Although it occurred 71 years ago tomorrow, I remember my birth as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.[1]
I recall grooving in the womb, the temperature a comfortable 98.6, the background music the soothing backbeat of my mother’s twenty-one-year-old heart of gold, womb service delivered umbilically in the amniotic Eden of pre-Natal bliss.
But, alas, on the fourteenth of December, an earthquake, a rupture, unwanted spasms, an excruciating expulsion through an opening not nearly large enough to accommodate the partially deflated soccer ball of my head, which, as it turned out, was covered with Hemoglobins.
Hour after hour of torture. Then I feel the ice cold clamp of forceps on my head, depressing and denting it, as Dr. Snyder yanks me out of the vice of a constricted passageway into the freezing but blinding bright light of Dorchester County Hospital’s delivery room.
To add insult to injury, he grabs me by the ankles and slaps the tiny target of my ass as I let out a hellish, ear-shattering scream.
Welcome to the third planet from the sun, little one.
I was not a pretty sight. Both parents agreed that I was the ugliest baby they’d ever seen. They’d sometimes tell the story to dinner guests in my presence. The punch line was that Daddy had to ride back to Clemson right after the not-so-blessed event, and some lady on the Greyhound asked him why he looked so distraught, and he replied, “Because my wife has just given birth to a seven pound, four ounce monkey.”
After the laughter subsided, my mother would add, “But a week later he was the most beautiful baby you’d ever seen. When I would stroll him around Colonial Lake, strangers would stop and marvel at his beauty.”
Yeah, right. No wonder I’m so messed up.
[1] Of course, at my age, remembering what happened yesterday clearly is not a given.
This week, i.e. 7 November 2023 – 2 December 2023, certainly has been an eventful one when it comes to obituaries, politics, and the rule of law.
I’ll start with the last item first.
In the insurrection realm of the Trump inditements, Roy Cohn’s protege isn’t even bothering to claim innocence anymore but arguing that he shouldn’t go to trial until he finishes his second term as president in 2029, when he’ll be even older and more morbidly obese. His crackerjack legal team argues that trying him for treason during his campaign for president amounts to election interference.[1] Of course, if he wins again and again mouths the oath of office to protect the Constitution, he won’t have to worry about the term ever ending as he’ll follow in the footsteps of his good buddy Kim Jong Un and declare himself President-for-Life, perhaps bestowing succession to his sons North Korean style, which means that one day we’ll have a President who also holds the title of Bar(r)on.
By the way, when’s the last time you’ve seen a photo of Barron Trump? He’s essentially invisible, drifting ghostlike through the rococo rooms of the Mar-a-Lago family compound pioneering a brand new literary genre, Glitter Gothic.
I’ll continue to reverse order with George Santos, the Inspector Clouseau of con men, who funneled campaign contributions into his own coffers, and dig this, stole contributors’ identities racking up thousands of dollars on their credit cards.
Here’s a pithy summary from the NYT:
The [Congressional] report detailed “substantial evidence” of the congressman funneling campaign funds to cover personal expenses, including at luxury retailers, on cosmetic procedures and on travel.
Examples include: $4,127 at Hermès; “smaller purchases” at OnlyFans, a website that hosts adult content, and makeup store Sephora; $6,000 at Ferragamo; nearly $3,000 on Botox; and $3,332 for an Airbnb, when Santos was “off at [the] Hampton’s [sic] for the weekend.”
Yesterday, in a rare example of bipartisanship, the House expelled him. Certainly, he must suffer from some form of mania, some Murdaugh-like disorder that prevents him from perceiving future consequences of wholesale criminality.
At any rate, I’m going to sort of miss him.
Last, but not least, death.
Sandra Day O’Connor died, which was news to me because I was shocked to discover she wasn’t dead already.
(Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images)
Also, Shane MacGowan, founder and front man of the Celtic punk band The Pogues finally, as they say, bit the dust. Ever heard the phrase, “live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse?”
Hey, Shane certainly satisfied the first piece of that triad of terrible advice. According to one obituary I read, “He was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles.” My son Ned remembers “chatting with some Irish people who had seen him perform in a wheelchair and vomit on himself onstage.”
When I was teaching, I told my classes whenever they all made a hundred on a reading or vocabulary quiz, we’d have a “Fethibal,” that I’d turn them on to some cool video.
By far, the most popular one was the Pogues’ cover of “Dirty Old Town,” which inverts the tropes of Romanticism where lovers woo one another beneath factory walls.
Here’s a link. Enjoy! And Happy December! Click the link “Watch on YouTube!”
[1] Have you heard that Irony has committed suicide? You can read about it HERE.
A speech given in honor of Vaughan Murzursky’s retirement from Porter-Gaud School
Over the years, I’ve had the honor to deliver several of these sending-off speeches for some masterful teachers – the late Tom Evatt, Erica Lesesne, Sue Chanson, Ed Burrows, Natalie Herford. But never have I faced such a daunting task as to encapsulate in under four minutes the five-FEET, two inches of gut-crunching, man-eating terror that is Paula Vaughan Mazursky.
“The Czarina.”
Where to begin?
How about Barnwell, South Carolina, Vaughan’s hometown?
Besides Vaughan, Barnwell has produced more than its share of notable South Carolinians, including, in the political realm, Edgar Brown and Solomon Blatt. However, undisputedly, Barnwell’s most famous native son is James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, or perhaps, nowadays, the hardest working penitent in Purgatory.
Of course, the Godfather was 13 years older than Vaughan, and Barnwell’s schools were segregated in their day, but what an exciting concept to think of them as contemporaries, the Godfather and the Czarina, in an integrated high school, perhaps as chemistry lab partners – if I may quote the Godfather – [holler] – what an explosive combination that would have been!
For, like James Brown, Vaughan Mazursky has Soul, soul with a capital S, which may be the most remarkable trait of this very remarkable, unforgettable woman. I don’t mean to diminish Vaughan’s stellar intelligence – anyone who has had the privilege of being her friend can attest to her quickness and her formidable knowledge of geography, history, art, and politics – but it is her passion that sets her apart from all the rest of us who have taught and teach here; it is her passion that has made her the teacher that former students first ask about when we bump into them years later, the teacher whom they never ever forget.
Add to her intelligence, her passion, and her learnedness – spontaneity – a joie de vivre that might spur her to jump upon a coffee table in the old teacher’s lounge to belt out Marvin Gay’s “A Stubborn Kind of Fellow” or to scream the Georgian word for freedom right in front of a Soviet tank in occupied Tbilisi or to raise both arms in triumphant joy at an Obama rally at the Cistern, an image that appeared internationally in various media (though as a subject of a National Enquirer article, Vaughan is no stranger to the limelight). Absolutely, Vaughan lives her life to the fullest.
Damn the cruise missiles, full speed ahead!
She was a demanding teacher, which endeared her to wise parents, not so much to materialists. Whenever I hear of that proverbial subliterate high school student from No-wheres-ville, USA who points to the Indian Ocean when asked to locate Alaska on a globe, I think of my two sons pouring over maps of godforsaken sub-Saharan countries, labeling rivers and mountain ranges, or strutting around the house doing the Wagga-do-do dance (which, by the way, Vaughan, I have spelled in this speech W-a-g-g-a-d-o-d-o).
O, my brothers and sisters, I have faced the fearsome wrath of MaZoo. In ’89 before I accompanied her and 21 students on a 28-day trip to the Soviet Union, a trek that took us from Leningrad to Moscow to Siberia back through Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Samarkand, and Tbilisi, I had to prove my worthiness by taking geographical tests along with the students on every so-called Republic we passed through. I, too, had to memorize the names of transliterated towns, rivers, lakes, and mountains and spell the transliterations correctly. Let’s say on the first couple of quizzes I didn’t meet the Czarina’s high expectations, but soon learned that she was serious. She wasn’t going to take along to a foreign land anyone not competently aware of the history and topography of his destination.
The good ol’ Evil Empire has been in history’s dustbin for two decades, so many of you may not know that Vaughan taught a senior course in Soviet history back in the day, a course that attracted the very brightest of our students, the de facto AP history course for seniors back when there wasn’t an AP history course for seniors.
It is, I think, the mark of a great teacher that she can effectively teach a wide range of grades. Here, the Czarina reigned supreme – She taught 8th graders geography, current affairs – and had them watch heart-throb ABC news anchor Peter Jennings every Monday thru Thursday – all the while below the radar teaching them organizational and study skills. Meanwhile, in the Upper School, she was having students grapple with the forces that led to the Russian Revolution, the complexities of the emerging Soviet State, the nuts and bolts of economics.
[Sigh] There’s so much more to say – I should talk about her trailblazing as one of the first female teachers in this school – I should talk about the devotion that the very best graduates we’ve produced hold for her, people like George Kent, Paul O’Brien, Blakely Blackford, and Alex Werrell, but I’m nearing the end of page two, which is my self-imposed limit.
* * *
In closing, as I stand here recalling the history of a great history teacher, I would like to mention a name from the past, Berkeley Grimball, who hired Vaughan and me and a handful of others here but without whom none of the rest of you would be here, because this institution would not exist.
By the early Sixties, Porter-Military had been reduced to a school for troublesome boys, and the Gaud School, though excellent in academics, subsisted in dingy, threadbare rooms, in a sort of Dickensian shabbiness.
It was Berkeley Grimball who had the vision to unite the spirituality of Dr. Porter and the academic rigor of Mr. Gaud to create this hyphenated school, and when the three schools merged in 1965 – at the height of Civil Rights Unrest – Porter-Gaud offered enrollment to anyone who qualified, white, black, or yellow, Muslim, Jew, atheist, or Hindu – a liberality of which we all can all be proud, a liberality that Vaughan Mazursky has always proudly embraced.
As we old folks disappear, we are fairly soon mostly forgotten. That is the way of the world.
However, Vaughan, you, for sure, have attained legendary status and your legacy will be remembered and cherished for decades as you remain a part of those students’ lives you have enriched – as you have enriched those of us who have taught with you – and I hope you’ll continue to enrich us, your friends, at parties and taverns and non-violent demonstrations.
Mike Johnson, the hastily installed new Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a religious fanatic who makes my late Bircher literalist cousin Zilla look like a forward thinker.
For example, here’s his take on same-sex marriages:
“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone. Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
Oh, I’m sure at the moment Mike’s on a prestige high, puffed up with pride, swamping Jesus’s switchboard with an overload of hallelujahs, enjoying all the attention, but this too shall pass because he’s destined to fail at his new job – understaffed, inexperienced, more or less chosen, not for intellect nor competence but because he possesses a winning Republican combination of rightwing fanaticism softened by a pleasant demeanor.
Affable Mike Johnson believes that the Bible is literally true. He’s on record claiming that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, which is pretty remarkable for anyone in the 21st Century but especially remarkable for someone so powerful, someone a mere two deaths away from possessing the nuclear codes.
I suspect that the 18 Republican representatives who serve in districts carried by Biden and who voted for Johnson may come to rue their decision come November 2024.
Hey Mike, as St. Teresa of Avila once said, “More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
I been called a prodigy, but the people what call me that teach in a middle school in South Carolina, the state of the union what comes up bottom in S.A.T. scores. They ain’t used to no 640 verbal SAT scores from no twelve-year-old. They ain’t used to twelve-year-old stylists as slick as EB White, as peppery as a Wendy’s Hot Creole Chicken Sandwich. Not only can I write standard English with flair, I can speak it, too, and I mean fluent. But biologicalwise, I’m immature:
pubic hairs creeping
on we unripe cracker balls
like blonde kiwi fuzz
Shocked?
Don’t be: it ain’t nothing but the truth dressed up in art. My current state of the biological done up like a haiku. And in my art I mean to tell the truth. And I ain’t gone to avoid the biological, which oftimes is vomitsome. I’m gone to try to take writing to a new level by making it as popular as TV.
I know to do anything first class you got to work hard, prepare yourself, like Mighty John Milton who read everything ancient and modern, memorized the Bible from Genesis 1.1 to Revelation 22.21 with every gotdam begoted polyslab Semite name in between, It made him go blind, yes sir, but then again, I bet his dreams was something, the whole Bible saga flashing on the silverscreens of his curvy brain passages: rivers of blood, idolatry, harlots galore, battleslaughter.
Then go multiple that by Greek mythology.
All that geography.
Ancient geography.
Colorful Bible maps stored in his mind like slides in a filmstrip.
He warmed up for Paradise Lost doing his touching-toes sonnet and elegy exercises before springing off and nailing that Mount Olympus epic dive, the tens flashing down the row of critics stretching out through the centuries. Milton’s my personal hero, I’m following his path. Learning geography and learning every work in the Cliff Notes and beyond set forth by my mentor, Mr. Winfred Parsley, who teaches up at the Marlboro Day School. He’s also supplementing my education by making me learn how to dive, which he calls pay-ee; read short poems and fiction in the anthologies; watch movies, old timey movies; and listen to music, old timey music he plays on record machines.
He’s got me reading James Joyce’s Ulysses right now, so I done read the Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and part of the Ulysses under his tutelage but tons more on my own before. The movies is them jumpy silent ones, boresome, German monster flicks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I like the records, though, hollering Bukka White afra-moans and jazz that bubbles up like a stew. Also this here journal he’s got me writing. He says write it like I’m talking to an “idealized self” who ain’t really me but a me like when I’m grown up and likely embarrassed by podunk pup sentiments. He says to make it “conversational,” make it sound like it’s me yapping, not to worry about the spelling or making it standard English but also to record images and memories and poems and writing exercises and that he ain’t never gone to read it, so I can be upfront honest. He says that good imaginations scare booje-wahs and you got to write for yourself and not worry bout what booje-wahs might think about you, and the only way to do that is to keep a personal journal onliest for your eyes and then after you is dead, the critics can decide if you was crazy or avant garde.
This Mr. Parsley is just as high on me as my own teachers at McColl Middle, one of the most ineptest schools in the domains of the United States. I can’t imagine schools in Guam being more inepter. That’s my only doubt about myself, that these not necessarily setting the world on fire teachers’ confidence in me is based on them spending their lives trying to teach hundreds, maybe thousands, of Homer Jo Mizells and LaShanna Browns, crackhahs and afras, respectfully. That’s all there is at my school, so my language arts teacher Ms Hays was trying to get Marlboro Day to give me a scholarship, but it ain’t nothing but a lowrent white flight pretend prep school maybe bout to go belly up with bacca being our number one crop, so they couldn’t afford to, but Mr. Parsley taken me on and become my mentor and give me his own typewriter to keep forever that I got right here on my pallet upon which I am typing at this very moment in time – yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo!
But this mumbo-jumbo Ulysses ain’t no confidence builder neither. Mr. Parsley takes me sometimes to Mexicano restaurants started by migrants that ain’t nothing but a shack. But he speaks espanol fluent, and they treat him like a hermano, and he takes me there so I can hear espanol in a real life setting spoke by real Mexicanos instead of “drawling rednecks with suspect B.A.s” as he calls Mr. Postell, who roams from school to school teaching both English as a second language and Espanol. And he says that’s the way I ought to read Ulysses, like I’m listening to jazz, listening to the migrants’ riffs of rolled rrrrrrrrrrrs, and he claims that though I don’t know what Mr. Joyce or them Mexicanos is saying, that unbeknownst to me I’m picking it up. This is gone to take me beyond my poor white trash prejudgings, like me calling afras neegrahs and Mexicanos wetbacks.
Mr. Parsley thinks one reason I got so much going for me is that me and Daddy never had no TV. My Mama taught me how to read when I was three cause she was dying of cancer and was afraid I’d never learn otherwise, Daddy married mobile upward, married him an Old Bennettsville girl in the Beta Club. My daddy was a dashing Croytan who could play the mandolin and sing heartbreaking songs in a high lonesome voice that got recorded by the son of Mr. Alan Lomax though they never gave him no money. By high school, Mama’d got all romanticized up on books and irrationalized so much she became a rebel, so went out and married a troubadour what drank Mabel’s Black Label and ended up joining the army. All book sense, no commonsense, my mama married him. That’s how my mama got to end up dying in s VA hospital in Charleston instead of a county one. Her dying wish was that he’d never have no TV to stunt my growth.
My Daddy is a man of his word. He’s a loner what lives with me out in this cabin way past the bacca fields next to nowhere. And my mama’s people didn’t want nothing to do with us, cause not only because was we poor but we is what people call Croytan injuns, above the afras, but lower than crackhahs, and her class being the vanilla topping on top of crackhah culture, as far as poordunk hierarchies go; that is, they is boje-wah. Episcopalians ain’t enarmored of no mixed breeds.
Alas?
Un-uh. The truth of the matter is that I don’t hardly remember my mama. My daddy and me bonded early. He’d rock me to sleep every night singing out on the porch singing. Mostly cowboy songs. Songs about getting buried on the lone prairie, little doggies, doomed women drownded and falling off horses with their light brown hair floating like a vapor in the soft summer air, and he made up his own songs, too, with my name in them sometimes. He home school me till last year when the govment made me go the McColl Middle. He keep his mandolin under his bed but can’t teach me to learn it worth nothing. All my musical talent gone into the verbmaking machine. Yippi-eye-yo-tie-yay!
But wait a minute. What’s all this commotion outside? A UFO? I’m right now looking out the window of our cabin and there’s this – you ain’t gone to believe this – an old man coming down from the sky on a swing.
“Yessah?”
“Open up that window, boy!
“Yessah.”
“I AM I AM come to demand that thou give up thy writing and take my mild yoke of becoming a Pentecostal preacher.”
He’s sitting on that swing looking like a Santy Claus in a choir robe.
I’m awestruck, but the biological’s tugging at me like a rivercurrent. “Sorry, sir, but I can’t be no Pentecostal Preacher. I’m gone to make writing more popular than TV and save the world from the govement.
“You dare defy me?”
“Yes sir-ree-bob tai. The mind is it’s own place. Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”
I know from personal experience that the Citadel has a pretty good, if not excellent, English Department. I took a topnotch graduate class in Victorian Literature there and used much of what learned in the British survey I taught at Porter-Gaud.
How is it then that Nancy Mace, a famous Citadel alum and representative of South Carolina’s First Congressional District, doesn’t know that the scarlet letter in the famous Hawthorne’s novel stands for Adulteress?
In case you missed it, yesterday Representative Mace had a scarlet A emblazoned on a white tee shirt because after voting against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, she has received a shitload of criticism from several of her Republican colleagues[1]. After all, McCarthy had, according to the Huffington Post, donated “millions of dollars to Mace’s campaign.”
Nevertheless, feeling martyred, Ms Mace, an Olympic-grade flip-flopper, whined, “I’m wearing the scarlet letter after the week I just had being a woman up here, and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.”
She plans to vote for Gym Jordan for Speaker, the firebrand former wrestling coach accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse by the team physician at Ohio State. When asked about the allegations on one of the Sunday talk shows, she claimed ignorance, which suggests she’s just as clueless about current events as she is of American literature.
So there she was, strutting around the Capitol Building seemingly advertising her violation of the Seventh Commandment.
However, as I used to tell my students, you have to interpret a symbol in its context. Here the A could very well stand for “ATTENTION!”
“Or asshole.”
[1] A more refined and learned commentator would have substituted “Augean-stable load” for “shitload,” but then if Mace were somehow stumble upon this post, she wouldn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.
Man, oh man, is the Internet ever a cesspool for the ol’ scam-o-rama! Daily, I’m informed that my Netflix payment has failed (even though I’m not a subscriber) or that 800 c-notes are headed Norton’s way for malware protection. I suspect that I’m an inviting target because of my advanced age (I don’t even have enough hair to part behind, and bending over far enough to roll my trousers very well might throw my back out).[1] Cobwebs crisscross the attic of my brain where I often have trouble finding the lines of a poem or song lyric I once knew by heart. So, of course, the [redundancy alert] nefarious Russian scam artist stinking of Turkish cigarettes and hacking a precancerous cough zeroes in on me, an old fool, because, as the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool.
Detail from an MRI of Wesley’s Brain
On the X social media platform (nee Twitter) it’s not unusual to receive a notification that Lori Buckett (pictured below ha-ha) is following me. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of these lovelies have exactly 22 followers and have posted absolute zilch on their pages, or if they have, it’s whatever the Russian word for cheesecake is.[2]
I wonder if older women receive similar solicitations. From, say, some pictured shirtless studly yet lonely thirty-year-old seeking the digital companionship of recently widowed nanas. I doubt it. After a lifetime of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous males, mature women know better that to click follow. Targeting older women would be like fishing for marlin in koi pond. Not worth the trouble.
I hate to admit it, but I recently fell for one of these would-be people on Facebook. A woman pictured in an army uniform contacted me and claimed that she really liked my writing and wanted to be my friend. She had liked several of my posts, so I checked her page out, and at first glance, it seemed legit, lots of military photos, so I friended her, thinking she might buy my novel.[3]
Sigh sure enough, she DMed me, and even though I replied that I didn’t enjoy communicating with strangers, that I was happily married, collecting social security, etc., etc. The queries kept coming, so I blocked her.
Anyway, I just checked my jink mail, and presto:
Well, I gotta go. I got some beta-reading to do on this bleak, gray windy day on the Edge of America.
[1] Congratulations if you got the “Prufrock” allusion. Yesterday marked the 135th anniversary of Tom Eliot’s birth in St. Louis, Louis.
Maybe It’s an Upper Echelon Manifestation of Tourette’s?
I get songs stuck in my head.
Songs I don’t even like,
Sometimes songs I even hate.
Songs like “Sugar Pop, My Lollipop.” or, even worse, songs like “Sugar, Sugar,” a bubble gum number one Archie’s song so sickenly sweet that whistling it or humming it could cause tooth decay.
I sometimes sing a bar or two of these sonic hiccups in public places, like on sidewalks or bar stools, the words coming unbidden out of my mouth, even sometimes in private places, like living rooms I might belt out
Sugar, a honey honey, You are my candy girl, And you got me wanting you.
Not to worry, though. My friends recognize my bursting into song as a peccadillo, a quirk, though one that can become really, really irritating, according to sources once near and dear to me, like college suitemates, ex-girlfriends, dead wives . . .
And as for passing strangers, I really don’t care what they think.
It’s too bad the quaint cool-sounding derogatory noun oaf is dying out, having been supplanted over the years by bonehead, spastic, and most recently dickhead, all of which lack the specific visual associations we conjure at the sight or sound of the word.
Oafs are male, usually bald, fat, dull-eyed, slack-mouthed, and clumsy whereas dickheads can be good-looking Lotharios who catalog their romantic conquests or gifted athletes who make acrobatic catches or PhDs who lord their petty powers over TAs eking out livings in academia.
The thing is, though, if you close your eyes and attempt to visualize an oaf, chances are you picture some lout in Medieval garb, Chaucer’s Miller or Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
That proved wel, for over-al, ther he cam,
At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.
He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre;
Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.
His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,
And therto brood, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys,
Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.
A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde.
Illustration from Thijs Porck’s leidenmedievalistsblog
Here’s my translation:
The Miller was a stout dude of stone
Very big he was of brawn and bone.
That proved well. When it came
to wrestling, he always won the ram.
He was short, broad-shouldered, a thick tor
Who could rip the hinges off any door
Or break it by ramming it with his head.
His beard like a sow or fox was red
and broad just like a spade.
On the right side of his nose he had
a wart that sprouted a tuft of hairs
red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;
his nostrils were black and wide.
A sword and buckler he had by his side.
You probably wouldn’t call the drooling loud mouth banging his hand on the bar for service an oaf; however, in my research I have discovered a modern day oaf, thanks to that most urbane of publications The Daily Mail, the UK’s version of the National Enquirer. Checkout these headlines.
Foul-mouthed motorist with ‘Big Oaf’ number plate and ‘Fast and the Fuhrerious’ T-shirt rants at coach driver to ‘get a proper job’ in 15-minute road rage stand-off that sees him dubbed ‘the new Ronnie Pickering’
Bald man tells coach driver to ‘get a proper job and shut your mouth’ in video
Overweight VW driver launches an abusive tirade through the coach window
The road rage motorist wore bizarre T-shirt reading ‘Fast and Fuhrerious’
Compared to Ronnie Pickering, whose 2015 row with motorcyclist went viral
Do you know the ‘Big Oaf’? Contact alex.robertson@mailonline.co.uk or call 0203 615 3767
So, dear readers, I encourage you to be on the lookout for oafs and use the word, which is such an unlovely embodiment of sound and sense. Say it out loud – oaf – and feel it coming out your mouth – oaf.
I sort of wince whenever I read the expressed shock of social media sharers taken aback at the death of aged musicians like Gordon Lightfoot, Robbie Robertson, or Charlie Watts. After all, no one should be shocked by the death of septuagenarians or octogenarians. The surprising thing to me is that these musicians managed to amass so many years given all the primary and secondary smoke they inhaled – not to mention the drugs, unsafe sex, and chartered flights.
Nevertheless, Jimmy Buffett’s demise did surprise me, maybe because he seemed unstoppable and forever young, a near (if not literal) billionaire who transformed his pop-a-top Texas-tinged Calypso into a financial lifestyle empire. I perhaps should add here that my cynicism prevented me ever coming close to being a parrothead. Despite my epicureanism, I’m not a fan of “resort casual” or much of his music after his AIA album. Maybe he was too much like me, or I was too much like him, to like him.
That said, Jimmy seemed to be a genuinely good fellow. I saw him live once, not on stage, but sitting across the bar from me in Oliver’s Pub in Columbia, South Carolina in 1976. His girlfriend/future wife was student at USC at the time, as was I, sort of. I’m not one to intrude upon celebrity, so I let him and her be.
What does surprise me, though, is how much his death saddens me. “Know thyself,” the Delphic Oracle advises. Maybe I need to get around to that before it’s too late.
Me in 1976 on the left along with John Robinson and someone named Lee (photo credit Jim Huff)
You Do Hoodoo 