I was just about to post the Fibber McGee and Molly back from summer vacation episode, but I heard Harlow saying it was October and I had wanted to stay in sequence so Thanksgiving falls 'round Thanksgiving, and Christmas falls 'round Christmas, and so on. I guess I'm used to TV fall seasons starting right after the kids get back to school. Maybe I'll post some reruns, though. Or rarities - old shows from '36-'38. I have one from '35. It's a bit scratchy.

Whatever.

Old shows are still active in the Heavenly Days archives. I'm having too much fun with music anyway. I got Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother off Limewire. Wow - what a great record. Who makes trip music like that anymore? No one.

No one trips like that, I guess.

I had heard the newish David Gilmour record. It was OK. He came up with some good songs. I love The Narrow Way. His contribution to Atom Heart is really good too. The record has cows on the cover. We used to call it "The Cow Album." And yes - we smoked a little. But when I hear it now I'm straight and sober, (and daffy), and it's the same, just as good, maybe better. It's what it is.

Well, a friend told me grown-ups can't smoke marijuana without getting freaked out. It's something that happens if you eventually do things like get a job, get married, raise children. It just gets very past tense all of a sudden. I can see that. My experience seems to bear that out.

So I hadn't heard that album in a very long time, and I never owned a copy of King Crimson's Lark's Tongue in Aspic - not in LP, 8-track or cassette. So I managed to download that one. And Lizard. I had it. I cherished it. But I lost it in my divorce. So - it's good to have that again.

A million parties either began or ended with Syd Barrett. I found a few songs of his I had never heard before. There's one of them absolutely bothers my 14 year-old son. He can't handle it. Well, they're sad songs. Syd's mind was going round into the next pasta dish. That's what was sad about them. But if you like Edgar Allen Poe you probably get what Barrett is trying to do. He loved words. Of course, Poe loved them to make sense as well as sound good together. And Barrett detached the sense from the sound.

But to me words have a taste, a flavor. When my mouth speaks a word I can taste it. Some words taste really good. So if I sing along with Syd The caterpillar hood won't cover your head/ And you know you should be home in bed it tastes good to me, it's a meal. Can't figure out what the hell he's talking about, but...

So what?

Well I like songs in languages other than English. I like Mozart opera, for instance, and those are best in the language of the libretto. All opera is best in the language of its libretto. Same with pop music. I like hearing Ute Lemper sing in German, Nina Simone sing in French. OK, so I know enough of those languages to figure it out, but I don't feel that I have to bother if I don't want to. I don't have to go to the trouble of translating the lyrics. They could be singing "Eat my toenails" for all I know, or care. With English lyrics I don't really have a choice - that is, if the singer cares for us to make them out.

The thing about Syd Barrett is he cared very much that we could make out his words. It was poetry.

Oh, enough about that.

Strolling down memory lane with John and his Squabbler...

 

Isn't this a nice picture?

I'd like to say I've been here - wherever it is. Maybe I have. In the 80's I visited many places like this. Down in the grubby little city to the south last night I "hung out" with The Lady, the only person I know who uses terms like "hung out." Who was the first person whose mouth formed that term? There had to be one. He should have a plaque. When I look up "myphets" in google I get myself, and I only get myself. I thought everybody knew about myphets. Apparently, that's not the case. See - you've got to check out your mind to find them. Have it back in three days or you'll pay a fine.

No, I've seen myphets since I was a little boy. They're hard to miss, the little devils.

We were looking at holiday pictures - hers - and it brought to mind my own travels. The Squab still travels. I don't. It's a very normal life, really. That's not a bad thing. She goes to places like Mexico and Puerto Rico, cruise ships, blah-blah, the places it would never occur to me to visit. Not that there's no architecture to be found in such places; there is, if that's what you wanna find. No, we always went to Europe back in the day. It was as if New York City was all of America, and then there was Europe. But that was wife Number One's doing. That was her perspective. I was just along for the ride.

When I was a boy my Dad took us camping all over America. In '72 we made it out to Montana, and up into Canada - to Jasper and Bamff-f-f-f.

I knew a guy who never left the Central New York county where he lived. He was proud of that. But I happened to see a Navy tattoo on his arm, and I said What about in the Service? Didn't you travel then? He said, Oh yeah - the Far East, but that doesn't count.

That doesn't count?

Well, if it came down to a mating struggle between The Lady's husband and me, and I had to compete with him for her affection and he offered travel I would lose. Well, I would just leave the battlefield. I despise traveling. I would just leave the battlefield anyway - I despise competing. That's why I'm not re-married. I'm not willing to put in all the effort it takes. I have a friend who can't seem to get by without having a woman. He's on his second or third "instant family," and if he's alone for a month between them I'd be surprised. That so odd.

I hate cruises. I hate the boring places of the world. I like long abandoned subway stations and picturesque ruins, but I favor my own culture. Anything else is exotic. And exotic is for postcards. I do like to drive. I do like road trips. Last night we were talking about a few we've taken together here 'n there. And she tells me she can get my favorite incense a lot cheaper than I'm paying right now, and I got a soapy batch of Super Hit which is really too bad. Does that happen to you? It's too perfumy - you know? Not natural.

Thai dinner with peanut sauce. It's been a long time since I ate in a restaurant. I had forgotten the etiquette. At which point do you smash the plate on the floor and shout Tierra del Fuego! - I don't remember. That's embarrassing. It's like not knowing when to stick the chopsticks in your nose. I think after the Kyrie Eleison. Am I right?

I don't really belong in society. Knowing where to stand, or sit, or what to say.

She tells me the long-anticipated picture she took of me will be available on Wednesday. It's been traveling around the world's museums. Throngs of people have been going to see it - you know, because I'm me - and I haven't seen it yet. Typical. I was reading how there was a riot because a fellow waving a hammer around started saying the picture was a fake and shouting Death to myphets! That was in Rome. Where else? Crazies.

But I've done my world traveling. It narrows the mind extraordinarily. When I traveled I had a very narrow mind. It's because of context. It's because when we travel we have to carry our world with us - make it portable. But when we're home we have the whole world at our feet.

I have my books. And I have memories of visiting other planets, other times, where the people have three noses and sneezing is an art form. I've never discerned a difference between traveling somewhere physically and traveling somewhere mentally because the memory is the same, and memory is how I see the whole world because by the time I see it it's past. What we read, what we imagine, is as much what we experience as sleeping through Copenhagen must be.

My wander lusting isn't about geography. It's about changing my mind. It's not about changing the position of my body. That happens anyway. The Earth revolves. We are moving at about 600 miles per hour when we're standing still. That's action-packed enough for me.

But the Squabbler wants to head out again. He's restless. Babe, he's got to ramble.

There's only one thing worse than not winning a mating battle, and not getting the woman you want, and that's winning the battle and getting her. There's only one thing worse than being rejected, and that's not being rejected.

Travel is worse than not traveling. Being married is worse than... anything. I mean - if you say to yourself "I've been here, I've been there, in my body," but you haven't been there in your mind, then what was the point of going? To have something to do? To try an' squeeze as much into the stream of life as you can? As much of - what? Places in the world are memories. When you leave they're gone - like smoke. Imagination is more real than reality. But, when you put your body into a place your mind has to be there too. And of course your mind is on the defensive then - stranger in a strange land. (I'll have to do a post on that book.) And so you become narrow-minded. You have to say Here I am, World! It's Me! and the World doesn't give a monkey's.

I have absolutely no idea how I am going to finish this post. I'm looking now to the dog for inspiration. He looks back - anticipation in his eyes. Is he going to feed me? he asks.

Being third in line is something I remember, sometimes second, but usually third. That's because my real last name isn't Squabbler - that's Squabbler's real last name. He would have been able to sit somewhere better. I don't know why I think that, but that's what I think. My name begins with an "A," but the second letter is "u," so I was always behind Adams, Athol, Adsit - names like that. I looked at the back of one kid's head for four years. I knew every follicle of his hair, and I even named them, and they all had names that came alphabetically before mine.

But the guy who sat sort of next to me - his name beginning with the letter "C" - came to mind yesterday, the day before, whenever, because I had been writing about differences between people, different types of differences, and one of them is race. It's not a thing I usually talk about, or write about. I couldn't give a rat's rear, being adopted. I look Irish in the morning and Jewish at night. Maybe I'm related to Luka Bloom. That's right - I am the offspring of a fictional character, which would explain much.

But this fellow... I had heard by then about guys like this one, but I had never come across one. Somewhere along the line he must have seen something, heard something, that convicted him of the notion that I was what he called a "nigger lover." How this might have come into his head I cannot say. There was one black kid in my class. I didn't know him. He was an athlete, a jock, and I was what they used to call a nerd. You know how High School is. Those groups don't mix. Apart from being athletic he was also one of these super geniuses you later read about discovering how to create nuclear fission from Cool Whip. So - whatever the case - my classmate whose name began with the letter "C" decided to brand me a "nigger lover," and so it went.

He sat on my left side. I had a wall to my right. Throughout Greek class his voice was like a serpent hissing continuously in my left ear - "A's a nigger lover, A's a nigger lover..." over and over. It was his mantra. He would get creative now and then and start in with how Jesus was going to kill me for being a nigger lover.

Meanwhile, I had never even seen an episode of The Jefferson's, much less had any real contact with black kids. I went to a Dizzy Gillespie concert - maybe that was it. See, the first music that clicked with me was the Classical stuff I was learning on my violin.

Did you know I play the violin?

But then I read a review of a book about the Blues, and in this review was printed an excerpt from a lyric:

"Way down low/ Way down low/ You can hear them whores/ Drag their feet across the floor/ Oh those bitches shake their asses/ Funky butt/ Funky butt..."

I wanted to learn more about the Blues after reading that lyric. I guess that's what brought me to that Dizzy concert at last, because I went to the library and asked the librarian to help me find a Blues album. Well, she told me someone had made off with Clarence Gatemouth Brown, and otherwise all they had were Jazz albums. Perhaps this one? It's "bluesy" in spots.

Good enough, said I.

The next week I was back. The library possessed several Jazz albums. I frequently borrowed each one, and I think two at a time was the limit for the audio-visual stuff they had available. They had Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Charles Mingus, Several Different Shades of the Blues - (That one I took first because it was "bluesy) - Coltrane's Om, and Michael White, Spirit Dance. And he was a fellow violinist. I used to imagine I could play like him. I used to imagine I could become invisible so I could watch my across-the-street neighbor Ruth taking her shower.

I don't believe I ever mentioned my Jazz obsession around my classmates, though. Perhaps my closest friends knew. We were all into prog rock. Since I had no older siblings to introduce me to pop music it would be years later before I listened to anything more mainstream than the rather obscure tracks my friends and I were grooving in High School.

So I went to see Diz - long story short. I have absolutely no idea what my thinking was at that time on the matter of race, or relations between them. Many years later I had a black friend who accused me of being color-blind, which he said was an intellectual luxury only whiteys like me could afford.

He was a singer in a Rock n' Roll band, and it was getting pretty popular. I've got one of their songs in my widget, but their albums aren't stellar - they're a live act. They're incredible live. But, my wife and I - I was married by then, (obviously) - would go to see him and his band play in New York every blessed Friday night. The first time we went the fellow's girlfriend - finance, whatever - introduced us to the gang who were regulars there present, all of them black, by saying in her most delightful voice, "These are our white friends!"

Picture me doing that were the situation reversed.

Anyhoooooo, I was working as a print shop supervisor in those days. My wife worked for several record companies. She kept getting fired and picking up new jobs. I couldn't keep up with her. And I would come home from printing to find the cast of a Lou Reed song in my house. And she was always flying off to England. Eric Clapton's son died, and suddenly she was pretending to know him better than she really did - one of thousands of groupies working in the industry. It was really pathetic, come to think of it...

Oh, here's Hildegard van Bingen on my embedded playlist. I'm going to lose the string here. I'm in Heaven. Just close your eyes and listen.

Whoops! - Goldfinger - We're back on Boogie Street.

Let's see - at this print shop I worked with a group of guys who made a lot of racist remarks in their day-to-day conversations. What did I care? I kind of 'tune it out.' I wasn't going to change anybody. I did happen to notice we all rather liked the black stripper up at Mammary Lane - the local strip club - with equal enthusiasm. Apparently, sexually provocative nudity is the ultimate healer of racial divisions.

That's funny. I'm laughing. Can you hear me?

Well, I didn't think it was bothering me listening to those guys, but I suppose it was a little like that kid back in school - "C." So, one day our singer friend and his fiance were coming to spend the weekend. She had a car - a little red Escort. And my wife and I were down to one car ourselves. She had probably wrecked the other one. We must have gone through twenty cars - well, that is, she went through 19 of them.

So I could have taken the train home from work. It was about a twenty minute ride. But our friend's fiance knew about my situation on the job, and we hatched up a little plot between us.

She came to pick me up at work. Now, none of my co-workers had ever met my wife. And it was a nice, bright, sun-shiny spring day. We were out at the plant's loading dock. Up comes this little red Escort and a young black woman gets out. I go meet her. She plants this beautiful kiss on my kisser, and we're arm-in-arm back to the car. It was brilliant. I never heard a peep out of those guys from that point on.

Now it occurs to me I never got more than that one kiss, which is really too bad.

When I was in school we had a Drama Club, and we'd get together with the girls from the girls' academy and put on a show each year. (See, I went to an all-boy school, right?)

Try to keep up.

We had this Drama teacher - coach, whatever - who made us sit across from each other cross-legged on the floor. With our eyes closed. And we were paired off in boy-girl couples at random. He'd have us touching hands, and working up to each other's arms, shoulders, and finally the face - we'd touch each other's faces with our eyes closed.

Now the song is some guy's version of the Talking Heads Heaven. "Heaven is a place/ a place where nothing/ nothing ever happens." 

This afternoon I was leaving the neighborhood of a job I had just completed, trying to remember where I live, when a young lady who was walking along the road flagged me down. I stopped.

She said, "Do you want to earn ten dollars?"

Well really, I'm not that kind of guy.

It turns out she missed her bus and needed a lift to a northern town. She was saying "we" although I could see that she was on her own. She explained that her boyfriend was very angry, and he was walking on ahead with the intention of hitchhiking. I surmised therefore a few unkind words may have passed between them, but it's a practice of mine to not decline strange travel suggestions so I told her to hop in the car.

"My boyfriend's black," she said, "but he's OK. Are you OK with that?"

Black? Does he have two heads?

She looked at me kinda funny.

Then black is how we'll recognize him, I explained.

I think she got it, because she nodded. And off we went.

There really isn't anything else to tell. I drove. We arrived. They got out of the car. We said goodbye. And then I was back to trying to remember where I live and aiming the car in that direction. I think because we have been discussing aspects of human social organization here at the White Lodge I was struck by the young lady's need to assure me the blackness of the boyfriend was no more threatening than the pinkness of herself.

Especially as I now live in an area where the blackness of anybody is extremely unusual, it seems doubly unlikely that it would supply happy hunting grounds for a pair of car-jacking grifters, if that's what she thought I might have been thinking. Perhaps they had encountered some trouble with others before they found me. That happens.

When it happens, by the way, we're supposed to shake the very dust of that place off the soles of our feet. If I offer peace and someone throws it back in my face the thing to do is to keep my peace then, and move on down the road. But you see, down the road I'm going to meet someone else. Now, how am I going to offer that next person peace if I'm still ruminating on the fact that the last person refused it? Naturally, I'm going to greet that next person with trepidation - I'm going to be suspicious - if I'm still nursing that old wound.

I'm no good then. I'm no good to anybody when I'm suspicious because of resentments, and I can't offer anybody peace when I have none to give. You see, the dust on the soles of our feet is resentment. And resentment happens to be the cause of all human difficulty, one to another. Resentment is the cause of all wars. Resentment is the cause of racism. Resentment is the cause of all divorces and broken homes. Resentment is the cause of all broken lives, broken spirits. Resentment is the cause of murder. Resentment is the very devil.

Now I imagine, with what little exposure I have to the mass media culture, that a person who devoted any significant amount of time to watching 24-hour News channels on television would be completely incapable of making room in his heart for peace of any sort. Of course, I'm being a touch rhetorical here - I personally know people who have recovered from the poison of television, and I have seen minds that had been made into miserable, twisted, distorted minds become free again.

It happens.

So, this morning I ran into the local Funeral Home director - owner, partner - whatever he is. Suffice it to say his name is on the sign and on the door, and on the side of the hearse. We're talking about how "You can't take it with you" - you know, that old saying. And he said that he knew a story about a very rich fellow who didn't believe that, and if I had a few minutes...

Oh, of course, by all means.

He said this very rich fellow made arrangements to have $300,000 placed into his casket just before it was closed, and to do this he gave $100,000 in cash each to three different people whom he trusted greatly - his doctor, his lawyer, and his priest.

Now, here am I in the way of realizing it's one of those stories, but that's OK.

The funeral director - who is also an attorney - continued with his story. He said that within a short time the rich old man died, and he was placed in his casket. Of course the doctor, the lawyer, and the priest were all there with envelopes, and each of them placed his envelope in the casket, just as the dead man had asked them to do. And the dead man was buried, with his three envelopes and all. It would be some time later that the ugly truth would become known.

See, the three trusted men - doctor, lawyer, priest - were talking about the incident together one night with the help of a little liquid spirit to loosen their tongues, and the doctor made his confession. He said he had every intention of putting the hundred G's in the envelope, but then he started thinking about how good it would be to have that money for the new hospital wing. He struggled with his conscience, of course, but at last he decided to only place $50,000 in the casket and keep the rest for his most altruistic project.

Well, this confession by the doctor gave courage to the priest to make a confession of his own. He said that he too had every intention of placing the full amount in the envelope, but he got to thinking about how far that money would go in helping to build the orphanage for the needy children of that city, and how many hungry children could be helped with that money. So he also kept back a portion. Oh well, heck - he kept back all of it! He kept the whole hundred G's of the dead man's money and now there's a wonderful new orphanage building in town as a result.

So, after hearing these confessions, the lawyer was absolutely outraged - outraged and ashamed that his friends should have betrayed the trust the deceased had place in them. He declared that he placed all of the money entrusted to him into that casket. No matter how silly he may have thought the whole thing was - since, after all "You Can't Take It With You" - and even knowing about all the good things that might have been done with that money, he scrupulously put down any temptation to do anything other than what the rich old man had wished. The lawyer said he put every penny of that money in the casket, all $100,000 of it - with his own personal check.

 

   

Gripped by a desire to hear Lark's Tongue in Aspic, Part I while moving, I drove around my village just now, coming eventually to an impasse established by a large utility vehicle with a cherry picker reaching our flagpole in the center of town. We have two main intersections, one having our town's single traffic light, the other having a flagpole in the center, forming a traffic circle of sorts. When summer is upon us, and hoardes of tourists descend on this humble infrastructure, crossing the flagpole intersection requires some communication skills - like making one's way through a party of vaguely connected women in jewelry holding beverages. And well, the flagpole itself was tipped over so that it looked like a serious accident may have made it so at first glance, as you often see on the highway with street lights and telephone poles, but as I drew closer I noticed the mayor was digging around with her hands in the soil underneath the flagpole in the raised stone (or stoned, raised) flower bed at its base. She was wearing a very unbecoming floral print dress. She seemed to be looking for something in the dirt.

Well, that's the beginning of a story I will not tell.

Instead, I have been adding to my song widget and occasionally playing with my 3-D Home Architect program which I found at the local Thrift for fifty cents several years ago, and it is perhaps the best 50 cents I ever spent as my son and I have gotten many hours of pleasurable fantasy home building out of it.

No radio traffic reports are available for my village. There is no helicopter hovering over our system of arterials to warn us that the mayor is digging in the dirt under the flagpole and one must detour 'round the post office and take the Lake road to double back. I'm glad of that.

Local AM radio originates in the grubby larger city to the east, where I suppose there must be a market for the morning traffic report, lugubriously tagged "All Day Traffic," as opposed to a rival radio station coming from the grubbier bigger city to the west which offers "Ten Second Traffic." Which would you prefer?

I hardly listen to the radio in my car, and sometimes by accident when my CD ejects, or when I am in the process of changing CD's. And, speaking of accidents, when my driving student came a touch too close to a guard rail yesterday I squealed like a little girl. It was really too funny. No harm was done, though. She'll have the knack for it before the decade's out, I reckon.

But when I do happen to hear the radio it always leaves an impression, never a good one. I know it's theater of the mind, but these days it has become theater of the mindless. What, for instance, is the "Price Chopper Traffic Command Center?" Is it a gigantic chrome and steel building guarded by Chippendales with machine guns? I mean - honestly. Radio suffers from the same dumbing down that has taken over television. Usually, it's in the form of a burlesque - hyperbole applied to mundane ideas and/or objects with the effect of producing absurd humor. But in the case of the dumbed down media, they are not trying to be funny, so the affect is bemusement - they are ridiculous.

The so-called "News" report is announced by a gravel-voiced announcer as it if were a Rolling Stones concert at Raceway Park, and backing vocals come in with a repetitive mantra of "News is Cool, News is Cool, listen to it, listen to it..."

Kill me.

Now, the weather. The weather is reported by the "Storm Team." It's called the "Storm Team Forecast." I imagine a paramilitary outfit comprised of fashion models armed with clipboards, umbrellas, and lattes running out of a SWAT van in some sort of serpentine football play pattern to interview a falling snow flake.

I don't blame MTV, as if it were a supernatural force with a simultaneous existence. I blame the morons who created it. They are not supernatural, they are real people. You can kick them in the ass if it makes you feel better. It sure does make me feel better. This morning I awoke from a dream in which I was kicking some asses because I needed to knock some sense into my companions, and that was obviously the part of them in which their brains were seated. It felt good.

And yes, OK - I ended up in Rhubarb Valley yesterday with my driving student, who really is becoming quite a good friend, but who is the daffiest broad you'll meet on any given day - extremely intelligent but starving for truth, like a very much younger girl who happens to score quite well on the IQ test but has nothing but nonsensical rubbish for education. And the two of us stopped by the home of a great poet friend of ours, an old pinko if ever there was one - and my dream must have been inspired, in part at least, by the two and-a-half hour conversation which kept us late getting back.

We spoke later - she and I - of acquiring that blissful state of giving not a monkey turd about what other people think of you, a state which she insists I have attained, nirvana-like, only without the torn flannel shirt. But, in my dream I was consumed by that old horrible feeling - that feeling that I must strive to "fit in" with others, even when they are being completely daffy. I suppose you could say it qualified as a nightmare, therefore. Or a morning-mare. 

Immediately upon waking, and having a cuppa two, I was gripped by a desire to hear Lark's Tongue in Aspic, Part I in a moving vehicle, and the rest - as they say - is history.

Back to you, All Day Storm Team Shadow Ten Second News Traffic.