddenly teeming with the latest models. Anyway, during this conversation, Jean uttered a word I hadn’t heard in decades – swanny. “I swanny,” she said, “I’ve never seen so many new ca-ahs,” i.e., cars.
Right then and there, I promised myself I was going to video her and Mama’s having a conversation about their childhoods so I could possess an auditory keepsake of their disappearing accents and locutions, and Mama convinced Jean to agree, but I never got around to it, and, of course, now it’s too late, because Mama’s on her deathbed, though Jean is still hale and hardy.
Yesterday, I heard another word you don’t hear much any more – commotion – as in “She doesn’t need all this commotion; what she needs is peace and quiet,” so I’ve decided to start a list of old Lowcountry Southernisms and provide a definition and a sentence that shows the words in context. Of course, because I’m lazy, I’m going about it in piecemeal fashion, adding them when I hear them, but here’s a start.
South Carolina Lowcountry Locutions
Bo-Gator – n., (pronounced bo-gatah) a male, often a term of affectionate greeting. You still hear people round here call males bo, but now, it’s more often bro, which flies in the face of most linguistic evolutions because the trend is usually towards simplification. My pal Steve Smoak, the bartender at Rue de Jean, still says, bo, but I haven’t heard anyone say bo gator since high school.
Commotion, n. irritating noise and activity. This word I doubt is a Southernism, but I don’t remember hearing a person “from off” using it, nor do I nowadays hear anyone using commotion all that often, which is too bad because it sounds like what it is.
Johns Island Dah circa 1950
Dah, n. African American nanny. Why so many people in Charleston developed a geechee brogue and why it’s dying out. When I first started teaching, some of my students fathers’ had the Charleston brogue, but their sons didn’t. Now you only hear the brogue in people over 65. “Doughnt-cha keep dat gay-ate open, fool.”
Near about (pronounced neahaboot), adv., almost or nearly as in “I neahraboot broke my back falling off that ladder.”
Reckon, v., suppose. I reckon he got what was coming to him.
Right, adv., somewhat to considerably. It’s right warm today.
Swanny – v., to declare, to aver. I swanny I never seen nothing like it.
Whatchasay, v., a expression of greeting, the elision of what-do-you-say, as in que pasa, what’s happening, etc. Often this greeting was followed by bo and was rendered whatchasaybo. When my friend, Tim Miskell moved to Summerville from Croton-on-the-Hudson, he literally had no idea what people were saying. He said whatchasaybo sounded African to him, which, of course, it does. Like I said, some of us learned to talk from our dahs, though, I never had one, nor do I speak with the Charleston brogue.
Yonder, adv – in that direction.
Let’s see if I can come up with one paragraph that incorporates all of the above.
Whatchasaybo? You hear that commotion last night over yonder at the short term rental on Huron? It was nearabout two AM, and I swanny it was loud enough to wake my dead dah. I reckoned I better go over and tell them I was about to sic the police on ’em. Judy was right exhausted after her chemo; plus, we need to nip this shenanigans in the bud. So I pull on my pants and headed out the door. Before I got within twenty feet of their yard, one of the partiers started discharging what looked like an AK-47 into the air. Who knows, maybe they were celebrating an Afghan wedding or something. Anyway, catch you later, bo gator. I’m headed down to Center Street to file me a complaint.
Hyperbole – over exaggeration — has always been my go-to cheap way to get a laugh, e.g., Marty Feldman was ugly enough to raise a blister on a bulldog’s ass, ugly enough to back a buzzard off a gut-wagon, ugly enough to send Mother Teresa packing.
However, I’ve decided to forego bombast here and merely say the last eighth months have been difficult. Rather than exaggerating, overreacting, getting all melodramatic on you, I’m merely going to tell it, as they used to say, like is.
[cue mournful violins]
The first of the succession of events thatwould have driven Job into atheism occurred last May when I offered my resignation twice overa miscarriage of justice that makes a Stalinist show trial seem fair over the administration’s insistence that I apologize to an eighteen-year-old for placing him/her in a non-honors class. The forced apology seemed to me likebetrayal like not fully appreciating an employee with three decades of service to an institution he had faithfully supported financially and verbally, an institution that now seemed to him unconscionably unfair to value students’ Kim-Jong-Un bat-shit crazy irrational parents more than its teachers.
Because of my cowardice of the insistence of wives (actually I only have one), colleagues, and my favorite bartender Steve Smoak, I relented and told the student in front of his/her parents in administrative offices and in front of administrators that I regretted hurting the student’s feelings, which I do, though I continue to maintain I delivered the placement news with compassion. Looking back on it, I wish I had doused myself with kerosene and lit a match in an act of self-immolation expressed resentment to the inquisitors assembled audience. Ha, that would have shown them!
Anyway, the incident has left me disillusioned, which, strictly speaking is a good thing (ain’t no Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Meaning-to-Life) but nevertheless depressing. However, I now realize that incident pales in comparison to the subsequent shit that was about to go down.
The second and third events happened on the same day, 17 June 2014, when my deck caught on fire and I learned that a childhood friend had died. In the blaze, I lost two surfboards, one a Sunshine shaped by Claude Codgen, the loss of which ordinarily I might lament by donning sackcloth, smearing myself with ashes, renting my garments as I howled to the Indifference above by feeling sorry for myself, but Paul’s death prevented that indulgence.
Instead, I wrote this bitter poem, which now seems downright prophetic predictive.
Hit arrow for sound.
The Grill
In memory of Paul Yost 1955-2014
I’m tearing apart paper,
newsprint, the obituary page,
shredding descriptions of lives:
of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers,
bachelors, partners, husbands, wives,
shredding their black-and-white
faces, their smiles, their stares,
ripping also the memorial verses
loved ones have left,
wadding it all up
to fuel my charcoal chimney.
Yet not enough.
So here comes the sports page,
the World Cup, accounts of pop flies
dropped, ripe for ripping,
ripped, balled, stuffed, ready
for the match’s fiery effacement.
And that poor chicken! hatched, harried,
pecking its food among hordes,
pulled from transport crates,
shocked for the throat cutter’s convenience,
plucked, eviscerated.
This one’s also been
deboned, yet not sold soon enough,
skewered by butchers along with
aging onions and overly ripe peppers.
After its scraping, red and black,
slightly rusted, the grill stands ready,
top open, at attention.
I place the chimney
upon the barred metal, pour in
the briquettes, and torch the
shredded lives of others,
their wins and losses,
and watch the smoke
rising into the dissipation
of the silent, cloud-shifting sky.
No, something far, far worse was in store – my beloved Judy’s diagnosis of a virulent strain of T-Cell lymphoma, which you can read about HERE.
So, the incidents detailed above that seemed at the time like the end of the universe so vexing declined in the hierarchy of woe to mere inconveniences.
The good news, the very good news, is that Judy’s treatments have been successful, she’s in remission, and as I write this, she’s getting pumped with bone-marrow killing chemo in preparation for a stem cell transplant that offers real hope for a permanent cure. Of course, I might add, that celebrating getting bone-marrow-killing chemo suggests that your life has been a tale-told-by-an-idiot,-full-of-sound-and fury, signifying nothing less than rosy .
If only I could end the story here, but by far the most tragic event of this narrative occurred, appropriately enough, on Halloween, when my good friend Nancy suffered a massive stroke, she, the beloved wife of my better friend Ed, which brings to mind Frost’s bitter lines:
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The final three instances of misfortune in this catalogue of woe actually pale in comparison with Judy’s cancer and Nancy’s stroke.
First, my mother is in hospice and suffering mental turmoil in the forms of hallucination and restlessness, but she’s 83, unlike Judy (60) or Nancy (69), and I’ve always thought Ecclesiastics makes the most sense of anything in the Old Testament.
from Robert Crumb’s graphic bible
(Imagine the Byrds recording a hit song using Bible verses from Genesis 38, 9-10:
Onan from his brother’s wife
Prematurely withdrew,
And for practicing birth-control,
Onan Yahweh slew).
As for my falling off a ladder and wrenching my back last Saturday, I attribute that to my idiocy, carelessness.
However, the last thing, the last fucking thing, has shattered the Hemingway mask of stoicism I’ve been sporting.
On the eve of her transplant, Judy found our dog Saisy dead on the living room carpet, lying there as if asleep, save for the frozen mouth.
Fuck, dear readers, I don’t like to think of myself as a whiner, but fuck.
It’s Fat Tuesday in the Protestant State of South Carolina, so not much is going on carnivalwise except on Folly Beach, which celebrates Fat/Shrove Tuesday not in the context of the Christian calendar but as another excuse to lure consumers onto the island so they can get rip-roaring drunk. This lack of a Catholic context is underscored by Folly’s postponing its big celebration — Folly Gras — until the more pecuniarily advantageous weekend, this Saturday, the fourth day of Lent.*
You Do Hoodoo 