Month: April 2022

The Ol’ Pearly Gates Ain’t What They Used to Be

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

Stubborn Denial

Bill ignored the early symptoms of the major coronary event that did him in. After all, he was only in his early 50s[1].

Yet, the googleable telltale signs were there, both in his body and on WebMD: cold night sweats, stentorian snoring, tightness in his chest, and then, on the day of his departure, a horrifying feeling of impending doom, like a star collapsing, sucking life’s light into a black hole of sudden despair.

He had hoped for the best, had ignored a week’s worth of symptoms, but as he pressed the button to engage the garage door opener on a clear, crisp late April Monday, two of his heart’s arteries slammed their doors, the pain Psycho-shower-scene stabbing horror show.

Clutching his chest, he thought of his children.[2]

Neither his biological offspring nor stepchild would mourn his death because he had been an aloof inconsiderate cigar-puffing malcontent who thought of his sons and daughters, which was rarely, only as abstract extensions of himself.

Jesus Christ!

The two last words screamed silently in his skull as he fell against the BMW and onto the concrete.

Interlude: A Short, Contrarian Meditation on Birth and Death

After it is all said and done, if atheism is correct, death is cessation from pain, both mental and physical, whereas birth is the commencement of suffering, of fardel bearing, of grunting and sweating, etc.

Unlike Bill, many decedents pass quietly, transitioning gently from a room of loved ones into that good night.[3]

On the other hand, no successfully born baby has ever come into being quietly, whether he or she was born in a hovel or a mahogany paneled birthing room.

Nestled in the uterus, lulled by a maternal heartbeat ­– bump-bump, bump-bump – a fetus enjoys womb-service, as it were, but with its mother’s water, all hell breaks loose.  An excruciating passage through a way too tiny portal transpires. The fetus experiences pain for the first time as it is smushed through a fleshy wringer.  Finally, when the head emerges, it encounters blinding light, sudden cold, unpleasant odors.[4]

Like a turd, the baby plops out, suffers a slap, and wails in abject horror.

The horror, the horror!

Post Death

For Bill, there was no tunnel of light with loved ones reaching down but a sudden transition, as if God had suddenly shut the venetian blinds, then immediately opened them.

Just like that he found himself alone on a cloudy plain dressed in his Tommy Bahama resort casual get-up: loud parrot-printed party shirt, cargo shorts, tasseled loafers without socks, in other words, what he had been wearing when he pressed the garage door opener and met his doom.

He looked down, and, as in a cartoon, he found himself standing on a cloud. He took a step on the soft mushy surface of what appeared to be congealed water vapor, and spritzy mist plumed upwards around his loafer. He took another step and then another.

Looking up, he saw twenty or so meters ahead a woman wearing nothing but a hospital gown, walking in the same direction, her plump exposed buttocks jiggling with each soft step. Back in the beforelife, this sight would have excited him, altered his metabolism, but here and now, here and now, here and now, it didn’t matter, and now, now, very now he could see up ahead a white walled edifice glowing beneath the blank azure of the deepest of skies, and now he could discern others walking ahead and behind, dressed in various guises, many in hospital gowns. He continued moving forward, his footprints disappearing after each step.

The Pearly Gates

It was like the heaven of a New Yorker cartoon, complete with a Northern European St. Peter with a Santa-like beard and white robe. He was running his index finger up and down a prodigious tome propped open on a golden, downright gaudy, rococo easel.

Avoiding direct eye contact, nodding quickly, St. Pete waved him through, and Bill sighed a sigh of profound relief. Despite his sloth, those hungover sabbaths in the hammock, despite his serial adulteries, his envy, greed, anger, and pride, he had somehow made it into heaven, had escaped the fiery furnace of pain everlasting.

Woo-hoo!

A Gospel Jamboree Meets O Henry Meets Jean-Paul Sartre (or Wasting Away in the Opposite of Margaritaville)

A native of Trenton New Jersey who had spent most of his adult life in central Florida, Bill had never acquired a taste for gospel music, especially hillbilly gospel, but now without transition he stood among a sea of hayseeds in white robes wearing crowns listening to a praise band plucking banjos and yodeling hallelujahs.

Good God, how long would he have to listen to this shit? [5]

[1]Although “coronary event” is effete, I thought I’d avoid triggering readers who may have lost a loved one via heartattack.

Oops, never mind.

[2]I.e., to the two sets of children from his first two failed marriages and the one stepchild from his third marriage.

[3] Or, to keep the motif going, “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

[4] My apologies to homeopathic midwives and Third World babies.

[5] A business major, Bill rarely read literature assignments, but instead opted for CliffsNotes summaries. He remembered nothing about No Exit, so had no clue of the concept of an existential hell, that his hell could be the hillbilly’s heaven whereas a never-ending Jimmy Buffett concert would be hell for these teetotaling worshipers who surrounded him.

Jean-Paul Sarte

Give Yourself an Ill-Deserved Slap on the Back

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

Every now and then on Facebook or Twitter, I run across a give-yourself-a-point list like the one below.

I remember my first one. I was maybe twelve or thirteen, hadn’t even broken a bone, much less skinny-dipped or enjoyed a one-night stand.

In fact, I scored a 19.  I had appeared on a local kiddie afternoon TV show where preadolescents celebrated birthdays between Hanna and Barbara cartoons. There was an elephant named Suzie-Q. chained up outside the TV station. That was the extent of worldliness.

Anyway, the list made me feel like a loser.

How bittersweet it must be for Mormons and Liberty University alumni to encounter these lists. Sure, some probably feel righteous, but I suspect that more than a few feel somehow inadequate, inexperienced, left out.

Therefore, in the spirit of solidarity with my inexperienced brothers and sisters, I have compiled a list where they, too, can achieve a low score.

GIVE YOURSELF 1 POINT FOR EACH THING YOU HAVEN’T DONE

  1. Eaten at Appleby’s
  2. Discarded gum underneath a desk
  3. Jaywalked
  4. Seen a PG-13 movie
  5. Stubbed a toe
  6. Talked behind someone’s back
  7. Farted in a bathtub
  8. Forgot to floss
  9. Ogled natives in a National Geographic magazine
  10.  Dreaded going to school.

How’d you do? I don’t like to brag, but I scored a 0! What a badass!

Song Lyrics as Opposed to Poetry, George Fox Edition

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment
George Fox, photo by Caroline Tigner Moore

Generally, when I first listen to a song, I don’t pay much attention to lyrics. If I dig the melody and beat – as the boppers used to say on Bandstand – I’ll start paying closer attention to the words, and if the diction is clever or thought-provoking, all the better.

After all, it’s really rare to encounter lyrics that possess the compression and structural integrity of poetry, i.e., to find songs with words that can stand alone on a page and engage sans musical accompaniment.

My friend George Fox’s latest song – so new that it’s still untitled – comes close to accomplishing this rare feat. The song, which consists of three verses followed by a chorus, distills a lifetime in four-and-a-half minutes and does so employing diction, imagery, and structure that reinforce and embody the song’s central theme, what Andrew Marvell famously dubbed “time’s wingèd chariot.” George wrestles with the metaphysics of time, the illusive nature of past, present, and future, and how a lifetime passes [cliché alert] in the blink of an eye.

The song begins with a callous youth speeding through life in rural Orangeburg County, South Carolina:

Just eighteen, driving an old pickup truck,
Joint in the ashtray and a bed full of luck.
Running nowhere as fast as I can
Down an Orangeburg County washboard road
Not enough sense to take it slow.
Rolling Stones singing “Street Fighting Man.”

Here, the theme of speed is introduced, and we have our first bit of compression in the allusion to the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” which melds the attitude of the the speaker in the Stones’ song with George’s narrator, both young men fueled by the fire of youthful exuberance.

What’s a poor boy to do but “run nowhere as fast as [he] can?”

The chorus shifts to the present, and again, we have speed, the idea of chasing “the dying light,” or as Marvell puts it in “To His Coy Mistress,” although “we cannot make our sun /Stand still, yet we will make him run.” Yet, in the last line, the speaker comes to the realization it’s always now, that the past and future only exist in the present and meaning lies in perspective, depending on where “you’re standing.”

Right outside of your window, just outside your door,
Everything is waiting for you
To fall into the night and chase the dying light.
There’s no need to be gentle.
Sometimes it’s heaven, sometimes it’s hell.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
All depends on where you’re standing.
I stand before you now, and I see it written in in the clouds,
All that was and is and could be is now.

In the video below you can check out the first verse and chorus from a live performance at Chico Feo’s Monday Night Singer/Songwriter Soapbox, which George emcees. The song is a work-in-progress, and for me, it’s thrilling to see it evolve on stage, as George experiments with phrasing and gestures.

In the second verse, the middle verse, the narrator finds himself suddenly middle aged, “thirty-three/With two little boys sitting on my knee” and has come to know “how love is made,” but swoosh, suddenly, with the days having flown by “like a midnight train,” he looks down to see, not his sons, but his granddaughter Eliza Jade.

Turned around and I was thirty-three
With two little boys sitting on my knee,
And I realized how love is made.
The days flew by like a midnight train.
The years fell on me like the pouring rain.
Now I look down and see Eliza Jade.

The last stanza arrives like a melancholy last act, with “second guesses, another last chance, and one more shot.” Once again, the radio is playing, not “Street Fighting Man,” but “a brand new song” saying “the same old thing” but “still get[ting] it wrong.”

Second guesses are all I’ve got,
Another last chance and one more shot.
And how I got here I don’t even know.
The radio plays a brand new song.
It says the same old thing they still get wrong
Oh man, and so it goes.

And so it goes – a lifetime distilled into a handful of words.

I could go on about structure, how the number three is central to the architectonics – three six-line stanzas, three nine-line choruses, the narrator citing at one point his age is thirty-three, but you’d think I was overdoing it, and you’d be wrong. If it’s there, it’s there, whether the artist planned it or not. Making art is like dreaming, it comes from below, often surprising the artist him or herself.

By the way, George’s band Big Stoner Creek has a new album out. You can check it out HERE.

PS. Here’s an earlier rendition of stanza three and the concluding chorus:

Excuse Me, Sir

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment
Street Huckster – Charleston by James Augustus McLean, Greenville County Museum of Art

I recall as a boy my daddy complaining about how television news stereotyped Southerners, the correspondents constantly trotting out before the cameras a series of Bull Connor belligerents, grammatically challenged podunk politicians, and/or dentally deficient racists whose lack of front teeth made pronouncing the n-word problematic. 

I didn’t know enough back then to explain that they were the ones making the most noise, the ones cracking Blacks with baseball bats, unleashing snarling German shepherds, that they were newsworthy, that his own nuanced, quiet racism wouldn’t be all that interesting to viewers.[1]

And if you were born and raised in the South in the first or middle portion of the 20th Century, you were bound to be racist because bigotry was inculcated, abundant in the air you breathed: segregation included not only movie theaters, restrooms, and water fountains, but even doctors’ offices.  Even if your parents didn’t explain to you as a child that Blacks were inferior, you would sense that they were because of their forced separation. It went without saying, though of course, lots of people were saying it, repeating racist jokes and addressing grandfathers as boy. The Blacks’ poverty was proof of their lowness, as if conquering systemic racism and overcoming a substandard education should not be a hinderance from rising from rags to riches. Look at the Greek immigrants, the Italians, etc.[2]

Last Tuesday, my friend Warren Moise presented his excellent memoir The Class of ’71: A Tale of Desegregation in Gamecock City to the Thomas Street Book Club. This was our first in-person meeting since the pandemic, so attendance was sparse. In fact, all the participants were white male Southerners of the boomer generation, so we all had stories to tell of race relations back in the day, of “maids” entering through back doors and yardmen eating their lunches on back stoops.

However, to my mind, the most poignant narrative came from Ed, a physician who grew up in Little River, South Carolina.

In high school Ed worked at an A&P supermarket bagging groceries. Like many establishments, the store had an in-door and an out-door. After working a month or two, Ed discovered he could save time exiting the store through the in-door as he carted customers’ groceries to their vehicles in the parking lot. 

One of the stores’ produce suppliers was an elderly Black man who brought in his vegetables on a cart composed of wood and cardboard, a sort of oversized wheelbarrow he pushed along the highway to the store. 

One day, Ed rocketed out through the in-door and collided with the old man, overturning the cart, knocking the man to the pavement. The cement was strewn with vegetables, with smashed tomatoes, the cart destroyed.

Clearly in the wrong, Ed was mortified, worried that the old man was hurt, that he’d have to pay for the ruined produce, that he might be fired.

Slowly, Ed said, the old man tottered to his feet, placed his cap back in his head, looked Ed in the eye, and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

[1] C.f. Atticus Finch and Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird.

[2] It just occurred to me that what I’m writing is exactly what opponents of critical race theory want to, pardon the term, whitewash. 

Idle Thoughts at 9:50 a.m. on a Wednesday

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

Wouldn’t it be nice if the pleasant moments of our lives passed as slowly as Mac system updates? For example, for the last hour or so, my update bar has been stuck on “about 15 minutes remaining.”

You glide into a warm bath.  Rather than cooling, the water remains at a constant soothing temperature, pleasure’s non-existent blue bar stuck, as it were, frozen in time, as you sing on key a melancholy air like “Danny Boy.”

. . .  And I will know, though soft you tread above me,

And all my grave will warmer sweeter be,

And you will bend and tell me that you love me

And I rest in peace until you come to me!”

Once, “Danny Boy’s” in its grave, so to speak, you launch into “The Streets of Laredo.”

“Go fetch me a cup, a cup of cold water.
To cool my parched lips”, the cowboy then said.
Before I returned, his spirit had departed,
And gone to the round up – the cowboy was dead.

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,
And bitterly wept as we bore him along.
For we loved our comrade, so brave, young and handsome,
We all loved our comrade, although he’d done wrong.
 
The water’s still warm, life affirming.
 
There’s time for another, “Jeanie With the Light brown Hair.”

I long for Jeanie with a day-dawn smile,
Radiant in gladness, warm with winning guile;
I hear her melodies, like joys gone by,
Sighing round my heart over the fond hopes that die:—
Sighing like the night wind and sobbing like the rain,—
Wailing for the lost one that comes not again:
Oh, I long for Jeanie, and my heart bows low,
Never more to find her where the bright waters flow.[1]

OMG, as the young people say, as I typed the above, the bar inched forward to “10 minutes remaining.” 

At this rate, the update will be completed by Doomsday!

[1] My father rocked me to sleep while singing these songs, among others. It explains a lot. You can read more about that HERE.

Being of Two Minds: Dionysian Edition

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

Molenaer, Jan Miense – Battle Between Carnival and Lent

One of the recompenses of old age – and believe me they are few – is that getting rip-roaring, intestine-unloading, word-slurring, sidewalk-reeling drunk has lost its allure.[1]

Oh, Lawd, my geriatric muse, Erratatata has descended:

Dionysius, boon companion of my youth,

has grown so very long in the tooth

that he looks like Nosferatu,

like, like bad, bad juju.

Before
After

Nevertheless, even though my days of dancing-on-tables, driving-MGs-down-parking-garage-steps have long passed, I still enjoy checking out Folly Beach’s party scene, to engage tiara sporting brides-to-be and their uniformed entourages in conversation.[2] I also enjoy making small talk with the young men at Chico Feo or Low Life who share adjacent barstools.  I relish shooting the shit, as my father might put it, with many of the bartenders whom I consider more than acquaintances.

But only for an hour or two. Too many Founders Day IPAs makes Wesley a dyspeptic codger.

Nevertheless, I tip my fedora to those old sybarites who never forsake the temporary comforts of strong drink, the Sir Toby Belches and T. Frothingill Bellows of the world, who belly up to the bar and have at it until the day they started to drink becomes the morrow or until their livers eventually give out.[3]

the great WC Fields

Yet, ultimately, forgive the cliché, but home is where the heart is. There’s nothing I’d rather do than sit on the deck with Caroline on a gnat-less late afternoon and look out over the river at the light maturing, going golden, and ultimately dying, then sitting down to dinner with Brooks and rehashing the day’s trivial events, which all and all make up most of our lives.

Now, as some of us used to say in the 60s, that is where it’s at.

[1] Of course, the cliché “with age comes wisdom” is somewhat true. I say “somewhat” because the wisdom of perspective, of the long view, i.e., the road map that experience provides, is merely two-dimensional. For example, I’ve learned in my old age that acute intoxication comes at a cost not worth paying, but that revelation isn’t exactly profound – it’s not as if I’ve embraced the Four Noble Truths and eliminated desire from my mental makeup, not as if I have achieved the serenity that a life of virtue provides. I still occasionally slip up and get drunk, though that’s never my goal.

Anyway, if old age provides wisdom, how come so many of my senescent brethren wear scowls instead of sport beatific smiles? I’ll tell you why, because their joints ache, they’re lonely, the world is going to hell in a handbasket as it has been since time immemorial, i.e., since the discovery of agriculture, Eden’s end.

[2] In which I offer sage advice like “monogamy is the cornerstone of a non-violent marriage” and “if you get caught in undertow, swim parallel to the shore.”

[3] Sir Toby of Twelfth Night and T. Frothingill Bellows, the protagonist of WC Fields’s The Big Broadcast of 1938.

The ABZs of Auto-Obituary Writing

/ wlm3 / 7 Comments

Look, I’m vain, love attention.[1] Therefore, there’s no way I’m going to let anyone get in the last word after I have checked out of this Motel 6 of Life. 

No, I’m writing my own obituary before I expire, and you should as well. After I succumb, I certainly don’t want my cousin Zilla to compose my obituary. Rather than merely “dying” or “passing away” or “entering eternal rest,” I might have “left the world to be with the Lord,” or worse, “entered the loving embrace of [my] Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”  Though I wouldn’t mind getting a hug from Jesus, I’m agnostic, so I want my obituary to be an accurate reflection of my life. 

Don’t trust others to do right by you. Do it yourself!

So, what follows is an easy guide for composing your very own obituary.[2]

Okay, let’s get started.

Rule #1. Know your audience. Chances are the readers of the obit are friends, family, or acquaintances. Most people don’t read strangers’ obits (yours truly being a notable exception), and if they do, you can bet they’re retired, likely former English teachers, and/or grammar Nazis. Therefore, make sure to proofread carefully but address the audience in a familiar fashion.

Rule #2. Sentence one should state the sad fact that Wesley is dead and when and where that regrettable transition took place. Although it’s not necessary to state the cause of death, inquiring minds want to know. In the following I have bracketed words that can be omitted according to your own predilections. 

Wesley “Rusty” Moore died Monday [at his home/at a sterile assisted living facility/on the side of the road] [after a short/long illness[3]//months of neglect// stumbling in front of a car outside of Chico Feo].

Rule #3. It’s best to get the bio out of the way first. Make sure to include the occasional introductory subordinate clause; otherwise, these lists of facts are deadly tiresome enough without your bludgeoning the reader with an unrelenting barrage of declarative sentences.

Wesley, the first son of Wesley E Moore, Jr and Sue Blanton Moore, began life on 14 December 1952 in Summerville, South Carolina. After graduating from Summerville High, Wesley attended the University of South Carolina and received a BA in English in 1975.[4] [Because of the post-OPEC oil embargo recession of 1975 and the fact that he didn’t own a car and couldn’t score a job], Wesley immediately entered the English graduate program the fall after his graduation.

Tending bar as a graduate student, Wesley met his first wife, fellow bartender Judy Birdsong. After they decided to marry, Wesley [weary of scaling the mountainous molehills that characterize literary criticism] left the university without a Master’s. After [somehow] getting an adjunct gig at Trident Technical College, Wesley and Judy wed on 4 February 1978 [in Decatur, Georgia.]

[After a short stint of collecting rejection slips,] in 1985, Wesley started teaching at Porter-Gaud. By then, Wesley and Judy had two sons, Harrison and Ned, [who eventually attended Porter-Gaud and rode to school with their father, providing the boys the opportunity to amass quite a quantity of profane and vulgar words as their father battled traffic from the Isle of Palms and later Folly Beach on their way to West Ashley.]

After Judy’s death from lymphoma [on Mother’s Day] in 2017, Wesley fell in love and married Caroline Tigner.  Caroline, her daughter Brooks, and Wesley made their home in Folly Beach, a community they treasured [until it was overrun by Airbnb short term rentals that transformed the once funky residential island into a virtual Sodom and Gomorrah/ Myrtle Beach].

Bored yet? 

Rule #4. You should follow the bio with a paragraph that humanizes the deceased. I don’t know how many obits I’ve read that have short-changed the not-seemingly-so-dearly departed by expending a scant sentence or two. 

For example, Harold enjoyed fishing. That’s it; that’s all it says. Or Mabel enjoying playing with her grandsons.

In mine, I would mention my writing, particularly the novel Today, Oh Boy! and the handful of writing awards I’ve received. I would also mention my collage-making and blog and perhaps my four decades of surfing.

Papa Hemingway, Joyce, and Tom Waits in Wilmington, a collage by Wesley Moore

Rule #5. You should then list survivors and pre-decedents. By the way, if you’re old like me, there’s no need to specify that your parents preceded you in death.

NOT: The great-great-great-great-great grandson of Adam and Eve, Methuselah was predeceased by his parents . . . 

Rule #5. Although the time and place of the memorial service/funeral/burial at sea, can be stated at the beginning of the obituary, I prefer it at the end, though it’s completely up to you.

Now, all you have left is to designate where memorial donations should go and perhaps to thank anyone who was especially helpful in the dying process.

So that’s it, have at it, don’t put off until tomorrow because, well, you know why.

Fin.

[1] Hence this blog.

[2] I realize that most people (Prince Hamlet being a notable exception), don’t cotton to contemplating their own demise. However, look upon the exercise of auto obituary composition as a fond look back on a life well lived. On the other hand, if you consider your life a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, you can lash out at your enemies in your obit. It’s up to you! [insert smiley emoji].

[3] For me, the more specific the better. If possible, I’d like to precisely name the illness, for example, “after an acute case of cirrhosis of the liver.” BTW, I hate the trite trope of illness as a martial encounter. Waging heroic battles with Goliath-like adversaries such as inoperable brain cancer is yawn-producing. Certainly, there must be people out there who whined their way to the grave.

[4] Why are red-blooded Americans omitting the “from” in sentences pertaining to graduation, as in “graduated high school or graduated university?”