Part Two of Donovan’s Brain tonight. Part One is below if you want to hear it. Orson Welles heads the cast.

 

Speaking of the “reallies,” the silly girl somehow rolled her car into a pond. Really. I guess it was parked, slipped out of gear, or some such thing. Never a dull moment in the life of The Amazing Monkey Girl.

 

Meanwhile, this doctor dude is keeping a brain alive in a jar…

I’ll write something in the morning. Tonight I’m going to finish my book.

 

Oh yes, the picture is of an architecturally interesting gas station.

Roma Wines sponsors Suspense! tonight. This is the first of a two-parter starring Orson Welles. I’ll post Part Two tomorrow, and on Tuesday I’ll post “Chicken Heart,” the Lights Out, Everybody program I promised you last week.

 

“Donovan’s Brain” was adapted for the cinema in 1953, starring Lew Ayers and Gene Evans, Nancy Davis. This radio adaptation was broadcast in May of 1944. Suspense! would do it again in ’48 with John McIntire and Robert Montgomery. There were several scripts that were just oh-so-good that they were reprised. Another of those was “Sorry, Wrong Number,” which I posted last week.

 

Pretty soon it will be time for Fibber and Molly to return from their summer vacation, and I’ll go back to posting their program on Tuesday nights. I’ll also be posting episodes of The Great Gildersleeve starring Harold Peary as the title – from the beginning.

 

In the meantime, this particular Suspense! program is one of their most polished productions. I suppose that’s because Orson Welles wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s also a rare Science Fiction entry in a series known primarily for Crime drama with a supernatural twist.

 

Now, to other matters…

 

Have you noticed? The White Lodge has been suffering from a serious case of the “reallies” lately. Well, of course you’ve noticed. Dumb question. For instance, I really have been looking for a house – me, myself, the person who writes this blog. I really did go camping with my children, my real children. I really did go to the Catskills yesterday to visit my real father.

 

I’ve been writing quite a lot about Elizabeth. That’s not her real name, but she is a real person. I really did go to a pig roast last weekend. She really did agree to look after my real dog while I was away. She really… didn’t. There was a message on my machine when I got back – apparently she’s had some real car trouble. I’m doubly glad I didn’t decide to spend the night in the mountains. Can’t find any dog poop, though. I’ve looked everywhere. Good dog. Or, maybe the myphets ate it. Who knows?

 

What on earth is causing this dearth of imagination at The White Lodge? Well, the Squabbler has been away quite a lot this summer, for a start. But I think the “reallies” got started when my house quest began in earnest. A narrative began to take shape. You have been reading factual accounts of my personal life all summer long – well, with here and there a more customary White Lodge style post thrown in. Previously it was the other way ‘round; only occasionally did I reveal things about myself without fabricating whole chunks of it.

 

I prefer to write personal mythologies. I recently got done with an interview for Bookworm’s blog – that is, I was interviewed by Taylor, and it will be posted at Bookworm’s place at some point. I did this once before. POH interviewed me for Lucy’s blog last year. I answered the questions in the Squabbler way. I explained what I was trying to do with The White Lodge, how it wasn’t a factual or personal journal. I’ve noticed often that readers can be confused, not knowing whether I’m writing fiction or fact. Good. That’s the effect I’m looking for in a real White Lodge post. Every now and then I take time out to explain it’s a gag – or, much of it is a gag – because confusion may be fun, but I don’t want people’s feelings put out of joint. Every now and then I have to explain The Lady is fictional, Sister Midnight is fictional, the Darklies of Rhubarb Valley don’t actually exist, and so on.

 

Clover? I ain’t tellin’.

 

But it occurs to me – (and this is a new paragraph only because it’s getting mighty grey) – that someone who reads that interview and then visits The White Lodge may feel cheated. He may ask, “So where’s the myphets? Where’s Daphne Sunshine and Mister Sludge?”

 

Of course, it’s my blog and I can write whatever I want to write, but really…

 

Mister Johnson.

 

Anyhooooooooooooooooooooooo, when Squabs gets back from his third trip abroad this summer – (the ole chattering gadfly) – he will find me still here in this same physical location, going on three years now. I will be here through the winter. At least that’s the plan to give Our Lord a chuckle. This house hunting business has thoroughly consumed the summer, and it has consumed my thoughts. I think it has been interfering with my creativity. So – enough is enough.

 

I have absolutely positively no idea what I may write about tomorrow. That – no matter what else may befall – will always be true, “hand to Gawd!” as they say on my home world – and on that you may always rely.

 

The people who live in this area drive at an average of 80 mph and complain bitterly about us slow poke Sunday drivers who enjoy the views. What used to be a gas station and is now apparently a propane company provides a place to pull off the road, and it also provides the first good view along the route of the mountain ridge which is my destination. The Catskill Mountains really aren’t mountains at all, by the way. This region is actually a gigantic mesa-like plateau which has been eroded into mountainous forms over the course of however many millions of years. Mountains are volcanic; this formation is glacial.

 

Sometimes the area in which I reside is referred to as the “foothills” of the Catskill Mountains, but that’s just silly. My hills – The Hollow Hills, The Haunted Hills, The West Hills, and so on, have nothing to do with the massive eroded plateau eighty or so miles southeast of them. It’s usually tourist publications which are distributed in the resort areas of the Catskills that make this claim. I suppose it is a way to minimize the two hour driving distance between the “mountains” and my home town, which is also something of a tourist attraction. You know – “Be sure to visit… It’s right next door!”

 

No, please don’t visit. Just stay home. There’s nothing to see here. Bloody tourists…

 

But I’m a slow driver no matter where I am driving. I just don’t have anyplace in particular to go. If it takes me an extra five or ten minutes to arrive somewhere that’s OK because I’ve been somewhere the whole time I’ve been driving. One place is as good as any other. I mean, goodness gracious – some folks have such monumentally important lives. They’re running late for their audience with the Pope, or… Who knows what they think they are late for. It must be something awfully important, anyway. I do a lot of yielding so the Speed Racers can go on their merry way, and I’m very grateful for being unimportant.

 

So – this picture had to be taken through the windshield, there being no convenient pull-over. The next one is taken from the vantage point of an actual parking area, and it shows a great expanse of nothing, but just a whole lotta nothing, which I suppose is what makes it interesting. But you can see – or surmise – from this view that it is taken from the top of a plateau. This ridge line simply appears out of the earth without the usual buffer zone of foothills leading gradually into it.

 

 

Rhubarb Valley, though smaller in scale, has a similar topography: dramatic “peaks” that suddenly appear without warning. And the view from there is of the Adirondack Mountains which are actual mountains, albeit extremely elderly ones, unlike the brand spanking new and relatively young Rocky Mountains in the western part of the country.

 

 

A fellow named Zadock Pratt created this eccentric display of monuments to his family in the rocks. An arrow in one of the rock formations points the way to the larger display. Here also is his grave. Unfortunately, the sun wasn’t cooperating with my camera, and of course I knew it, but I couldn’t continue hiking to a better vantage point because I was wearing flip-flops and my back still hasn’t quite healed. Pratt was several things, including a congressman. Blah blah. It’s a nice place for a picnic. Now, that’s a measure of the ultimate in worldly success: your gravesite is a nice place for a picnic. The Valley of the Kings should have it so good.

 

 

Dinner arrived shortly after 4. It’s very convenient, really.

 

 

Dad and I visited and talked about many things until about 11 pm. Then I came home. My extended family own property in this area, so it has always made good sense to meet here, at the halfway point between us. Cousins of mine who live in Florida spend their summers here. School begins a week or two earlier down there, so they have returned home by now. Dad usually winterizes the house, and re-opens it in the spring. He also uses it as a retreat. The Catskill House has been the scene of several family reunions, though not recently.

 

People come and go. People die, disappear. And they are replaced by babies who in their turn grow up, and eventually create their own memories. Some of them carve things into the rocks; others don’t. As for me, I’m just passing through. But I do enjoy a picnic now and again.

  

So the photos of the interior are titled by the words “Smoke Damage.” I don’t know if the RE broker knows this. It’s a helluva way to sell a house. What I would do, if I were the agent, is get the punter in to see the house first and then say something like, “Oh yes, and there was a little kitchen fire here at some point. If you look closely you can see a trace of it…”

 

I’m ready to give up. This summertime quest for a new home has created nothing but discontent. Now the summer’s nearly gone and I still can’t have my fire. I’m looking at classified ads for a rental outside of the village. Everything is twice the money I might expect to pay on a mortgage. Early in the morning I step outside into the driveway to hear the sound of the birds, and the sound of the traffic, and the sound of the fire whistle, and the sound of… why the hell doesn’t that guy get his muffler replaced? What birds?

 

My goal was invisibility. When I sit on my porch I am on display. Joggers pass by, some with dogs. Why do people jog? – Because they don’t have cows to milk, I suppose, or any other useful thing to do.

 

Yesterday we stopped at the Hubbell Hollow estate so Elizabeth could feed her animals. I stayed in the car, listening to T Rex, while I watched her leading two calves on chains into a shady area above the house, followed closely, or surrounded, by six dogs and a pig. She is the pack leader – a tiny girl in blue jeans and a tank top knocking dogs away with knee nudges as she leads her cows to a better pasture. This is The Land of Milk and Honey, sez I to myself.

 

We finished a rental clean-out that we started the day before. The tenants’ cats had had their way with the place. Once the mountains of discarded clothing were finally bagged up and removed the carpet beneath showed us the source of the horrible odor that permeated the place. Bad news, I would have to explain, the carpet wants pulling, the floorboards beneath it have been impregnated with kitty piss. I’m up to my knees in a drug addict’s garbage, and I say to my partner, “I’m too old for this.”

 

“I’m going to take a million showers,” she declares. I see that she is wearing her MP3 player, and is therefore deaf.

 

Oh well.

 

It’s important to take before and after pictures when you do a clean-out, by the way. I’ve learned this the hard way. Is there any other way to learn a thing? I could have titled those pictures “Cat Damage,” or “Catamination.”

 

So anyhoooo, my dog is here with me. He has to be put on a leash, or so I thought. I do put him on a leash. Well, when we got him, twelve or so years ago, he was a young thing – very excitable. I built a field fence to keep him in the yard. This was when we were living at the place I affectionately call “The Little Dump on the Prairie,” the place my wife escaped from, leaving me there for the next four years before it finally occurred to me she wasn’t coming back and I’d rather be living in the village. The dog laughed at my pathetic fence. He got over it, under it, out of it. He chased cars. Oh boy, did he chase cars!

 

So I’ve always leashed him. Or, that is, I’ve leashed him here in the village. But the other day I came home from work to find my son at the computer and the poor dog needing to go. I said, “Take the damn dog out, will you?” Elizabeth said, “I’ll do it,” and before I could raise a protest she had him outside, no leash, cars going by on the street, a coupla deer grazing on the lawn, squirrels running around. The world was just full of things for him to chase. But no, to my amazement, he followed her wherever she would telepathically lead him. He did his business and came right back inside when she told him to.

 

He behaved just as I had seen her own dogs behave with her: he stayed close to her legs all the while and she’d nudge him this way or that with her knee. He would look at her from time to time, reading her manner, I suppose, for approval.

 

She is my own dog whisperer. Well, somebody else’s dog whisperer, technically-speaking, but I borrow her four days a week. I don’t imagine I could control the animal the way she does.

 

Now I think I’ll be taking a drive down to Long Island – that is, if I can reach my Dad first and be sure he is there. I need to talk to him. He is almost impossible to reach otherwise – not a phone talker, and he hasn’t checked his e-mail in months. All he has for a phone these days is a cell phone, and I guess he doesn’t have much use for it. And why should he? The man’s retired. He doesn’t need to be bothered. But, if I do go, I’ll ask Elizabeth to take care of the dog.

  

    

I love this guy. Close your eyes and watch this.

 

I can’t move on till I get a comment, but I have to say I’m so very ready to retire. My back is killing me.

 

Phil Hendrie. It took me three listens to figure out his guests were fictional. I gathered they were actors, and I was very impressed. Lord knows I won’t stay awake long enough to listen regularly, and I don’t pay attention to anything that happened after 1950 or so. My son once asked me if I owned any movies in color. (Of course he knows I do. It was just his way of being a weisenheimmer.) So Hendrie, whose schtick is well known to a lot of people who are plugged into the culture, was not so well known to me. Of course, later I would find out he’s an impressionist of great talent.

 

It’s all about timing. Hendrie has an astounding knack for timing. You’d think that with my great love for Theater of the Mind I would have followed this guy right along. Especially as how the only radio I listen to anymore is talk radio. Why is that? – Because talk radio is broadcast live, or at least recorded live, and it’s also theater of an entirely improvisational sort. Since I’ve been a radio DJ, and I’ve spent some time at the mic, I can appreciate that hosting a talk radio program is an extremely difficult thing to do, requiring a whole lotta talent.

 

I walked in on Clover arguing with her husband about whether or not Rush Limbaugh would be a good president. She asked me what I thought. I said, “Why not Phil Hendrie? He could be the whole Cabinet.” They both thought that was funny, and I was happy to defuse their argument which was not likely to end anywhere good, considering their fundamental ideological differences.

 

Well, it’s almost time for Elizabeth to arrive, and then I’ve got to go.