non-fiction

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 enjoyed 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 #6. 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?”  

The Sixth Deadly Sin

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment
Anger Transformation, image via Bidita Rahman

The Sixth Deadly Sin

Anger begins with folly and ends with repentance – Pythagoras

I’m no stranger to anger – I’m not proud of this – but I’ve poured beers over people’s heads, assaulted deaf heaven with bootless cries, smashed my brothers’ model of the human skeleton on a hardwood floor and shoved each individual bone beneath the door of his judiciously locked bedroom. 

Even though I was much, much younger than Will Smith when I committed these examples of Deadly Sin Number Six, I can relate to rashness, the fire in the veins that short-circuits the pauser reason, the anger-spawned and awful daring of a moment’s surrender, the explosion, the exhilaration, but also the subsequent miasma of guilt-ridden regret, which, if you’re like me, might suddenly rise to consciousness a half century later and make you cringe as you recall your lack of human decency.

At least, in my case, my acts of assholedom weren’t caught on camera, much less viewed by millions. It’s bad enough reliving grainy reruns in my memory. [1]  

Will Smith, on the other hand . . . 

At any rate, I find it much easier to forgive the slap than the subsequent speech, which I heard live, a shameful, weepy, entitled, excuse-ridden justification that quoted the Gospels as Smith claimed to aspire to be a “vessel of love.”

No, man, that was some Old Testament smiting shit you were throwing down. For your own good, embrace shame because it serves you right to suffer. Take a month off, read Crime and Punishment or the Brothers Karamazov.

Uh-oh, my prose is starting to rhyme, which means it’s time to shut the-you-know-what up.

Nighty night. Until next time, indulgent readers.

[1] I realize many of my fellow Lefties believe we shouldn’t be talking about Will Smith’s bitch-slapping Chris Rock when there’s more serious badness afoot: to wit, a coup sparked by a President and partly organized by a Supreme Court Justice’s whacko wife, who later cajoled the White House’s chief-of staff to overthrow the election, not to mention the Ukraine horrorshow, tactical nukes, WW3, etc. etc. 

But, hey, the Academy Award assault is interesting, worth contemplating, fun to talk about. I’m a big fan of Chris Rock, a fellow South Carolinian who has described our home state as “the dirt road not taken.” I didn’t dig his getting backhanded. Anyway, all existential angst and no schadenfreude makes Wesley/Rusty a dull [mannish] boy. Or, as the Underground Man puts it, “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”

A Dog Ain’t Necessarily a Gentleman

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment
Victorian Whippet by Michael Thomas

My love for creatures isn’t wholesale. 

For example, I don’t love a dog merely because it’s a dog, don’t love a baby because it’s merely a baby. Loving something just because in falls into category strikes me as indiscriminate.  

Oh, look at baby Putin, he’s so adorable. Coochie Coochie Coo, Vladimir. 

On the other hand, I have loved and do love individual dogs like Jack, Sally, Bessie, Saisy, Milo, Cosmo, Daisy, and KitKat because they cool, not because they merely possess four legs, sport fur, and love you unconditionally if you feed them and offer them the scantest attention.[1] I don’t love babies because they’re supposedly innocent or cute or whatever. I love babies with personality, party babies, babies with soul.  Like this one:

Grandson Julian

If you don’t like dogs – and some people don’t – it’s probably not a great idea to announce it on your Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.[2] For whatever reason, where I live dogs have risen in status approaching the parental love levels of demi-human.[3]  Sometimes. it seems to me that people who bring their dogs to bars consider their dogs alter egos, like the dog is an extension of themselves, a walking scarf, as it were. I suspect that some dog owners work all day and feel obligated to drag their shepherds and Boykins to Chico Feo or Lowlife for a modicum of stimulation and companionship for the dog while the owners seek human contact and alcohol. 

Unfortunately, today I had unpleasant encounters with three bar dogs. The first one, one of these ubiquitous poodle mixes (perhaps a waddle waddle doodle doodle) was lying underneath my stool and looked up beseechingly and me, so I addressed him as if he were human, saying something along the lines of, “How you doing, Buddy Roe,” and he immediately growled at me, showing his teeth. His owner, a dour faced woman eating an exotic dish, didn’t chide the dog, so I said to it testily, raising my hands with palms pushing outward, “End of conversation, canine.”

A bit later as I was leaving, my passage was blocked by two straining spaniels on leashes, held by an attractive smiling blonde, and when I tried to slide past them, they barked aggressively.

I stopped and addressed the dogs. “Look,” I said, “I come to this bar practically every day. This is my territory.” Then glanced at the woman and said, “I’m serious.” 

A Dear Abby suggestion: If you’re gonna bring belligerent dogs to restaurants, sit in a corner. 

On the way home, the light was beautiful as I walked down Cooper to Hudson to take KitKat out to pee, which she did indeed, happy but not overjoyed to see me. 

The cat, on the other hand, hangs with me in the study, now asleep he is, curled up like a black, hairy caterpillar. No way I’m ever taking him to a bar.

[1] I’m a slack ass grammarian and lazy to boot, so I omitted the verb here because most of the dogs are dead, though a couple are alive, and I didn’t want to clutter the sentence with the verbs “were” and “are” as in “because they are and were cool.” I could have used “be” as in “they be cool.” But you really don’t need it:

            We real cool. We   

            Left school. We

            Lurk late. We

            Strike straight. We

            Sing sin. We   

            Thin gin. We

            Jazz June. We   

            Die soon.

[2] Donald Trump isn’t into dogs, not to mention not being into his son Barron, or whatever his name is. Some people consider not liking dogs a character flaw, but I don’t. Not liking your son is a different matter. Trump’s father doesn’t seem to have loved him, which reminds me of these lines from Larkin:

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

[3] Parental here means ownership. Dogs have become like offspring, especially for single people, which is fine.

Let’s Not Cue Barry McGuire

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment
from Blade Runner

I believe that old folks, senior citizens, golden-agers, stooped shufflers – whatever you want to call them – tend to project their mental and bodily decay on the world at large, which leads them to disparage the present and overpraise “the good ol’ days.”  Of course, their parents did the same, derided those good ol’ days we fondly look back on as doom-ladened even as they themselves waxed nostalgic about World War II or the Great Depression.[1]

And I can’t help but wonder if this tendency might have something to do with moon-faced Vladimir Putin’s waging war on Ukraine as he nostalgically looks back on the post-Stalinist era of his youth, on good ol’ Nikita banging on a UN desk with his shoe, a lapse of protocol that makes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Lauren Boebert’s screeching during Biden’s the State of the Union address seem downright urbane.

The 60s, the good ol’ days
owning the libs

Putin wants to restore the Soviet Empire, a project not unlike restoring the Blade Runner set. Look, I spent twenty-eight days in the Soviet Union in 1989, and I’d never witnessed a population more depressed, especially in Leningrad where virtually every face I encountered was stamped with despair.

If you’d like, you can click HERE for a side trip that offers more specifics on the despair.

Ah, yes, 1989, fun times in the Evil Empire

To be fair, Putin did a fairly good job of fostering a middle class, even in a Kleptocracy, that is, up to now. 

At any rate, Putin is suffering from some malady, perhaps Parkinson’s, as his shuffling gate and clenched fist suggest, or perhaps he’s had a stroke. At any rate, he’s obviously on steroids, and some have even suggested his belligerence is rooted in “roid rage.”

Given the six-thousand nukes he has at his disposal, it’s pretty damned scary. I remember in the fourth-grade squatting under desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in duck and cover drills[2]. 

Now, with my bad back and aching knees, I’m not sure I’m capable of squatting, so let’s pray –if we pray and hope if we don’t – that Putin shows some restraint. He does, I hear, have to daughters via his first wife and four more with a mistress, an Olympic gold medalist gymnast, who, no doubt, is very adept at squatting.

Cheers!

[1] Writeth achy Wesley in his 69th year.

[2] An oldie but goodie: “In the event of a nuclear attack, get under the desk, cover your head with your hands, and kiss your ass goodbye.”

From Crib to Crib

/ wlm3 / 5 Comments
Aleksei Adele Panilov

I’ve been devoting un-precious moments of my wee-hour insomnia thinking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

[Swoosh]

He’s lying on his back in a crib or cradle kicking his little legs and waving his little arms.

Grandmother, Mother, and Baby Putin

[Swoosh]

He’s in middle school, pasty and sawed-off[1], targeted by bullies who stink of B.O and Turkish cigarettes.[2]

[Swoosh]

Now, he’s sitting at the end of a table, a fifth of an American football field[3] from his nearest underling.

(Photo by Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images)

In a recent NYT op-ed piece. Madeleine Albright, who spent three hours with Putin when she was Clinton’s secretary of state, described him as “reptilian.”

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C

So obviously something went terribly wrong with him somehow, somewhere. 

He claims to have revered his parents, so they must have loved him – or maybe not.

A bad seed?

I bet it’s complicated.

Then end product is overcompensation. Why all the overcompensation?

Overcompensation, micro and macro. 

            Micro: Judo black belts, bare-chested horsemanship. 

            Macro: Resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

In the irrational pre-dawn of my depressive sleeplessness, it seems we’re regressing, devolving, that even in the US democracy is disappearing.[4]

Meanwhile, In Ukraine, babies lie on their backs, kick their little legs, wave their little arms.

[1] A hip 1950’s synonym for “short.”

[2] I spent twenty-eighty days in June of ’89 in the Soviet Union. Anonymous high rises galore, the stench of Turkish cigarettes, shuffling pedestrians everywhere looking down at the sidewalk. 

Putin’s citizens are more prosperous, less woebegone. He’s popular, especially among the countryfolk, c.f. Trump

[3] Approx. twenty yards, two first downs, i.e., 18.288 meters, give or take a centimeter or two.

[4] Folk wisdom insists “that just before daylight is the darkest hour.”

Literary Messaging

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment
Me writing fiction circa 1980

When I first started writing as an adult, around 1978, publishing short fiction was very difficult.[1] Hotshot quarterlies like The Georgia Review received a thousand manuscripts a month, and of those three thousand submissions, they’d publish maybe two an issue.  Stephen Corey, one of its editors in those days, told me if the story didn’t grab a reader’s attention in the first paragraph, it was tossed in the “thanks-for-submitting-your-manuscript-but-it-doesn’t-meet-our-needs” pile.

Fortunately, my home state of South Carolina has an Arts Commission that provides writers chances for publication. I was fortunate to be selected to participate in a workshop led by Blanche McCrary Boyd. We met once a week for six weeks or so, and I learned a helluva lot about technique, but on the less positive side of the ledger, I discovered that my writing was no great shakes. Jo Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Starkey Flythe Jr., and William Baldwin were among the participants. It was humbling –disillusioning in the positive sense that – poof – an illusion had disappeared.

It was through the Arts Commission that I published my first story “Airwaves,” which was later anthologized by the Hub City Press. Encouraged, I started sending manuscripts out to literary journals I’d cull from the Fiction Writer’s Market published by Reader’s Digest Books, a pre-internet storehouse of possibilities. 

One journal that caught my eye was a quarterly out of Richmond, Virginia, the New Southern Literary Messenger. They, according to the entry, received 140-150 submissions per month and published five. The pay was meager, $10, 6 copies, and a free subscription. So, I sent them a story entitled “Almost Blue,” my latest.

It took them so long to get back to me that I had forgotten I had submitted it. In fact, I’d gotten full-time teaching job in the meantime and had more or less given up writing. 

I’ll never forget reaching in my mailbox in Rantowles, pulling out the acceptance letter, and doing a little jig of joy. They wanted me to provide a photograph and write a first-person bio. Of course, I was ll too happy to comply. 

I crowed, I boasted, informed my parents and in-laws and my new bosses at Porter-Gaud. After all, Edgar Allen Poe had once been an editor of the [Old] Southern Literary Messenger!

I should have been more careful reading the entry in the Writer’s Market, for example, that the journal was 5×8 with card stock cover.

Here’s a Xerox reproduction of the last page. To say I was disappointed at the layout would be an understatement.

My poor parents, my poor in-laws, my poor wife. The Georgia Review this was not.

So now that I’m finally publishing my first novel, I have some trepidation about the quality of the product, but so far so good. I received the preliminary proofs this week, and the editors had gone through the manuscript with [awkward attempt at avoiding a cliché alert] a cootie comb, and with David Boatwright doing the cover, I’m confident that the book itself will be high quality.

The quality of the writing, however, I’m still not so sure about.

A Cootie Comb

[1] It’s still very difficult, but a bit less so with so many on-line journals out there nowadays. 

South Carolina, the Creation Science State

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

Senator Mike Fair, the carefree hypochondriac, has successfully struck a clause from cutting edge South Carolina’s not-so-new new science standards as the Modular Home State continues to lead the nation in embracing the concept of a 1st Century AD classroom.  

This educational apostasyphilosophy, according to Senator Fair, will prepare students for the most profound challenge they will face in the upcoming century, i.e., avoiding an eternity of everlasting perdition, “torture without end [. . .] a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur (sic) unconsumed,” as the 17th Century astro-physicist John Milton put it.[1]

Here is the controversial clause in question:

Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that in that population over multiple generations.

Not so fast, says broad-minded Baptist Fair: “To teach natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong.  I don’t have a problem with teaching theories.  I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”[2]

In agreement with Fair is state Superintendent of Education Mick Zais, a Darwinian doubter who for some odd reason introduced forensic chemistry into Newberry College’s college curriculum when he served as president.  “This has been going on in South Carolina for quite some time,” Zais noted.  “We ought to teach them both sides and let students draw their own conclusions.[3]

Actually, Dr. Zais’s idea of teaching the theory of evolution vis a vis with creation mythsscience has already been implemented in a few avant garde Upcountry independent schools in the state.  Your commentator has obtained an exclusive copy of a comparison/contrast essay by a senior at Pitchfork Ben Tillman Christian Academy.

***

Skinner Hodges
Mrs. Tammy Jean Weektee
English IllI
Febuary 2014 A.D.

For the six thousand years man has walked the planet

earth, they have been arguing about how this God-Created

miracle of a planet came to be. And we are not only talking

about people, that are saved, but about pagean people, too.

That being the case, it is not, we reckon, not all that

surprising that people are still arguing about this topic.

This six-weeks we have been studying two different

versions of creation. The scientific and biblical versions.

The scientific version is based on human observation, that

is often faulty, and the Biblical version is based on the

unerrant Word of God. This paper using the block method

will compare and contrast the two theories.

     First, the scientific theory, which is full of holes. According

to this, out of nowhere this bigbang spit stars that cooled

and somehow or other little cells popped up on earth,

started dividing and over a ridiculous long period of time

ended up being monkeys that ended up being man. Not to

mention they haven’t found a missing link to prove any of

this.

     The Biblical theory is that the Lord created the world and

all of its creatures. This makes more sense. First, the world

did not come from nothing, which even a special education

kid could tell you makes no sense, but from the Hand of the

Almighty. Adam and Eve started out as people, not as

germs and viruses, who could walk upright in the garden

from Day 1. Add to this that this version does not come

from the faulty observations of Fallen Man but from the

Mouth of the Almighty by way of Its servant Moses.

     In conclusion. We live in a free country. You’re free to

believe in evolution if you like or in the Biblical version.

The facts, though, speak for themselves.

A+

Great job Skinner. Almost perfect, except that
“Six Weeks” should be in capitols because it
refers to a specific school-related period of time

***

In other good news, Governor Hayley is expected to sign the bill allowing patrons to bring their firearms into bars without their having to go through training or criminal background checks.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

SC Celebrity, Pee Wee Gaskins

[1] Symbol S, atomic number 16.

[2] When self-proclaimed right-thinking leftist Pointee Head questioned if Fair, a product of SC schools, could actually read, given that the above clause says nothing about “origins,” he was easily squashed by Fair’s Churchillian sally, “Hey, if I can’t read, how did I get a football scholarship to USC?”

[3] The “naked” this in above sentence doesn’t refer to sex education but to “not believing in science.” Dr. Zais believes students should receive abstinence only sex education and that students should not be aware that condoms even exist because sometimes letting students “see both sides” and “draw their own conclusions” can lead to eternal damnation.

Strange Encounters

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

In 1989, the South Carolina Fiction Project selected my story “An Invasion of Tourists” as one of twelve short stories to be published in Columbia, South Carolina’s daily newspaper, The State. The story, written in second person, dramatizes a male twenty-something’s encounter with two very strange bar patrons who seem not only foreign, but downright alien, and by alien, I mean alien in the extra-terrestrial sense:

There’s another woman, but something’s not quite right about her. In a tropical print sundress, she’s practically catatonic. Her eyes are fluorescent green, very far apart and don’t blink. Slowly, she picks up her banana daiquiri, cocks her head, and laps it up with a flickering tongue.

You stare in disbelief. She looks at you and smiles stupidly. “Hello,” she says, “how goes it, amigo?” Her voice is fresh, friendly, but somehow mechanical, like the voice on your Portuguese Made Easy records.

[snip]

“Where y’all from?’

“Q.”

“Queue? Where’s that?”

“Just around the corner from Tri-Alpha 6.”

They’re smiling like his and hers ventriloquist dummies. You manage to muster a fake laugh as the jukebox engages. Pop-a-top, pop-a-top, pop-a-top. Reggae. Bob Marley.

“Excuse us,” they say in unison and head for the small, tiled rectangle that serves as a dance floor. Like exotic birds, they go through elaborate steps, a mirror image mating dance. Then shoulder-to- shoulder, back-to-back, butt-to-butt, they shimmy, like two people with terrible itches.

“What’s the scoop on those two?” you ask the bartender.

“Beats me,” he says, “but they sure can do the Dorsal.”

As the story progresses, the unnamed protagonist sees more and more evidence of an intergalactic incursion. For example, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news is unexplained lights hovering over cars on I-26. After a sleepless night, he drives to the television station to share his story with the anchor. There he encounters a teenager convinced he’s also seen an extraterrestrial. The kid looks crazed, so the protagonist decides to bail.

You’ve called in sick. Deservedly so. You’re shook. You came within a heartbeat of making an utter fool of yourself. You can’t believe that you’d ever fall a victim of mass hysteria. With so little sleep, your memory is even more suspect than usual. Probably her tongue wasn’t as long as it seemed yesterday. Maybe she was wearing contacts that made her eyes that color.

Maybe you’re going insane.

You head out to the beach for rest and relaxation. You’ll swim, exhaust yourself, and go home for 18 hours or so of sleep.

Food. You haven’t eaten. Food will make you feel better. So you pull into Frankie’s Place, a rundown joint on the front beach. Seated on the deck with a salt breeze blowing, you feel better already. Frank, a fat, freckled, tattooed ex-Marine brings you out a cold one.

How’s business,” you ask.

“Great,” he says. “Tourists are flocking in from everywhere.”

“Do you get many from Tri-Alpha 6,” you ask, as if he’s your pal, as if it’s an inside joke.

“Huh?”

“Tri-Alpha 6.”

“What’s that? A fraternity?”

You don’t answer him.

As he waddles off, he shakes his head as if to say, “Give me a break.”

You turn to look out over the ocean, half hoping to see one flashing over the horizon, but there’s nothing, not even a cloud in the sky.

***

Well, brothers and sisters, yesterday I had a real-life strange encounter, though not quite as disorienting as the one in the short story.

I was walking my dog to the end of the unpaved road where I live (see above). A grey medium-sized SUV slowly made its way towards us and stopped. An elderly woman on the passenger side rolled down her window, and the driver, another grey-haired woman, leaned towards the steering wheel so I could make eye contact with both. They didn’t look like aliens from another planet but like characters in a David Lynch movie, corny and blandly friendly in a creepy, Trumanshowesque[1] sort of way.

“We just have a question,” the passenger said in a vowel-deprived Midwestern accent.

“Ask away.”

“What’s behind these houses? Marshes?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Marshes and the Folly River.”

“A river?” the driver asked. “There’s a river back there?” Her tone was incredulous.

“Yes, ma’am, a river.”

“But what are those long things jutting out? Flat wooden things projecting outwards. It looks like you could walk on them.”

“They’re docks,” I said, somewhat taken aback, wondering what planet they were from.

“Docks!” They seemed flabbergasted.

The passenger said, “You mean you can have boats back there?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s deep water. You could take a boat out of there and sail all the way to Lisbon, Portugal.”

The passenger said, “We’re not from around here.”

I laughed. “I’d never guess with those accents of yours.”

They were beaming.

“Where are you from?”

“St. Louis.”

I mentioned going to see the Braves play at Busch stadium when my boys were young.

“We’re Cardinal fans,” they said, almost apologetically.

“No shit Sherlock,” I thought, but instead said, “I got to see Ozzie Smith do his backflip.”

They both smiled genuine smiles. They knew who Ozzie Smith was, which came as a relief. 

(You may have heard that during the Battle of the Bulge, army units would quiz each other at checkpoints with baseball trivia after they learned that German spies, wearing US uniforms and speaking perfect American English, were attempting to infiltrate the lines.)

I showed them where to turn around (it’s a dead end road) and bid them goodbye. Twenty minutes later, as I was walking to Lowlife for my afternoon constitutional, they passed me without waving, puttering along about fifteen miles an hour.

When I told the tale to my pal Jeremy at Lowlife,” he said. “Haven’t they seen movies? There are docks in movies. St Louis is on the Mississippi, for chrissakes. They must have seen a dock before.”

He added, waving and nodding, “I would have said, ‘good day’ and walked away.

[1] Yes, goddammit, add it to the dictionary.

The Freedom to Offend

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

The Freedom to Offend

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“[. . .] and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.” – Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”

Okay, so we don’t want to ban AK-47s because that would be unbarring the door of tyranny. On the other hand, we don’t want our precious, delicate children exposed to depressing historical events like the Native American genocide, slavery, the Holocaust – perhaps even Sandy Hook – because the truth might make them feel uncomfortable.

I’ll tell you what made me feel uncomfortable when I was teaching: crouching under a Harkness table stifling a fart with my AP Lit students during a live shooter drill.

And, O, my Brothers and Sisters, we read many a bannable book in those AP classes.

Oedipus Rex – parricide, incest, sacrilege

The Canterbury Tales – vulgarity, profanity, nudity, plagues

Hamlet – fratricide, adultery, vulgarity, a corpse-strewn stage

Crime and Punishment – murder, prostitution, crushing poverty, alcoholism

Madame Bovary – serial adultery, suicide, insanity

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – atheism, masturbation, prostitution, adolescent rebellion

The Sound and the Fury – promiscuity, suicide, racial epithets, abject cruelty

The Song of Solomon – premarital sex, vulgar language, murder

The Hand Maid’s Tale – dystopia, sexism, theocratic cruelty

And that’s not even considering the poetry we read.

Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

`A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

~WB Yeats

That’s it.

Thanks for listening to my Ted Rant.