A misleading title, as soon after the previous installment we moved on to Cambodia, where the temperature was about 2 degrees celsius hotter than anywhere in Vietnam, for a few blistering days at Angkor Wat, followed by the long, long trip home to the blessed relief of frost on the windshield and ice on the buckets.
I have to say that one of the high points of this trip was the hotels. While it's true the promotional material describing the trip clearly implied that we could expect clean sheets and private bathrooms, the reality was that the places were pretty near palatial. There were spa services in some like exercise equipment and massages of various sorts. Our Vietnam guide coyly opined that “massage with a happy ending” would probably not be offered on site.
Most of them had people posted at the front door so that the guest could sweep through like crowned royalty, without having to break stride. In our first place, this job was taken by two gorgeous girls dressed in white ao dais, the national dress of Vietnam, and conceivably the most graceful and beautiful national costume on earth, especially when worn by the willowy young things who opened our doors and brought our orange juice.
I was commenting on the terrible heat to one such girl, marveling that people could live in this sweltering environment. She giggled charmingly and explained that this is is the cool season which is why there were so many tourists jostling through the scenic attractions. And what temperature might it be back where I lived, she asked. I thought about what you might guess for Vermont in the end of October, made a quick conversion to celsius, and suggested “Around zero, I think.” She blinked, considered this, and tried to decide whether I was teasing her, badly mistaken, misunderstood the question, or outright lying since she remembered from some nearly forgotten lesson at school that zero was where things turned to ice, so clearly nobody could live in such a place. The mangoes would freeze right on the tree, wouldn't they? She smiled uncertainly and went off to tend other customers.
I was especially keen to go to Angkor Wat because I remembered an article in Life magazine when I was young and impressionable showing massive ornate buildings peeking out from under jungly tendrils and massive gnarled roots. Images are still widespread in travel guides, websites, encyclopedias showing the same or very similar scenes of lavishly ornamented columns and walls, towers and archways. I wanted to see this for myself, smell the pervasive tropical leaf mold, listen for the rustle of tiny arboreal creatures, commune with the ghosts of long-dead monks and generals and concubines, stone masons and weavers, fishermen and mahouts.
The first intimation that there was disappointment in my future was when our bus approached the ticket booth in an area clogged with other buses, all patiently waiting for their turn to buy a busload-worth of tickets for Cambodia's most popular tourist attraction. When we finally got our tickets, a colorful card that we were to wear around our necks like a luggage tag, we parked in an area with a thousand other buses, and walked the rest of the way to the causeway into the temple grounds in the rapidly gathering heat at 10 AM.
Our guide cautioned us to keep together and to come back here (he pointed to the ground next to a statue of a 5-headed snake) should we get lost, which we were strongly encouraged not to do. Then we set off across the causeway, shoulder to shoulder with dense clumps of other tour groups from France, America, Germany, past a group of Japanese tourists photographing one another next to statues of dead generals. And then there we were inside the temple grounds, our guide shouting instructional material over the clamor of other guides doing the same in various languages, continually jostled along by tour groups coming along behind through the narrow passageways, struggling up steep stairways, a simple passage made surprisingly difficult by our sweat-soaked clothes glued to our legs. Then at the top we were each allowed a quick glimpse of The View, and maybe 15 seconds for a couple of snapshots. Then down another set of stairs to another photo op chosen by our guide who was not sympathetic to pictures from other locations.
Any tiny arboreal creatures that might once have made their homes among these historic stones had long since moved out and any ghosts of the long-past glory days were not doing any communing with the tumultuous throngs shoving their sweaty way through their old stamping grounds.
Meanwhile, my travelling companion had come down with some croupy infirmity, and I was feeling the first faint tentacles of the same, so I skipped the afternoon outing to some other heavily visited site in the Angkor complex so that I could muster the energy to go to Angkor Thom the following day. This site, one of the many secondary attractions in the Angkor region devoted to the glorification of one king or another, was constructed by a Khmer king named Jayavarman who, among other things, was a narcissist of the first water. At the center of the complex is the state temple called the Bayon which The Great King caused to be built with his face emblazoned 216 times on all sides of every one of the numerous (OK, 54) towers in the place.
We stumbled in and out of ruined terraces, passageways, chapels, and audience chambers, taking photographs when instructed to do so, pausing when possible in the blessed shade, trying to keep track of one another in the mobs of other red-faced, sweaty tour groups, and finally assembling at the front gate to wait for the stragglers in the broiling sun, always the same ones, whose need for yet another picture of something or other always superseded the need of the rest of us to get onto the air-conditioned bus.
But all things end, and finally it was time to make for home, first on Korean Airlines, which is the last vestige of what air travel once was. We were stripped of our water bottles at security, of course, because America declared that it must be so, but were spared that stupid x-ray machine, taking off our shoes, unpacking computers. 3 hours later we were in Seoul where we had a little nap in preparation for the 12-hour slog to Chicago in a clean, well-maintained, comfortable (well, as comfortable as a seat in steerage can be) aircraft whose bathrooms were as clean after 12 hours as they were when we left Seoul. And as an added bonus, the cabin attendants were exceptionally beautiful young women who, throughout the trip, were courteous, competent, and able to fix the entertainment modules embedded in the seat backs.
The final miracle was made manifest as we were beginning to descend for Chicago. One of the gorgeous cabin attendants sought me out way back there in steerage and explained that since I had a pretty tight connection in Chicago, and we were going to be a bit late getting in, they were going to move me up to first class right at the end so that I could get off the plane first and hustle right along to all the immigration and customs lines, and a good thing too since the lines were endless for both immigration and customs, my onward flight left from the other end of O'Hare, I just missed the shuttle train, security was a frustrating chaotic time waster including a false positive alarm from that stupid x-ray machine, and I barely got to my gate in time to catch my breath before boarding began onto the crowded, decrepit derelict that was to complete the journey. There was trash in the seat pocket from some previous traveler, we were late getting away because they were having trouble pumping out the toilets, and the cabin attendant was a bored middle-aged man who probably had karate skills, or could throw a knife with deadly accuracy, but had little discernible interest in attending cabins.
As for the croupy thing my traveling companion generously shared, it trumpeted its arrival on that last horrible leg of the trip and I spent most of the ensuing week blowing my nose, napping, and not unpacking. When I finally got to it, sorted sweaty laundry from fans and trinkets, it felt like Christmas. I could barely remember buying this stuff. I could barely remember the heat. I had forgotten the names of half the people we had spent two weeks with.
In a month's time will I be wondering if I went at all?
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Two Sweaty Weeks in Vietnam - Part 1
Thinking it would be a nice change of scenery from the late autumn gloom and leaflessness of late October in Vermont, I signed up for a tour of Vietnam. Indeed it was a change of scenery, sure enough. I might go so far as to suggest culture shock.
We arrived in Hanoi 12 days ago, and I can't actually explain why I thought it would be pleasantly cool and bugless, especially after I groped around Google and found some weather information which all agreed that Very Hot would be the norm for October, but there we were after 30 hours of air travel, groggy and stumbling, with our glasses fogged over in the 100% humidity of the middle of the night, being met by our tour guide and dragged off to our beds in a barely living condition.
As it happens, Hanoi has embraced air conditioning with a convert's fervor and our room was refrigerated to Arctic. Which was just as well, since the beds were equipped with down comforters suitable for use in polar conditions. This trend continued as we made our way from Hanoi south through Danang and points south, hitting, along the way, all the temples and ruins and sites of war and mayhem from the tenth century to the present. All of these are discussed in considerable detail in great numbers of guidebooks, so I will skip over all that and just mention the things that they don't tell you in the guidebooks.
The first thing to overwhelm the unsuspecting tourist is the numbers of motor scooters everywhere, countrywide. In Hanoi they go everywhere, sidewalks, alleys, in any direction on the roadways. They emerge from peoples' houses and shops and interstices between street vendors. Most houses have a ramp out to the sidewalk so that the family scooter can be brought in at night and parked in the livingroom. They are used for all forms of transport – cargo, family outings, commuting. Occasionally a mobile haystack may appear on the highway with driver barely visible under the load. Other cargo might be many sacks of grain, or stacks of boxes, or lumber or crated chickens. Anything you can get a bungee cord around. In terms of family outings, the largest number of people I saw on a single scooter was Mom, Dad and the 3 kids. Typically riders sit side-saddle and are perfectly relaxed, chatting on their phones or buffing their nails. At rush hour the rippling flow of scooters is like the mighty Mekong in flood.
Many of the riders, especially the girls, wear masks that cover, at a bare minimum, their faces from their eyes down. Some cover their foreheads and necks as well, and very often a cotton jacket with a neck up to the earlobes and specially constructed sleeves that extend to cover their hands. This is to prevent the sun from getting at them and sullying the perfect whiteness of their tender young flesh in a similar stab at maidenly beauty as those sleek young coeds who poach themselves on the beach so they can dazzle the viewing public with their golden tan.
The second thing to catch the eye, after the scooter swarms, is the overhead wires. In certain areas of the city, any city, but especially Hanoi, wires are strung in swags from pole to pole, and on certain poles there are one to many coils of spare wire so that it would be possible to add to one swag or another. It was never made clear what the nature of these wires was, whether telephone, electric, or merely bizarre ornamentation, but I would guess that if ever Vietnam ran into an embarrassing shortage of copper, they could easily harvest a year or two's worth from the streets of Hanoi alone.
Then there are the vendors who are everywhere selling anything from scooter tires to chicken parts, but those of us who are clearly tourists most commonly attract those offering Buddha statues, jewelry made in China, clever little carved pigs, fans, post cards, straw hats, flyblown fruit, faux-silk scarfs, spoons made from buffalo horns, chop sticks made from bamboo, and in very upscale areas bags of coffee made from weasel manure.
There are several popular vending techniques: First, as soon as you spot a creature that looks like it might be American, you snatch up the first object that comes to hand and thrust it in the face of the mark, shouting “Madame! Madame!” When the mark moves on politely shaking their head and murmuring “No thank you,” you repeat the attempt, perhaps with the same item in a different color. Continue this until the mark has moved off into the territory of the next vendor.
Technique No. 2 cuts in when the the hook is set and the victim has actually bought something, 2 scarves, say. So they have handed over the money and picked up their treasures and are about to leave when the vendor blocks the exit with a flamboyant display of more scarves. It is not clear whether they imagine that every passing tourist aspires to own more scarves than Imelda Marcos has shoes, or if we look so much alike to them they think this is a new person in need of neckwear.
The third technique is popular when there are great numbers of vendors hawking the identical line of junk. In this case, if the tourist manages to fight their way past the first one or two vendors and finds something at the third, the owners of the first two will stand at the elbow of the thoughtless purchaser, tears gathered at the corners of their eyes, pathetically offering whatever it was that had just been bought from the triumphant number 3.
In the more upscale establishments, those prosperous merchants with an actual roof, and doors, the potential buyer is closely followed around by a helpful employee who will try to guilt you into buying stuff by unfolding everything in the place, taking things down from the top shelf, pulling stuff out of drawers and so forth whether or not the customer has shown the slightest interest in any of it.
To add interest to the shopping experience, the local currency, the Dong, is worth about 20,000 to the US dollar. The main problem with this is getting the order of magnitude right. If you offer a 10,000 note for something worth 100,000, it is a sure bet that the shop keeper will point out your error. If your error is in the other direction, however, it may go undetected. Of course, US currency is always welcome and there is almost nothing in the country that cannot be had for One Dolla. It would seem that the vending public imagines that all white tourists arrive in Vietnam with a large suitcase full of small US bills. In any case, keeping track of all those extraneous zeros is monstrously difficult and is responsible for much of the widespread “I can't think what I spent that $100 on” anxiety.
In case I failed to mention it, it is very hot in Saigon. Pay no mind to the residents who will tell you that it is cool and pleasant. 90 degrees is not cool and pleasant.
Further observations anon...
As it happens, Hanoi has embraced air conditioning with a convert's fervor and our room was refrigerated to Arctic. Which was just as well, since the beds were equipped with down comforters suitable for use in polar conditions. This trend continued as we made our way from Hanoi south through Danang and points south, hitting, along the way, all the temples and ruins and sites of war and mayhem from the tenth century to the present. All of these are discussed in considerable detail in great numbers of guidebooks, so I will skip over all that and just mention the things that they don't tell you in the guidebooks.
The first thing to overwhelm the unsuspecting tourist is the numbers of motor scooters everywhere, countrywide. In Hanoi they go everywhere, sidewalks, alleys, in any direction on the roadways. They emerge from peoples' houses and shops and interstices between street vendors. Most houses have a ramp out to the sidewalk so that the family scooter can be brought in at night and parked in the livingroom. They are used for all forms of transport – cargo, family outings, commuting. Occasionally a mobile haystack may appear on the highway with driver barely visible under the load. Other cargo might be many sacks of grain, or stacks of boxes, or lumber or crated chickens. Anything you can get a bungee cord around. In terms of family outings, the largest number of people I saw on a single scooter was Mom, Dad and the 3 kids. Typically riders sit side-saddle and are perfectly relaxed, chatting on their phones or buffing their nails. At rush hour the rippling flow of scooters is like the mighty Mekong in flood.
Many of the riders, especially the girls, wear masks that cover, at a bare minimum, their faces from their eyes down. Some cover their foreheads and necks as well, and very often a cotton jacket with a neck up to the earlobes and specially constructed sleeves that extend to cover their hands. This is to prevent the sun from getting at them and sullying the perfect whiteness of their tender young flesh in a similar stab at maidenly beauty as those sleek young coeds who poach themselves on the beach so they can dazzle the viewing public with their golden tan.
The second thing to catch the eye, after the scooter swarms, is the overhead wires. In certain areas of the city, any city, but especially Hanoi, wires are strung in swags from pole to pole, and on certain poles there are one to many coils of spare wire so that it would be possible to add to one swag or another. It was never made clear what the nature of these wires was, whether telephone, electric, or merely bizarre ornamentation, but I would guess that if ever Vietnam ran into an embarrassing shortage of copper, they could easily harvest a year or two's worth from the streets of Hanoi alone.
Then there are the vendors who are everywhere selling anything from scooter tires to chicken parts, but those of us who are clearly tourists most commonly attract those offering Buddha statues, jewelry made in China, clever little carved pigs, fans, post cards, straw hats, flyblown fruit, faux-silk scarfs, spoons made from buffalo horns, chop sticks made from bamboo, and in very upscale areas bags of coffee made from weasel manure.
There are several popular vending techniques: First, as soon as you spot a creature that looks like it might be American, you snatch up the first object that comes to hand and thrust it in the face of the mark, shouting “Madame! Madame!” When the mark moves on politely shaking their head and murmuring “No thank you,” you repeat the attempt, perhaps with the same item in a different color. Continue this until the mark has moved off into the territory of the next vendor.
Technique No. 2 cuts in when the the hook is set and the victim has actually bought something, 2 scarves, say. So they have handed over the money and picked up their treasures and are about to leave when the vendor blocks the exit with a flamboyant display of more scarves. It is not clear whether they imagine that every passing tourist aspires to own more scarves than Imelda Marcos has shoes, or if we look so much alike to them they think this is a new person in need of neckwear.
The third technique is popular when there are great numbers of vendors hawking the identical line of junk. In this case, if the tourist manages to fight their way past the first one or two vendors and finds something at the third, the owners of the first two will stand at the elbow of the thoughtless purchaser, tears gathered at the corners of their eyes, pathetically offering whatever it was that had just been bought from the triumphant number 3.
In the more upscale establishments, those prosperous merchants with an actual roof, and doors, the potential buyer is closely followed around by a helpful employee who will try to guilt you into buying stuff by unfolding everything in the place, taking things down from the top shelf, pulling stuff out of drawers and so forth whether or not the customer has shown the slightest interest in any of it.
To add interest to the shopping experience, the local currency, the Dong, is worth about 20,000 to the US dollar. The main problem with this is getting the order of magnitude right. If you offer a 10,000 note for something worth 100,000, it is a sure bet that the shop keeper will point out your error. If your error is in the other direction, however, it may go undetected. Of course, US currency is always welcome and there is almost nothing in the country that cannot be had for One Dolla. It would seem that the vending public imagines that all white tourists arrive in Vietnam with a large suitcase full of small US bills. In any case, keeping track of all those extraneous zeros is monstrously difficult and is responsible for much of the widespread “I can't think what I spent that $100 on” anxiety.
In case I failed to mention it, it is very hot in Saigon. Pay no mind to the residents who will tell you that it is cool and pleasant. 90 degrees is not cool and pleasant.
Further observations anon...
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Emergency Measures
When I hear terms like “crisis management” or “emergency measures,” images leap to mind of miserable, huddled people clustered around sagging tents, surrounded by mud or backlit by the lurid orange light of their house in flames; volcanoes, tidal waves, cities crushed by earthquakes; dislocated throngs living in sports facilities, fleeing murderous paramilitaries, starving while their crops die from drought and their women are raped by armed gangs from the next village over.
For this reason it gives me a jolt when I receive cautionary notes including these terms from organizations responsible for dealing with widespread misfortune. My first panicky thought is that these highly placed functionaries know something that they are not telling us about. That they know that there is a hurricane bearing down on us, a lava dome forming under our feet, a fleet of bombers approaching over the pole, with their sights set on Rutland.
Happily, we have been spared most of these assaults on our placid lives, however, it appears that our ever vigilant watchdogs are leaving nothing to chance as I have been getting more than the average number of messages recently from well-meaning persons and organizations who, having my health and welfare at the forefront of their minds, want to make sure that I do not suffer some horrible fate in the event of catastrophe. Since the sort of dislocation that constitutes a catastrophe seems to cover a larger and more varied list of misfortunes with each passing year, I am not sure whether they mean nuclear strike or road washed out again. Not that it matters much since the measures we are enjoined to take are the same in either case:
1. Make sure there is a lot of tinned food about the place
2. Keep some water handy since your well will not provide when the power is out.
3. Get lots of things that use batteries, like flashlights and stuff. Maybe a radio.
4. A few candles couldn't hurt. Don't leave your toddlers alone with them.
One official went so far as to suggest that sufficient emergency provisions should be laid in for 72 hours. That's 3 days. Presumably after that arduous period spent loafing around the house without even a TV, unless you've got a generator, helicopters would be provided to replenish the victims' dwindling stock of Cheetos. Maybe they could strafe the affected area with frozen chickens which could then be cooked on sticks over a fire on the patio made by breaking up their furniture.
I was disappointed to note that none of these sources of comfort and good sense cautioned the inexperienced not to remain in the house if the toddler managed to get a crackling blaze going in the couch. No mention was made in any of the notices I received of fire extinguishers, so one can only imagine that the average householder would not have one, or know how to use it if they did.
It is not clear what is driving this drift toward trivializing the idea of what constitutes an Official Disaster. It is tempting to imagine that the legal industry plays a starring role. I understand the Corps of Engineers is still coping with lawsuits relating to the Katrina disaster, and the National Weather Service is clearly the target of choice when your house is unexpectedly washed out to sea owing to their failure to predict a 10-inch rainfall. However, it is hard to see how canned goods would improve the aftermath of either of these events.
This is a fundamental evolution of the National Character and may go far to explain why we, as a nation, steadfastly refuse to do anything that might mitigate the environmental apocalypse to which we have so generously contributed. With so many examples of the often rapid progress from the introduction of a good idea to a preposterously extreme application of it, it is understandable that people would be anxious about any reduction in, say, fuel consumption or the use of plastic bottles. The extrapolation of these benign measures would inevitably, in the anxious public mind, result in all of us riding bicycles or carrying water in our hats.
And then how could we live with ourselves?
Happily, we have been spared most of these assaults on our placid lives, however, it appears that our ever vigilant watchdogs are leaving nothing to chance as I have been getting more than the average number of messages recently from well-meaning persons and organizations who, having my health and welfare at the forefront of their minds, want to make sure that I do not suffer some horrible fate in the event of catastrophe. Since the sort of dislocation that constitutes a catastrophe seems to cover a larger and more varied list of misfortunes with each passing year, I am not sure whether they mean nuclear strike or road washed out again. Not that it matters much since the measures we are enjoined to take are the same in either case:
1. Make sure there is a lot of tinned food about the place
2. Keep some water handy since your well will not provide when the power is out.
3. Get lots of things that use batteries, like flashlights and stuff. Maybe a radio.
4. A few candles couldn't hurt. Don't leave your toddlers alone with them.
One official went so far as to suggest that sufficient emergency provisions should be laid in for 72 hours. That's 3 days. Presumably after that arduous period spent loafing around the house without even a TV, unless you've got a generator, helicopters would be provided to replenish the victims' dwindling stock of Cheetos. Maybe they could strafe the affected area with frozen chickens which could then be cooked on sticks over a fire on the patio made by breaking up their furniture.
I was disappointed to note that none of these sources of comfort and good sense cautioned the inexperienced not to remain in the house if the toddler managed to get a crackling blaze going in the couch. No mention was made in any of the notices I received of fire extinguishers, so one can only imagine that the average householder would not have one, or know how to use it if they did.
It is not clear what is driving this drift toward trivializing the idea of what constitutes an Official Disaster. It is tempting to imagine that the legal industry plays a starring role. I understand the Corps of Engineers is still coping with lawsuits relating to the Katrina disaster, and the National Weather Service is clearly the target of choice when your house is unexpectedly washed out to sea owing to their failure to predict a 10-inch rainfall. However, it is hard to see how canned goods would improve the aftermath of either of these events.
This is a fundamental evolution of the National Character and may go far to explain why we, as a nation, steadfastly refuse to do anything that might mitigate the environmental apocalypse to which we have so generously contributed. With so many examples of the often rapid progress from the introduction of a good idea to a preposterously extreme application of it, it is understandable that people would be anxious about any reduction in, say, fuel consumption or the use of plastic bottles. The extrapolation of these benign measures would inevitably, in the anxious public mind, result in all of us riding bicycles or carrying water in our hats.
And then how could we live with ourselves?
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Should We Expect Privacy in the Workplace?
There was a report on public radio the other day about something to do with the workplace. I don't remember what, but at some point the reporter remarked that an employee of the large company under discussion was outraged that the employer dared to read his emails which contained private information that the employer had *no* business looking at. His numerous emails that had been written and sent on company time using the company's computer running the company's software.
I find this mystifying. Not that the company's goods had been used for private purposes – I am guessing that anybody with access to a computer at work will have used it to send personal messages at one time or another. Will, in fact have made private phone calls, filched ball point pens, taken an extra ten minutes for lunch, and taken any of a long and varied list of liberties that the employer might not, strictly speaking, approve of, although it would be naive indeed if the company were truly unaware that such tiny felonies were a daily affair.
What was the eye-opener was that the employee who, having been caught red-handed and asked to spend more time on his actual work, for which he was paid, and less on his private conversations, instead of saying, demurely, “Oh, yes, sir, it won't happen again, sir, I'll get right on that report, sir” and then scurrying off to look busy for a week, tops, before figuring out a way to continue his malfeasance so as not to get caught a second time. Instead of taking this very sensible and mollifying course, this quarter-wit threatened to sue the company for reading the rubbish that he shouldn't have been writing on company time to begin with.
What was he thinking?
This is another example of Our Society's failure to expose the young to reality. Somebody had failed to sit down with this young imbecile and explain what it means to get and, more importantly, to keep a job. Maybe some respectable institution should issue plastic cards to be read to prospective new hires and then given to them to study at their leisure. The card should say something like:
“OK we will hire you. Here's the deal: We are buying from you 40 hours of your time each week excluding holidays. These are our hours and we will do what we like with them. This will not include taking your dog to the vet, picking up furniture from Walmart using the company's truck, or slipping out for a long lunch with your college roommate.
The computer on your desk is not provided so that you can while away an idle morning playing solitaire or forwarding pictures of kittens to your mother.
When your supervisor gives you a task with a deadline of, say, Friday, what is meant is that the task should be completed before Saturday. This Saturday.
Any items under this roof that you did not, yourself, bring here are not yours. The stationary cupboard is not your source for household supplies; those felt-tip markers belong to us, not to you, along with the staplers, post-it notes, and printer paper stacked nearby.
If we catch you stealing our stuff, malingering, texting your friends on our time, using our materiel for purposes unrelated to our needs, we reserve the right to kick your butt.
Do you understand?”
I am reminded of a young man at one of my previous places of employment. This place generated a lot of data and generated endless reports which took up huge chunks of space on the in-house servers. These were very large servers, but every now and then they would approach capacity and the Keepers of the Data would scan through them to find who was taking up the space. Then they would natter at the responsible parties to purge, archive, or move it.
The young man in question was one of these quiet introverted people who never made eye contact and who spent his days alone in a dark windowless room full of computers doing something with data files, so it was not a surprise that his account on the servers very nearly outstripped those of all other users. What was a surprise was that much of the space was taken up with photographs, which he did not work with. This excited the curiosity of one of the Keepers of the Data, who was having a dull day anyway, so he opened one to see what sort of maps or micrographs or field trip records our young man might have accumulated. What he found was hundreds and hundreds of high-resolution pornographic pictures.
What happened next was that probably the most extensive collection of porn in all New England vanished without a trace, and Our Boy got his butt kicked. It could be argued that he was not the brightest star in the firmament, but even so, it is significant that the young ninny did not threaten legal action for invasion of his private fantasy life on company time.
It could be that as jobs become hard to get and good jobs nearly non-existent, the idea that the workplace is merely an extension of our home life will gradually fade as both employer and employee come to understand what each owes the other. However, in the fine American tradition of “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” there are disquieting symptoms of a movement toward the workplace moving into the home. It is already fairly common for companies to demand that its employees not smoke at all, anywhere. I understand that some are moving toward prohibiting all alcohol use. Next up, what? Overeating? Trampoline use? Using the Lord's name in vain?
I realize that moderation is not a notable feature of the national character, but I dream of a time when our time at work is time for work and then we can go home and forget the buggers.
I find this mystifying. Not that the company's goods had been used for private purposes – I am guessing that anybody with access to a computer at work will have used it to send personal messages at one time or another. Will, in fact have made private phone calls, filched ball point pens, taken an extra ten minutes for lunch, and taken any of a long and varied list of liberties that the employer might not, strictly speaking, approve of, although it would be naive indeed if the company were truly unaware that such tiny felonies were a daily affair.
What was the eye-opener was that the employee who, having been caught red-handed and asked to spend more time on his actual work, for which he was paid, and less on his private conversations, instead of saying, demurely, “Oh, yes, sir, it won't happen again, sir, I'll get right on that report, sir” and then scurrying off to look busy for a week, tops, before figuring out a way to continue his malfeasance so as not to get caught a second time. Instead of taking this very sensible and mollifying course, this quarter-wit threatened to sue the company for reading the rubbish that he shouldn't have been writing on company time to begin with.
What was he thinking?
This is another example of Our Society's failure to expose the young to reality. Somebody had failed to sit down with this young imbecile and explain what it means to get and, more importantly, to keep a job. Maybe some respectable institution should issue plastic cards to be read to prospective new hires and then given to them to study at their leisure. The card should say something like:
“OK we will hire you. Here's the deal: We are buying from you 40 hours of your time each week excluding holidays. These are our hours and we will do what we like with them. This will not include taking your dog to the vet, picking up furniture from Walmart using the company's truck, or slipping out for a long lunch with your college roommate.
The computer on your desk is not provided so that you can while away an idle morning playing solitaire or forwarding pictures of kittens to your mother.
When your supervisor gives you a task with a deadline of, say, Friday, what is meant is that the task should be completed before Saturday. This Saturday.
Any items under this roof that you did not, yourself, bring here are not yours. The stationary cupboard is not your source for household supplies; those felt-tip markers belong to us, not to you, along with the staplers, post-it notes, and printer paper stacked nearby.
If we catch you stealing our stuff, malingering, texting your friends on our time, using our materiel for purposes unrelated to our needs, we reserve the right to kick your butt.
Do you understand?”
I am reminded of a young man at one of my previous places of employment. This place generated a lot of data and generated endless reports which took up huge chunks of space on the in-house servers. These were very large servers, but every now and then they would approach capacity and the Keepers of the Data would scan through them to find who was taking up the space. Then they would natter at the responsible parties to purge, archive, or move it.
The young man in question was one of these quiet introverted people who never made eye contact and who spent his days alone in a dark windowless room full of computers doing something with data files, so it was not a surprise that his account on the servers very nearly outstripped those of all other users. What was a surprise was that much of the space was taken up with photographs, which he did not work with. This excited the curiosity of one of the Keepers of the Data, who was having a dull day anyway, so he opened one to see what sort of maps or micrographs or field trip records our young man might have accumulated. What he found was hundreds and hundreds of high-resolution pornographic pictures.
What happened next was that probably the most extensive collection of porn in all New England vanished without a trace, and Our Boy got his butt kicked. It could be argued that he was not the brightest star in the firmament, but even so, it is significant that the young ninny did not threaten legal action for invasion of his private fantasy life on company time.
It could be that as jobs become hard to get and good jobs nearly non-existent, the idea that the workplace is merely an extension of our home life will gradually fade as both employer and employee come to understand what each owes the other. However, in the fine American tradition of “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” there are disquieting symptoms of a movement toward the workplace moving into the home. It is already fairly common for companies to demand that its employees not smoke at all, anywhere. I understand that some are moving toward prohibiting all alcohol use. Next up, what? Overeating? Trampoline use? Using the Lord's name in vain?
I realize that moderation is not a notable feature of the national character, but I dream of a time when our time at work is time for work and then we can go home and forget the buggers.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Darien Days
I am sprawled in front of a large fan, giddy with heat, the story of my summer. How can people live in heat like this?
In midwinter, 2008, my friend Bronwyn and I packed up our tropic-weight sportswear, polarized sunglasses, and insect repellant and went to Panama for a romp through the nature preserves with the Vermont Nature Conservancy. The trip lasted only a week, hardly enough time to justify the great length of time in the nightmare grip of the air travel industry, so I softened the blow by finding a side trip down to Darien Province and badgering Bronwyn into coming with me. This is the southernmost tip of the country populated largely by Embera Indians, poisonous snakes, jaguars, and drug smugglers. We were to spend 3 educational days living in an Embera village, living in their houses, eating their food, slapping their flies. We were to leave from Panama City on Sunday, the day after our return from our final Nature Conservancy stop, a very fine, white, virtually unpopulated beach up to the north.
We got back to our hotel around 5 in the evening and I picked up our itinerary for our personal trip extension to Darien. Imagine my dismay upon discovering that what they meant by a Sunday departure was that we were to be picked up a minute past Saturday in the lobby, leaving seven hours in which to unpack, repack, enjoy a festive farewell dinner with our traveling companions of the past week, and get a couple of hours of actual sleep.
I broke the news to Bronwyn and we immediately started the process. Mirabile dictu we did get down to the lobby punctually at midnight, bleary and bad-tempered, and met our guides: Roberto, a lumbering 300# of good cheer, and his silent & wiry sidekick, Mario, who was brought along to carry things. We were loaded in minutes into a Hyundai 4 x 4 with not a nickel’s worth of spare room after our baggage was added to theirs along with 2 giant coolers. And so it was that we set off just as the Panama City night life was getting under way, friction-fitted into the back seat with wistful hopes of a snooze or two before our transfer to The Boat, which was scheduled for about 6AM so as to get to the Mogue River at high tide.
Once we were clear of Panama City the road was bad and narrow and grew worse as the night wore on, finally degenerating to a continuous series of large deep potholes and coarse gravel, effectively ending any hope of naps. The final lap was a long narrow lane lined on both sides by parked vehicles and knee-deep trash. This was Puerto Quimba where we were to meet our boat, but first, the boys sidled up to the edge of the parking lot to relieve themselves while Bronwyn and I sought out a gap between a couple of trucks with the same idea, the first comical moment of our trip being when Bronwyn, standing ankle deep in chips bags, candy wrappers, and pop cans, wondered what to do with her little wad of toilet paper.
There was a little concrete bunker near the water with soldiers in it, some with machine pistols. I would have been a bit more jumpy about them if they hadn’t looked half asleep and also ignored us entirely. Knowing how close we were to Columbia I, as a well-indoctrinated American, assumed they were there to ward off drug smugglers, but Roberto explained that they were on hand to fend off refugees and other illegal alien riff-raff.
By and by our boat arrived- something like a Boston Whaler – and we dumped our stuff in and headed down the river. It wasn’t long before all signs of habitation vanished and we had the sea to ourselves. For about 15 magical minutes we got to watch the velvet dawn grow pink and bright behind the silhouetted mangroves and jungle and then suddenly it was day. And the sea smelled wonderful and there were porpoises and pelicans and frigate birds and terns.
It was an exhilarating ride, and then we got to the Mogue River right at high tide, as promised, and we came to understand why this was important and could not be done at night. We swooped and ducked up the narrow winding river between encroaching mangroves and fallen trees, which I am guessing would have been impassable at low water, for half an hour or so, passing a thatched hut or two and a dugout, but nothing else. Flights of parrots passed overhead on their daily commute somewhere. Egrets ignored us.
Finally we nosed into a concrete protuberance and one of our boatmen jumped out followed by the rest of us. Our welcoming committee comprised one fine-looking fellow named Leonardo, clad only in a bright red scarf and some beads, who, it transpired, was responsible for the care and feeding of all four of us during our stay, a couple of women who apparently had just come to look, and a flock of little boys delegated to carry our stuff. The little boy who got my pack wasn’t much larger than it was, but managed it gamely, and he and the rest of our straggly band trudged up through the banana grove (actually, more likely plantain), through the near side of the village and up the hill to Our House.
The reason we got the house rather than the Downtown Hotel was that another group had the hotel, but were expected to decamp tomorrow at which point we could have it. The advantage of the Hotel was that there was an actual toilet nearby with a door that could be closed along with a sink and a shower, which amenities were not available at our assigned digs.
It was also located right in the center of things so we could gawk at the doings of the neighborhood (and they could gawk at us) which would have been a good bit of fun, but once we got our tents up, our stuff unpacked, our camera clap-trap located, our cooks established in the basement and our hammocks hung, it didn’t seem worth the effort, so we stayed put throughout. I think Roberto was much relieved by this decision.
Our toilet, which Roberto referred to as “the Structure,” was located, mercifully, at a considerable remove from our house across a cleared area that, Leonardo blandly informed us, had snakes at night, so we made sure to do what could be done before dark and toughed it out until first light. What it was was a drainpipe upended above a hole which contained the excrement of the surrounding households enlivened with a boiling mass of maggots the hatchlings of which flew out in great numbers when you lifted off the cover. We used the hotel facility as much as possible. The shower, which adjoined the Structure, was simply a tap mounted about 5’ up. If you took your shower at the end of the day the water would be piping hot from the supply line having been in the broiling sun all day; if you had a morning shower, it would be considerably cooler. Both of these were surrounded on 3 sides only by a pretty sketchy wall not quite as tall as I am, and entirely open on the fourth side and the top. Luckily there was no snow while we were there.
Anyway, the house itself was a thatched affair on stilts with a carving of a Harpy Eagle at the peak. And the living area was about 7’ up. You got there by clambering up a chinked log propped against one end. At night you would lean a board over the chinks so that dogs wouldn’t come up. In the interests of a bit of privacy as well as nocturnal insect control, we had tents set up on the platform, but apart from our tents, a single long table with associated benches, and a few stools, the place was unfurnished.
By 10AM we were Officially Entrenched, and we, having had 2 hours sleep, and Roberto not that much, we were none of us frantic to dash off into the woods. So Bronwyn improved each shining hour by distributing pads of paper and colored pencils among the numerous small children who had followed us up onto our platform. The idea was that they were to draw pictures, but at first they didn’t seem to understand what was wanted. Finally one of them got the idea and our quarters were quickly filled with shapeless drawings of butterflies and cats and flowers. The second greatest thrill for the younger set was to have their picture taken and then view the result. The upshot of this was that the greater part of the photos taken at the Mogue village feature children. The arrival of lunch marked the end of our morning rest period.
We had two cooks who set up a fire or two down under the platform for cooking purposes. They would then clamber up the log carrying pots and plates and spoons in an impressive display of balance and coordination. They always cooked up a huge volume of stuff, and we quickly discovered that the idea was that Bronwyn and I, being the Honored Guests, got first grabs at it, and what we didn’t eat, which left a great deal, was to be offered to anybody else who happened to be around, including Roberto and Mario, of course, and usually Leonardo, and whatever children hadn’t been chased off home, and El Jefe, who came by occasionally, and the cooks, and the local guides, and random people who had come to help fix the hammocks, or who just happened to be in the neighborhood, etc. Mealtimes were always a lively affair, and in the end, there were never leftovers. The protocol was, though, that the food had to be offered. If they were not expressly invited to eat, they would sit stoically on the bench and slowly starve to death. And of course in some cases, like El Jefe, for example, it was desirable that the food be served up and delivered. Not sure we figured out all the niceties of this procedure, but we did our best.
Breakfast was Crema which seemed to be various grain type things boiled up in milk to the consistency of thick soup. It was served in juice glasses. There were also maybe sausages, eggs, plantain, and, of course, coffee grown and roasted locally. Other meals featured chicken, sausages, pork, yuca, plantain, potatoes. There were some bananas once, but we never saw a green vegetable. I have to say our diet was bland, but the process made up for any shortfall.
At some point somebody’s wife clambered up the log with tattoo ingredients and offered to decorate us. We were told that the dye used in this process would not only make us look like cannibals, but would also repel insects. Bronwyn and I both got leggings and bracelets, but Roberto went right to town and got neck-to-butt ornamentation, which, considering his bulk, was quite a lot of tattooing.
After lunch, and feeling somewhat revived, we wobbled down the log and took a stroll downtown to see what there was to see. We found the hotel and its luxurious bathroom. There was a concrete school and ditto health center, but everything else was much the same as our house. And there was a tiny pigling patrolling the town center, oblivious to the perpetual stir of children and dogs. It always seemed to have important business, no time to stop and fool around. And sitting in solitary splendor among all the thatched houses on stilts there was a single phone booth. The urban center contained not only the Hotel, but also a Supermarket which actually did sell things apparently, notably 4 bottles of beer which we obtained one evening after a long hike in the virgin timber and chilled in one of our coolers whose ice was largely gone. The resulting meltwater was an unwholesome brew of dribbled milk and neutrally buoyant cold cuts, but was cooler than the beers. After a day tramping around in blood temperature heat, that was the best beer that ever passed my lips.
The area under the houses was used for various things including miscellaneous storage, pigpens, and chicken coops, in which were raised the ugliest chickens on earth, with bald necks and patchy bottoms, complete with ugly babies. We thought at first it was some dermatological condition, but apparently not.
One day we got the local harpy whistler, who I gather was also the local parson, and tramped off through the steaming jungle in search of adventure and eagles. We didn’t find any harpies, alas, in spite of some very impressive whistling on the part of our guide. The feeling was that the eagles had moved to the next mountain over because of too much disturbance where we were. So we had to content ourselves with Oropendolas, noisy birds that live in bags high up in large trees, which had set up a lively colony surrounding a hornets nest, or the hornets had moved in among them. Who knows?
Our sweaty trudge was not entirely unrewarded, however as there were some very large trees still standing in spite of the snarl of distant chain saws, and a vast assortment of quaint and beautiful insects and bizarre and prickly plants. We stepped over and around countless skeins of leaf-cutter ants streaming across the path. Each swarm focussed on a single task: carrying leaf fragments, carrying yellow petals, deadheading back to the source. They had worn paths around the roots and talks in their way.
We walked down to the village after dark one day, keeping a sharp lookout for snakes, to sample the night life. We quickly discovered there was none. At least one reason for this was that there was a generator down there that came on at about sunset and stayed on for a few hours and this generator provided just enough power to run however many televisions there were in the neighborhood, and so it came to pass that for this electrified period everybody with a television was home up there on their open-sided, thatch-roofed, platforms sitting on the floor watching Three's Company or whatever the single channel might offer.
So that is how people live in heat like this. They wear no clothes worth mentioning, they live in houses with thatched roofs and no walls, they don't do much of anything during the heat of the day, and since there are no clocks in the place, they are never in a hurry.
In midwinter, 2008, my friend Bronwyn and I packed up our tropic-weight sportswear, polarized sunglasses, and insect repellant and went to Panama for a romp through the nature preserves with the Vermont Nature Conservancy. The trip lasted only a week, hardly enough time to justify the great length of time in the nightmare grip of the air travel industry, so I softened the blow by finding a side trip down to Darien Province and badgering Bronwyn into coming with me. This is the southernmost tip of the country populated largely by Embera Indians, poisonous snakes, jaguars, and drug smugglers. We were to spend 3 educational days living in an Embera village, living in their houses, eating their food, slapping their flies. We were to leave from Panama City on Sunday, the day after our return from our final Nature Conservancy stop, a very fine, white, virtually unpopulated beach up to the north.
We got back to our hotel around 5 in the evening and I picked up our itinerary for our personal trip extension to Darien. Imagine my dismay upon discovering that what they meant by a Sunday departure was that we were to be picked up a minute past Saturday in the lobby, leaving seven hours in which to unpack, repack, enjoy a festive farewell dinner with our traveling companions of the past week, and get a couple of hours of actual sleep.
I broke the news to Bronwyn and we immediately started the process. Mirabile dictu we did get down to the lobby punctually at midnight, bleary and bad-tempered, and met our guides: Roberto, a lumbering 300# of good cheer, and his silent & wiry sidekick, Mario, who was brought along to carry things. We were loaded in minutes into a Hyundai 4 x 4 with not a nickel’s worth of spare room after our baggage was added to theirs along with 2 giant coolers. And so it was that we set off just as the Panama City night life was getting under way, friction-fitted into the back seat with wistful hopes of a snooze or two before our transfer to The Boat, which was scheduled for about 6AM so as to get to the Mogue River at high tide.
Once we were clear of Panama City the road was bad and narrow and grew worse as the night wore on, finally degenerating to a continuous series of large deep potholes and coarse gravel, effectively ending any hope of naps. The final lap was a long narrow lane lined on both sides by parked vehicles and knee-deep trash. This was Puerto Quimba where we were to meet our boat, but first, the boys sidled up to the edge of the parking lot to relieve themselves while Bronwyn and I sought out a gap between a couple of trucks with the same idea, the first comical moment of our trip being when Bronwyn, standing ankle deep in chips bags, candy wrappers, and pop cans, wondered what to do with her little wad of toilet paper.
There was a little concrete bunker near the water with soldiers in it, some with machine pistols. I would have been a bit more jumpy about them if they hadn’t looked half asleep and also ignored us entirely. Knowing how close we were to Columbia I, as a well-indoctrinated American, assumed they were there to ward off drug smugglers, but Roberto explained that they were on hand to fend off refugees and other illegal alien riff-raff.
By and by our boat arrived- something like a Boston Whaler – and we dumped our stuff in and headed down the river. It wasn’t long before all signs of habitation vanished and we had the sea to ourselves. For about 15 magical minutes we got to watch the velvet dawn grow pink and bright behind the silhouetted mangroves and jungle and then suddenly it was day. And the sea smelled wonderful and there were porpoises and pelicans and frigate birds and terns.
It was an exhilarating ride, and then we got to the Mogue River right at high tide, as promised, and we came to understand why this was important and could not be done at night. We swooped and ducked up the narrow winding river between encroaching mangroves and fallen trees, which I am guessing would have been impassable at low water, for half an hour or so, passing a thatched hut or two and a dugout, but nothing else. Flights of parrots passed overhead on their daily commute somewhere. Egrets ignored us.
Finally we nosed into a concrete protuberance and one of our boatmen jumped out followed by the rest of us. Our welcoming committee comprised one fine-looking fellow named Leonardo, clad only in a bright red scarf and some beads, who, it transpired, was responsible for the care and feeding of all four of us during our stay, a couple of women who apparently had just come to look, and a flock of little boys delegated to carry our stuff. The little boy who got my pack wasn’t much larger than it was, but managed it gamely, and he and the rest of our straggly band trudged up through the banana grove (actually, more likely plantain), through the near side of the village and up the hill to Our House.
The reason we got the house rather than the Downtown Hotel was that another group had the hotel, but were expected to decamp tomorrow at which point we could have it. The advantage of the Hotel was that there was an actual toilet nearby with a door that could be closed along with a sink and a shower, which amenities were not available at our assigned digs.
It was also located right in the center of things so we could gawk at the doings of the neighborhood (and they could gawk at us) which would have been a good bit of fun, but once we got our tents up, our stuff unpacked, our camera clap-trap located, our cooks established in the basement and our hammocks hung, it didn’t seem worth the effort, so we stayed put throughout. I think Roberto was much relieved by this decision.
Our toilet, which Roberto referred to as “the Structure,” was located, mercifully, at a considerable remove from our house across a cleared area that, Leonardo blandly informed us, had snakes at night, so we made sure to do what could be done before dark and toughed it out until first light. What it was was a drainpipe upended above a hole which contained the excrement of the surrounding households enlivened with a boiling mass of maggots the hatchlings of which flew out in great numbers when you lifted off the cover. We used the hotel facility as much as possible. The shower, which adjoined the Structure, was simply a tap mounted about 5’ up. If you took your shower at the end of the day the water would be piping hot from the supply line having been in the broiling sun all day; if you had a morning shower, it would be considerably cooler. Both of these were surrounded on 3 sides only by a pretty sketchy wall not quite as tall as I am, and entirely open on the fourth side and the top. Luckily there was no snow while we were there.
Anyway, the house itself was a thatched affair on stilts with a carving of a Harpy Eagle at the peak. And the living area was about 7’ up. You got there by clambering up a chinked log propped against one end. At night you would lean a board over the chinks so that dogs wouldn’t come up. In the interests of a bit of privacy as well as nocturnal insect control, we had tents set up on the platform, but apart from our tents, a single long table with associated benches, and a few stools, the place was unfurnished.
By 10AM we were Officially Entrenched, and we, having had 2 hours sleep, and Roberto not that much, we were none of us frantic to dash off into the woods. So Bronwyn improved each shining hour by distributing pads of paper and colored pencils among the numerous small children who had followed us up onto our platform. The idea was that they were to draw pictures, but at first they didn’t seem to understand what was wanted. Finally one of them got the idea and our quarters were quickly filled with shapeless drawings of butterflies and cats and flowers. The second greatest thrill for the younger set was to have their picture taken and then view the result. The upshot of this was that the greater part of the photos taken at the Mogue village feature children. The arrival of lunch marked the end of our morning rest period.
We had two cooks who set up a fire or two down under the platform for cooking purposes. They would then clamber up the log carrying pots and plates and spoons in an impressive display of balance and coordination. They always cooked up a huge volume of stuff, and we quickly discovered that the idea was that Bronwyn and I, being the Honored Guests, got first grabs at it, and what we didn’t eat, which left a great deal, was to be offered to anybody else who happened to be around, including Roberto and Mario, of course, and usually Leonardo, and whatever children hadn’t been chased off home, and El Jefe, who came by occasionally, and the cooks, and the local guides, and random people who had come to help fix the hammocks, or who just happened to be in the neighborhood, etc. Mealtimes were always a lively affair, and in the end, there were never leftovers. The protocol was, though, that the food had to be offered. If they were not expressly invited to eat, they would sit stoically on the bench and slowly starve to death. And of course in some cases, like El Jefe, for example, it was desirable that the food be served up and delivered. Not sure we figured out all the niceties of this procedure, but we did our best.
Breakfast was Crema which seemed to be various grain type things boiled up in milk to the consistency of thick soup. It was served in juice glasses. There were also maybe sausages, eggs, plantain, and, of course, coffee grown and roasted locally. Other meals featured chicken, sausages, pork, yuca, plantain, potatoes. There were some bananas once, but we never saw a green vegetable. I have to say our diet was bland, but the process made up for any shortfall.
At some point somebody’s wife clambered up the log with tattoo ingredients and offered to decorate us. We were told that the dye used in this process would not only make us look like cannibals, but would also repel insects. Bronwyn and I both got leggings and bracelets, but Roberto went right to town and got neck-to-butt ornamentation, which, considering his bulk, was quite a lot of tattooing.
After lunch, and feeling somewhat revived, we wobbled down the log and took a stroll downtown to see what there was to see. We found the hotel and its luxurious bathroom. There was a concrete school and ditto health center, but everything else was much the same as our house. And there was a tiny pigling patrolling the town center, oblivious to the perpetual stir of children and dogs. It always seemed to have important business, no time to stop and fool around. And sitting in solitary splendor among all the thatched houses on stilts there was a single phone booth. The urban center contained not only the Hotel, but also a Supermarket which actually did sell things apparently, notably 4 bottles of beer which we obtained one evening after a long hike in the virgin timber and chilled in one of our coolers whose ice was largely gone. The resulting meltwater was an unwholesome brew of dribbled milk and neutrally buoyant cold cuts, but was cooler than the beers. After a day tramping around in blood temperature heat, that was the best beer that ever passed my lips.
The area under the houses was used for various things including miscellaneous storage, pigpens, and chicken coops, in which were raised the ugliest chickens on earth, with bald necks and patchy bottoms, complete with ugly babies. We thought at first it was some dermatological condition, but apparently not.
One day we got the local harpy whistler, who I gather was also the local parson, and tramped off through the steaming jungle in search of adventure and eagles. We didn’t find any harpies, alas, in spite of some very impressive whistling on the part of our guide. The feeling was that the eagles had moved to the next mountain over because of too much disturbance where we were. So we had to content ourselves with Oropendolas, noisy birds that live in bags high up in large trees, which had set up a lively colony surrounding a hornets nest, or the hornets had moved in among them. Who knows?
Our sweaty trudge was not entirely unrewarded, however as there were some very large trees still standing in spite of the snarl of distant chain saws, and a vast assortment of quaint and beautiful insects and bizarre and prickly plants. We stepped over and around countless skeins of leaf-cutter ants streaming across the path. Each swarm focussed on a single task: carrying leaf fragments, carrying yellow petals, deadheading back to the source. They had worn paths around the roots and talks in their way.
We walked down to the village after dark one day, keeping a sharp lookout for snakes, to sample the night life. We quickly discovered there was none. At least one reason for this was that there was a generator down there that came on at about sunset and stayed on for a few hours and this generator provided just enough power to run however many televisions there were in the neighborhood, and so it came to pass that for this electrified period everybody with a television was home up there on their open-sided, thatch-roofed, platforms sitting on the floor watching Three's Company or whatever the single channel might offer.
So that is how people live in heat like this. They wear no clothes worth mentioning, they live in houses with thatched roofs and no walls, they don't do much of anything during the heat of the day, and since there are no clocks in the place, they are never in a hurry.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
What's in a Name?
The most recently publicized mass murder by a heavily armed lunatic took place in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. The murdered murderer, it develops, was known to the FBI as one of these white supremacists who strive to establish their intrinsic superiority by behaving like enraged hyenas with assault weapons. Unsurprisingly, news reports surfaced almost immediately with whatever was known or believed, namely that there had been a shooting in a Sikh temple.
I first heard about this episode on Public Radio. An excitable young man was breathlessly describing the situation in the Sick temple, interviewing members of the Sick community, including a Sick man who briefly outlined Sick beliefs and so forth. As he carried on in this rather long tale, referring to Sick this and Sick that I cringed, wondering if National Public Radio had really sunk so low that there was nobody within earshot of the newsroom who knew how to pronounce the name of this respectably well-known and widespread religion.
It seemed to me, though, that this had all the earmarks of the common practice of expressing contempt through mispronunciation. To refer to these people as Sicks is to dismiss them as insignificant, not worth the minute effort it would take to broaden the “i” into the term they use to describe themselves. I expect that if you suggested to the eager young reporter that the word should be “Seek” rather than “Sick,” he would roll his eyes and reply “What-Ever.”
The same technique is used by certain right-wing windbags who refer to the president as “Obaama.” There is no shortage of broadcast journalists and commentators who speak his name as he does himself, and again it would take no effort worth mentioning to broaden the “a” into “Obahma,” but again, the sneering speakers are making a point which is that President Obama is not worthy of the simple courtesy of remembering his name.
But shortening vowels is not the only way a name can be used as an insult. Just changing it a little will also do the trick.
There is a plumber who comes to clean my furnace once a year. He is a short, dark, Bosnian muslim named Hamdi. Last year when I phoned to get an appointment, the dispatcher named a date and told me Hans would be there first thing. Naturally, I assumed this was Hamdi's replacement, Hamdi himself having been promoted or sacked or relocated. However, it turned out that Hans was actually Hamdi repackaged. The dispatcher was unable to remember or pronounce his actual name so she decided on Hans as a suitable replacement, being, on the one hand, foreign, but at the same time acceptably blond.
I am especially sensitive to this sort of slight since I have spent all of my adult life trying to convince the world at large to call me Deborah rather than Debby which latter I tolerated up through grammar school since it was suitable for that time. The name evokes a cute freckle-faced moppet with pigtails, which fairly well describes me as a very young thing. I was undeniably cute.
At first I thought the rush toward Debby in my later life, well after I had given up pigtails, was a result of everybody and their dog having a niece or a babysitter named Debby and being unable to heave themselves out of that rut. I finally figured out that people who insisted on insulting me with this designation were people who wanted to diminish me for one reason or another. People who saw me as competition, for example, or struggling little junior executives making sure that I knew I was inferior. Or people who just simply disliked me.
Eventually I stopped being irate when this happened and started using it as a sort of litmus test that indicated fairly accurately whom I could or could not trust. In short, Sicks or Obaama or Hans or Debby are just another way of calling the target an asshole without actually offending the public sensibility. It is a deniable way of offending the target while maintaining a “golly, I had no idea!” wide-eyed innocence.
So next time your boss or colleague or some semi-stranger calls you Sweety or Stud or some diminutive of your actual name, sit up and pay attention. This is not your friend. Secure your wallet and run.
I first heard about this episode on Public Radio. An excitable young man was breathlessly describing the situation in the Sick temple, interviewing members of the Sick community, including a Sick man who briefly outlined Sick beliefs and so forth. As he carried on in this rather long tale, referring to Sick this and Sick that I cringed, wondering if National Public Radio had really sunk so low that there was nobody within earshot of the newsroom who knew how to pronounce the name of this respectably well-known and widespread religion.
It seemed to me, though, that this had all the earmarks of the common practice of expressing contempt through mispronunciation. To refer to these people as Sicks is to dismiss them as insignificant, not worth the minute effort it would take to broaden the “i” into the term they use to describe themselves. I expect that if you suggested to the eager young reporter that the word should be “Seek” rather than “Sick,” he would roll his eyes and reply “What-Ever.”
The same technique is used by certain right-wing windbags who refer to the president as “Obaama.” There is no shortage of broadcast journalists and commentators who speak his name as he does himself, and again it would take no effort worth mentioning to broaden the “a” into “Obahma,” but again, the sneering speakers are making a point which is that President Obama is not worthy of the simple courtesy of remembering his name.
But shortening vowels is not the only way a name can be used as an insult. Just changing it a little will also do the trick.
There is a plumber who comes to clean my furnace once a year. He is a short, dark, Bosnian muslim named Hamdi. Last year when I phoned to get an appointment, the dispatcher named a date and told me Hans would be there first thing. Naturally, I assumed this was Hamdi's replacement, Hamdi himself having been promoted or sacked or relocated. However, it turned out that Hans was actually Hamdi repackaged. The dispatcher was unable to remember or pronounce his actual name so she decided on Hans as a suitable replacement, being, on the one hand, foreign, but at the same time acceptably blond.
I am especially sensitive to this sort of slight since I have spent all of my adult life trying to convince the world at large to call me Deborah rather than Debby which latter I tolerated up through grammar school since it was suitable for that time. The name evokes a cute freckle-faced moppet with pigtails, which fairly well describes me as a very young thing. I was undeniably cute.
At first I thought the rush toward Debby in my later life, well after I had given up pigtails, was a result of everybody and their dog having a niece or a babysitter named Debby and being unable to heave themselves out of that rut. I finally figured out that people who insisted on insulting me with this designation were people who wanted to diminish me for one reason or another. People who saw me as competition, for example, or struggling little junior executives making sure that I knew I was inferior. Or people who just simply disliked me.
Eventually I stopped being irate when this happened and started using it as a sort of litmus test that indicated fairly accurately whom I could or could not trust. In short, Sicks or Obaama or Hans or Debby are just another way of calling the target an asshole without actually offending the public sensibility. It is a deniable way of offending the target while maintaining a “golly, I had no idea!” wide-eyed innocence.
So next time your boss or colleague or some semi-stranger calls you Sweety or Stud or some diminutive of your actual name, sit up and pay attention. This is not your friend. Secure your wallet and run.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Second Amendment Blues
There was a phone-in show on public radio this morning whose main topic was the shooting spree in Colorado by some lunatic who killed or injured something like 70 people in a movie theater. The news reports inexplicably refer to him as “the alleged killer” in spite of the unanimous agreement of living victims, first responders, police, and the fact that he was the only one present with an assault rifle, a shotgun and two handguns. But I am wandering from individual to national lunacy.
The aspect of this sorry affair being scrutinized by guests and callers was “Should we consider regulating guns?” The answer to this difficult question was mulled over by both knee-jerk liberals and freedom-loving conservatives. The former group apologetically suggested that perhaps more care should be taken to prevent assault rifles falling into the hands of known felons, convicted terrorists, and the criminally insane; that, if it isn't too much trouble, maybe purchases of more than a truckload of ammunition and high explosives should be reported to somebody.
This outrageous assault on our personal liberties was stoutly opposed by the conservative side. As one patriot pointed out with some asperity, guns are all around us – making a few more restrictive laws won't make it any safer. Furthermore, he explained, these shooting are a rare occurrence and bound to happen anyway in schools and movie theaters and such since places like this are magnets for violent acts of this sort, and if nut jobs like James Holmes didn't have access to machine guns, well he would have used Molotov Cocktails instead, and just think of the mess that would have made.
At that point I really wished my radio had an instant replay feature so that I could confirm that an actual full-grown human being of presumably average intelligence had really said this.
The conversation then strayed into the area of whether it was wise to allow, not to say encourage, a demonstrably violent, trigger-happy population to carry concealed weapons. I wondered it the Patriot would voice the opinion of another Concerned Conservative that we should all not only be allowed, but required, to carry a firearm at all times. Happily he didn't, but he did argue that if more people carried a Glock, then random shooters would be much less likely to run amok in malls since they would be mowed down by vigilantes before the body count rose past five or six.
Somebody then pointed out that in situations like this, typically the damage caused by the crossfire is greater than whatever was likely without amateur intervention.
We then moved on to the patriotic importance of the Second Amendment, during which debate nobody thought to mention that Thomas Jefferson had never heard of an Uzi.
This entire horrifying exchange took place on National Public Radio, that bastion of liberal thought hated and vilified by the Real Conservative Patriots, those stout-hearted protectors of our Rights and Liberties, or at least the rights and liberties of rich, white, christian, men. I have not sought out any Fox News channels or radio stations that favor Rush Limbaugh, but I am struggling to imagine how a similar conversation might unfold on one of these venues. Would they opine that the mop-headed boy left anyone alive? Would they be outraged that the police had overstepped their authority by arresting an American citizen for simply exercising his second amendment rights? Would they be scornful that not one of the 70 victims shot back?
I'm not sure I want to know, but now I am giving some thought to what model of handgun would go best with my Birkenstocks.
The aspect of this sorry affair being scrutinized by guests and callers was “Should we consider regulating guns?” The answer to this difficult question was mulled over by both knee-jerk liberals and freedom-loving conservatives. The former group apologetically suggested that perhaps more care should be taken to prevent assault rifles falling into the hands of known felons, convicted terrorists, and the criminally insane; that, if it isn't too much trouble, maybe purchases of more than a truckload of ammunition and high explosives should be reported to somebody.
This outrageous assault on our personal liberties was stoutly opposed by the conservative side. As one patriot pointed out with some asperity, guns are all around us – making a few more restrictive laws won't make it any safer. Furthermore, he explained, these shooting are a rare occurrence and bound to happen anyway in schools and movie theaters and such since places like this are magnets for violent acts of this sort, and if nut jobs like James Holmes didn't have access to machine guns, well he would have used Molotov Cocktails instead, and just think of the mess that would have made.
At that point I really wished my radio had an instant replay feature so that I could confirm that an actual full-grown human being of presumably average intelligence had really said this.
The conversation then strayed into the area of whether it was wise to allow, not to say encourage, a demonstrably violent, trigger-happy population to carry concealed weapons. I wondered it the Patriot would voice the opinion of another Concerned Conservative that we should all not only be allowed, but required, to carry a firearm at all times. Happily he didn't, but he did argue that if more people carried a Glock, then random shooters would be much less likely to run amok in malls since they would be mowed down by vigilantes before the body count rose past five or six.
Somebody then pointed out that in situations like this, typically the damage caused by the crossfire is greater than whatever was likely without amateur intervention.
We then moved on to the patriotic importance of the Second Amendment, during which debate nobody thought to mention that Thomas Jefferson had never heard of an Uzi.
This entire horrifying exchange took place on National Public Radio, that bastion of liberal thought hated and vilified by the Real Conservative Patriots, those stout-hearted protectors of our Rights and Liberties, or at least the rights and liberties of rich, white, christian, men. I have not sought out any Fox News channels or radio stations that favor Rush Limbaugh, but I am struggling to imagine how a similar conversation might unfold on one of these venues. Would they opine that the mop-headed boy left anyone alive? Would they be outraged that the police had overstepped their authority by arresting an American citizen for simply exercising his second amendment rights? Would they be scornful that not one of the 70 victims shot back?
I'm not sure I want to know, but now I am giving some thought to what model of handgun would go best with my Birkenstocks.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Ito's Frog
I would never have known the little creature was there if the ever-vigilant Ito had not told me. She often sits on that windowsill looking out over the garden and keeping an eye on the moths that come to beat on the screen perhaps to express their disdain for my taste in Netflix offerings. I do not place much store in the opinions of moths so I let Ito deal with them which she does by fixing them with a laser stare and plucking at the screen with one or two toenails for the duration of her attention span which doesn't last for long.
But it turned out that there were other life forms taking an interest in my Netflix moths and that these were Out There, where the rubber meets the road so to speak, and it was one of these enterprising souls that Ito was attempting to form a bond with a week or two ago. She was doing this by plucking at the screen right at the bottom and also making a funny little noise. This was so interesting I actually got up out of bed and went over to look. What she had found there was a frog that had somehow found its way onto my windowsill which is located 15 feet above the ground, 8 feet below the eaves, and 3 feet from the closest wobbly twig. I stared at it for several minutes trying to imagine this tiny semi-boneless creature leaping these tremendous distances, then, exhausted by this intellectual excess, flopped back down in front of Netflix to rest.
However it got there it was wasting no time lapping down the smorgasbord of multilegged snacks gathered on my screen. I was so impressed by the very presence of this, no doubt, accidental visitor that I looked it up the next morning. Ito's discovery, it seemed, was a Wood Frog.
I had forgotten all about it by bedtime that night when Ito and I went up to bed for the next exciting installment of Netflix. As usual, I poked through the viewing possibilities while Ito paced back and forth across my feet until she had found the exact geometric center of the bed to stake out as her own and then we settled down to, variously, watch or snooze.
Soon the moths started gathering and then suddenly Ito sprang to her feet, took a shortcut to the window across my face, and there, mirabile dictu, was our impossible frog, oblivious to the ravening amphibiophile a mere screen's thickness way, prattling and strumming the screen.
After that, as one hot, oppressive night followed another we came to expect our new friend and Ito no longer even talked to it. And I stopped wondering how it got there.
But as a reminder never to take anything for granted, one night Ito dashed over to the other window and was staring at the sill. This window is at the back of the house where the terrain drops off abruptly and is directly below the peak of the roof, so it is much further to the ground as well as to eaves, and not a twig anywhere. Therefore it really was impossible that this tiny animal could have jumped from anywhere to get to its current perch among the moths.
It was hard to get a good look at it, partly because it was dark, and partly because Ito refused to budge, but in the end, the greater avoirdupois prevailed and Ito resentfully stepped aside so I could have a good look, and was amazed to see that this lumpy little gourmand was not, after all, our Wood Frog, but rather some kind of toad.
So now I am left to conclude that either we have both a magical frog and a magical toad, or that both of them are able to walk around on vertical surfaces for some distance looking for moths or that there is a prankster in the neighborhood with a very silent ladder who spends his days sneaking around among the deer flies catching frogs and his nights clambering up to people's bedroom windowsills to leave them for some experimental purpose.
Really, it's a tough choice, but I am inclined to go for the magical toad theory and next time I see one or the other I plan to sneak the screen off and catch it quick before Ito gets ideas. Not sure what's next. Do I kiss it and hope a prince emerges? Not much chance a prince would be much use – what I need is a prince who can fix the drains.
I'll discuss it with Ito.
But it turned out that there were other life forms taking an interest in my Netflix moths and that these were Out There, where the rubber meets the road so to speak, and it was one of these enterprising souls that Ito was attempting to form a bond with a week or two ago. She was doing this by plucking at the screen right at the bottom and also making a funny little noise. This was so interesting I actually got up out of bed and went over to look. What she had found there was a frog that had somehow found its way onto my windowsill which is located 15 feet above the ground, 8 feet below the eaves, and 3 feet from the closest wobbly twig. I stared at it for several minutes trying to imagine this tiny semi-boneless creature leaping these tremendous distances, then, exhausted by this intellectual excess, flopped back down in front of Netflix to rest.
However it got there it was wasting no time lapping down the smorgasbord of multilegged snacks gathered on my screen. I was so impressed by the very presence of this, no doubt, accidental visitor that I looked it up the next morning. Ito's discovery, it seemed, was a Wood Frog.
I had forgotten all about it by bedtime that night when Ito and I went up to bed for the next exciting installment of Netflix. As usual, I poked through the viewing possibilities while Ito paced back and forth across my feet until she had found the exact geometric center of the bed to stake out as her own and then we settled down to, variously, watch or snooze.
Soon the moths started gathering and then suddenly Ito sprang to her feet, took a shortcut to the window across my face, and there, mirabile dictu, was our impossible frog, oblivious to the ravening amphibiophile a mere screen's thickness way, prattling and strumming the screen.
After that, as one hot, oppressive night followed another we came to expect our new friend and Ito no longer even talked to it. And I stopped wondering how it got there.
But as a reminder never to take anything for granted, one night Ito dashed over to the other window and was staring at the sill. This window is at the back of the house where the terrain drops off abruptly and is directly below the peak of the roof, so it is much further to the ground as well as to eaves, and not a twig anywhere. Therefore it really was impossible that this tiny animal could have jumped from anywhere to get to its current perch among the moths.
It was hard to get a good look at it, partly because it was dark, and partly because Ito refused to budge, but in the end, the greater avoirdupois prevailed and Ito resentfully stepped aside so I could have a good look, and was amazed to see that this lumpy little gourmand was not, after all, our Wood Frog, but rather some kind of toad.
So now I am left to conclude that either we have both a magical frog and a magical toad, or that both of them are able to walk around on vertical surfaces for some distance looking for moths or that there is a prankster in the neighborhood with a very silent ladder who spends his days sneaking around among the deer flies catching frogs and his nights clambering up to people's bedroom windowsills to leave them for some experimental purpose.
Really, it's a tough choice, but I am inclined to go for the magical toad theory and next time I see one or the other I plan to sneak the screen off and catch it quick before Ito gets ideas. Not sure what's next. Do I kiss it and hope a prince emerges? Not much chance a prince would be much use – what I need is a prince who can fix the drains.
I'll discuss it with Ito.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The Other Half
I picked up a Seven Days the other day because it was there on the way out the door and so that I could then huffily assure my detractors that yes, of course I read the papers. And the price was right.
Then when I got home I put it on the counter to ripen for a few days and finally sat down with a cup of coffee to look it over. Of course I started at the back where the funnies are, but even before I got to the funnies, there were the Personals.
Now I enjoy the peculiarities of my fellow creatures as much as the next creature, but for sheer overload you cannot beat the Personals, each one an astonishing little story. This week's issue offered up 6 categories to satisfy most tastes:
Women Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking ?
Men Seeking ?
Other Seeking ?
Even just allowing the mind to strum these possibilities gets the imagination aware if not fully alive. Why no Men Seeking Men? Are they all already paired off? Do we, like Iran, have no gay men? Are they too timid to seek companionship in print media? Then there are the Men/Women Seeking ? categories. That ? opens whole worlds – the variety of needs, goals, desires they might be seeking could leave a person dizzy with possibilities: exotic pets, bicycles, depilatory cream, happiness, butter churns, riches, barnyard animals, depression glass, playwrights, wild, panting, sweaty, screaming sex in an elevator. All things considered, the last is most likely, but still...
And then finally there is Other Seeking ? There are 7 items in this category which I will save for dessert.
But back to the beginning, of the 27 people seeking other human beings of the same or different gender, if you believe what the ads say, all are just looking for somebody to go to the movies with, except for one bold female who is “looking for a discreet girlfriend for fun times in and out of bed,” and a 44 year-old gent named bigboots looking for “...someone to play with...” Pretty tame stuff.
But next up we have women seeking ? and it finally becomes clear that ? means “sex,” and who'd have guessed there would be so many variants and acronyms. Several querents were looking for others interested in BDSM which apparently has to do with bondage, dominance, and sado-masochism. Others were looking for “NSA summer fun.” That would be “No Strings Attached,” and is being sought by a young thing who is turned on by tattoos, among others.
One ad explains that her husband is dull as ditchwater and she is looking around for “discreet encounters to leave us breathless and wet.” Another suggests a torrid threesome, adding “Taped for personal use only.” No details given as to what is considered personal use – training sessions for future threesomes? An amusing entertainment for the next Christmas party? A bit of light-hearted blackmail in case one of the participants runs for office?
The men seeking ? offer a wider spectrum of desiderata than the girls did. One message entitled WOODLAND CREATURE posted by a party named foodofthegods says, in its entirety, “A mole in the field of existence.” I guess this must be code for something, but I can't imagine what. At the other end of the spectrum we have “I'm just an aspiring college freshman looking for a one-night stand. That's all, nothing else.” No code there.
Apart from these, most of the rest of the men seeking ? are looking for slap and tickle of one sort or another especially pappahobbit, a 49 year old navy veteran, whose message, entitled LOVING SPANKING DADDY invites contact from a submissive female (no age range given) or “select male between 18 and 29 that needs or wants regular spankings.”
Finally I dipped into Other Seeking ? and was disappointed to learn that the members of this group were couples looking for some recreational swapping. Almost all demanded that applicants be clean and many insisted that they were. Most seemed to be looking for just a bit of vanilla swapping, although there were a couple of ads called HYPERSEXUAL COUPLE NEEDS THE SAME and INSATIABLE APPETITES FOR SEX!!! who seemed to be looking for variations on the theme including “toys,” whatever that implies. One of these even invited “those with ethnic background” which surely demonstrates their sophistication.
Reading through these little paragraphs gives me a glimpse into the lives and hopes of strangers I will probably never know. But the other half of the equation is the people who actually answer the ads. I try to imagine them sitting there at their kitchen table with their sticky fingers following the lines of print and thinking what fun it would be to be spanked by pappahobbit, pushing their smudged glasses back on their nose and reaching for the phone. An exercise for another day.
Then when I got home I put it on the counter to ripen for a few days and finally sat down with a cup of coffee to look it over. Of course I started at the back where the funnies are, but even before I got to the funnies, there were the Personals.
Now I enjoy the peculiarities of my fellow creatures as much as the next creature, but for sheer overload you cannot beat the Personals, each one an astonishing little story. This week's issue offered up 6 categories to satisfy most tastes:
Women Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking ?
Men Seeking ?
Other Seeking ?
Even just allowing the mind to strum these possibilities gets the imagination aware if not fully alive. Why no Men Seeking Men? Are they all already paired off? Do we, like Iran, have no gay men? Are they too timid to seek companionship in print media? Then there are the Men/Women Seeking ? categories. That ? opens whole worlds – the variety of needs, goals, desires they might be seeking could leave a person dizzy with possibilities: exotic pets, bicycles, depilatory cream, happiness, butter churns, riches, barnyard animals, depression glass, playwrights, wild, panting, sweaty, screaming sex in an elevator. All things considered, the last is most likely, but still...
And then finally there is Other Seeking ? There are 7 items in this category which I will save for dessert.
But back to the beginning, of the 27 people seeking other human beings of the same or different gender, if you believe what the ads say, all are just looking for somebody to go to the movies with, except for one bold female who is “looking for a discreet girlfriend for fun times in and out of bed,” and a 44 year-old gent named bigboots looking for “...someone to play with...” Pretty tame stuff.
But next up we have women seeking ? and it finally becomes clear that ? means “sex,” and who'd have guessed there would be so many variants and acronyms. Several querents were looking for others interested in BDSM which apparently has to do with bondage, dominance, and sado-masochism. Others were looking for “NSA summer fun.” That would be “No Strings Attached,” and is being sought by a young thing who is turned on by tattoos, among others.
One ad explains that her husband is dull as ditchwater and she is looking around for “discreet encounters to leave us breathless and wet.” Another suggests a torrid threesome, adding “Taped for personal use only.” No details given as to what is considered personal use – training sessions for future threesomes? An amusing entertainment for the next Christmas party? A bit of light-hearted blackmail in case one of the participants runs for office?
The men seeking ? offer a wider spectrum of desiderata than the girls did. One message entitled WOODLAND CREATURE posted by a party named foodofthegods says, in its entirety, “A mole in the field of existence.” I guess this must be code for something, but I can't imagine what. At the other end of the spectrum we have “I'm just an aspiring college freshman looking for a one-night stand. That's all, nothing else.” No code there.
Apart from these, most of the rest of the men seeking ? are looking for slap and tickle of one sort or another especially pappahobbit, a 49 year old navy veteran, whose message, entitled LOVING SPANKING DADDY invites contact from a submissive female (no age range given) or “select male between 18 and 29 that needs or wants regular spankings.”
Finally I dipped into Other Seeking ? and was disappointed to learn that the members of this group were couples looking for some recreational swapping. Almost all demanded that applicants be clean and many insisted that they were. Most seemed to be looking for just a bit of vanilla swapping, although there were a couple of ads called HYPERSEXUAL COUPLE NEEDS THE SAME and INSATIABLE APPETITES FOR SEX!!! who seemed to be looking for variations on the theme including “toys,” whatever that implies. One of these even invited “those with ethnic background” which surely demonstrates their sophistication.
Reading through these little paragraphs gives me a glimpse into the lives and hopes of strangers I will probably never know. But the other half of the equation is the people who actually answer the ads. I try to imagine them sitting there at their kitchen table with their sticky fingers following the lines of print and thinking what fun it would be to be spanked by pappahobbit, pushing their smudged glasses back on their nose and reaching for the phone. An exercise for another day.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
The Death of a Law Firm: Must We Mourn?
There was a talk show on the radio recently discussing the pending
collapse of Dewey & LeBoeuf, an enormous law firm in New York with
branches in 25 countries which had been successfully extracting money
from its customers for many years but was now teetering on the thin edge
of financial ruin. Its chairman, now former chairman, is the focus of a
criminal investigation, and the partners' swollen pay packets have been
reduced, in many cases, from obscene to excessive.
Here's what happened: When you are a very large, rich law firm (I use the second person singular advisedly since the Supreme Court has assured us that large associations of venal predators such as huge law firms and other multi-national corporations are people just like you and me). As I was saying, when you are a very large, rich law firm vacuuming money out of anybody who drifts into your sphere of influence, you start to think not only that you actually deserve all that money, but also that the inflow will continue forever; that the well will never run dry. There will always be another mark. So you sniff around the legal hatcheries like Harvard and Yale and entice the more promising cockerels into your nest with the promise of a million or two per annum plus perks and benes and a percentage of whatever they can bring in, and before you know it you have 300 generously compensated partners and a thousand or so lesser beings with houses in the Hamptons.
Then one tragic day the accounting team (a large person such as yourself does not limp along with An Accountant like the rest of us persons, but rather assembles a team with a specialist for any imaginable contingency met by multi-national persons requiring expert sleight of hand) The accounting team stands up in front of the 300 Armani suits and nervously explains that last month's take fell $50 million short of expectations, the rent for the office space housing the head office, 3 floors on Central Park West, is overdue, the electric bill hasn't been paid since Christmas, and the bank is making mean remarks about any further overdrafts.
The room falls silent. The sweaty spokesman scoops up his notes and discreetly slips out the back with the rest of the team, none of them inclined to linger. The meeting continues. Other business is discussed, but nobody is paying attention. A few are making lists of other firms that might take them in.
The next morning three hotshots who have been repeatedly courted by other firms tender their resignations. By quitting time 2 more have found other opportunities. By the following week 25 more defections have been realized and the news has leaked to the lesser beings, the secretaries and paralegals and such as well as the lesser lawyers, the drones who are not yet partners. The exodus spreads.
Soon the ranks of the partners have dwindled from 300 to little more than 200. The news has leaked into the street and the media have taken an interest. And that is how National Public Radio got hold of it and why they were discussing the sad news with two or three knowledgeable commentators. There were, of course, differences of opinion on this point or that, but there seemed to be general agreement that this was a Bad Thing.
I have puzzled over this for a week now and have been unable to think of a single reason why this would be a Bad Thing. All those paralegals and sub-lawyers should be able to find a billet with little difficulty. Legal secretaries, by all accounts are in hot demand. The landlord will have no difficulty filling those three floors on Central Park West with somebody who is solvent. All that remains is the rapidly dwindling population of partners who have been taking in no less than $2 million per annum for the duration of their tenure.
Are we asked to make sympathetic clucks over the financial misfortune of people who too k in more last year than most of us will see in our lifetimes? Are we to feel sorry for these sleek, perfectly coiffed beings who may have trouble making the mortgage payments on their third house in Vail? Or who will be forced to drive the same Mercedes two years running?
Really?
Here's what happened: When you are a very large, rich law firm (I use the second person singular advisedly since the Supreme Court has assured us that large associations of venal predators such as huge law firms and other multi-national corporations are people just like you and me). As I was saying, when you are a very large, rich law firm vacuuming money out of anybody who drifts into your sphere of influence, you start to think not only that you actually deserve all that money, but also that the inflow will continue forever; that the well will never run dry. There will always be another mark. So you sniff around the legal hatcheries like Harvard and Yale and entice the more promising cockerels into your nest with the promise of a million or two per annum plus perks and benes and a percentage of whatever they can bring in, and before you know it you have 300 generously compensated partners and a thousand or so lesser beings with houses in the Hamptons.
Then one tragic day the accounting team (a large person such as yourself does not limp along with An Accountant like the rest of us persons, but rather assembles a team with a specialist for any imaginable contingency met by multi-national persons requiring expert sleight of hand) The accounting team stands up in front of the 300 Armani suits and nervously explains that last month's take fell $50 million short of expectations, the rent for the office space housing the head office, 3 floors on Central Park West, is overdue, the electric bill hasn't been paid since Christmas, and the bank is making mean remarks about any further overdrafts.
The room falls silent. The sweaty spokesman scoops up his notes and discreetly slips out the back with the rest of the team, none of them inclined to linger. The meeting continues. Other business is discussed, but nobody is paying attention. A few are making lists of other firms that might take them in.
The next morning three hotshots who have been repeatedly courted by other firms tender their resignations. By quitting time 2 more have found other opportunities. By the following week 25 more defections have been realized and the news has leaked to the lesser beings, the secretaries and paralegals and such as well as the lesser lawyers, the drones who are not yet partners. The exodus spreads.
Soon the ranks of the partners have dwindled from 300 to little more than 200. The news has leaked into the street and the media have taken an interest. And that is how National Public Radio got hold of it and why they were discussing the sad news with two or three knowledgeable commentators. There were, of course, differences of opinion on this point or that, but there seemed to be general agreement that this was a Bad Thing.
I have puzzled over this for a week now and have been unable to think of a single reason why this would be a Bad Thing. All those paralegals and sub-lawyers should be able to find a billet with little difficulty. Legal secretaries, by all accounts are in hot demand. The landlord will have no difficulty filling those three floors on Central Park West with somebody who is solvent. All that remains is the rapidly dwindling population of partners who have been taking in no less than $2 million per annum for the duration of their tenure.
Are we asked to make sympathetic clucks over the financial misfortune of people who too k in more last year than most of us will see in our lifetimes? Are we to feel sorry for these sleek, perfectly coiffed beings who may have trouble making the mortgage payments on their third house in Vail? Or who will be forced to drive the same Mercedes two years running?
Really?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Story of our Story
What record is left of the lives, aspirations, tragedies, and desires of the early members of our species? A footprint in beach sand, some bits of bone.These uncommunicative folk crept up out of Africa and percolated across 5 continents leaving only mysterious piles of stones, sharpened flint fragments, and a genetic heritage still evolving.
Finally one of the more garrulous offshoots of the westbound throng babbled some frolicking buffalos onto the walls of a cave, the first step toward the New York Times.The Style and Financial sections still a long way into the future.
The first record keeping on a manufactured medium was a grocery list.Since the medium was manufactured out of clay it is easy to understand why they didn't get chatty with it, but still, they left a lot of details about their life and times to the imagination and deduction of graduate students past, present, and unborn.
By and by somebody found a sheepskin and wrote some bible stories on it.Word spread about this miraculous feat and others strove to duplicate it.This was progress.These stories related details about people: kings, prophets, generals.Even some mention of women; colorful women to be sure, like Jael and Deborah and Ruth. But as to their domestic arrangements or childhood diseases, hobbies, food fads, all of this is largely lost in the mists of time.
As time passed literacy spread beyond the scribes and clerics and before you know it people were writing diaries and books and poems. Many of these offered glimpses into the thoughts and lives of their authors.This private information was supplemented by pictures, paintings by young men with no useful skills. In general, the authors were men, since literacy was not high among the women and they were probably kept busy mending the Master's shorts and tending to the croupy babies and choosing an appropriate snood for tea with the bishop. Thus we have only the masculine account of life's annoyances and triumphs not only because most of the accounts were written by men but also because women had no voice except for the occasional queen or significant mistress. For this reason the conditions of childhood are virtually unknown, since children were entirely invisible, along with their nannies and the numerous mothers who were not queens or mistresses.
Before long, however, literacy began to spread, starting with the rich or at least the comfortable who didn't have to work 16 hour days, and soon the feminine slant emerged in the form of stories of romance: handsome brooding heroes and sensitive heart-broken heroines with a tendency toward the vapors. We get a good long look into the details of the household – what the upstairs maid did, what went on in the scullery, who slept with whom and what happened next.
The next phase of our plunge into self-revelation was the appearance of the penny-dreadfuls and the ladies magazines, closely followed by the confessional magazines, crime stories, specialized periodicals dealing with every imaginable interest: cookery, home décor, automobiles, pets, electronics, science, antiques, literature, travel, soft porn, baseball, agriculture, knitting, warfare, hard porn, and the intersection of any or all of these.Not to mention the movies and the TV shows, the miles of celluloid capturing interviews and stories and the behavior of giraffes. It is impossible to imagine that anthropologists of the future would have the slightest trouble finding out anything at all about Us and our world in the middle of the 20^th Century.
One dares to hope that the trend has peaked with the recent spate of public airings of a startling variety of personal flaws and peculiarities ranging from certain bizarre misunderstandings of the law as revealed to Judge Judy to the barely credible psychological kinks retailed on the many salacious interview shows in which seemingly normal people tearfully reveal to the panting viewing public their most private and embarrassing problems and perversions.
And then, among all this, there came the internet, and the slow rise of the online access to almost anything, and suddenly these media have started slowly slowly to transplant themselves from the grocers' shelves and tape libraries to The Cloud, byte by byte shifting from prime shelf space to some humming, windowless server farm, from a tangible, curatable object to electrons. All of the juicier segments from Dr. Phil and Oprah are currently available on YouTube and subscriptions to most of those special interest print publications are available online, with the rest either soon to follow or soon to fold.But where will all this information be in 20 years? 50 years? Files created less than 30 years ago on an obsolete computer and stored on the 8" floppy disks common at the time are gone. It is impossible to guess what improvements in operating systems or storage media will render today's archives unreadable, but for all our hypercommunication, social media, widespread literacy, online news outlets, it is entirely possible we have come full circle. That we will leave behind no more evidence of our lives for the archaeologists of the future than our forebears in the stone age. Such a tragic loss to Posterity that our descendants 100 or 1000 years hence will never know of our struggles to achieve orgasm, to cope with hair loss, to stamp out the evils of socialism. Will be denied the timeless wisdom of Geraldo and Rush Limbaugh.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
A Dream of Junklessness
There once was a time when I could carry on a conversation in a noisy,
crowded place and hear what was said back to me. I could also eavesdrop
on gossip nearby and understand enough that I could reconstruct the
salient details for later analysis over coffee with other interested
parties. One of the many disappointments of the aging process is that
hearing loss not only turns down the volume on ambient sound, but also
blurs the boundary between one sound and another, not only making it
tremendously difficult to snatch titillating fragments out of saturated
air but also to understand what is being said on television under the
competing music.
This same principle also applies to the visual arena. Where once I could scan a packed closet, a cluttered desk, an overstuffed drawer and immediately find the green scarf, the felt-tip pen, the Philips head screwdriver, now it becomes an afternoon's project to find something, scratching through drawers and cupboards, upstairs and down and finally finding it someplace I already looked twice. Glasses do not help. They just add crisp definition to the clutter. It is a cognitive impairment as much as a visual one.
It is easy to follow a conversation where one person is speaking in a quiet room, or anyplace where there is no auditory clutter. Similarly it is easy to find your glasses when they are the only thing present on the table where you normally put them. The trick is to arrange your environment so that this is possible. Even occasionally.
Not so long ago when I was resting between donating 3 boxes of books to the library and a large bucket full of kitchen implements to Goodwill I tried to think of a better means of lightening the load. Some way to offload great heaps of stuff all at once rather than by one stingy carload at a time, but yet retain things I still want or need. I considered garage sales I had passed that looked like the house had vomited onto the lawn. Perfect. I wondered if that would work for me, here, 2 miles down the worst dirt road in Vermont. I close my eyes and imagined the process.
Easy things first to get a start. Drag out that bit of plywood the plumbers cut out of the counter 12 years ago for the drop-in sink and clean off the dead spiders and lumps of caulk. I knew it would be useful one day. Extract a gallon paint can that feels heavy from behind the kerosene. Open it to find half a gallon of completely fossilized dark red paint. Ponder it, trying unsuccessfully to think what there is or ever was around the place that was ever that color. Put it in the driveway and get another. This one is too light. A quarter gallon of light grey - floor of the back bedroom, last painted in the 70s maybe? There is a slime of linseed oil on the surface, but no useful paint left. Put it in the driveway. Continue this until there are 5 such cans in the driveway, and finally a partial quart of something dark with a skin that can be penetrated with a sharp stick. Remove the skin and stir what remains. Blue. Thick but serviceable. Get out a small, completely rigid, paintbrush and laboriously inscribe on the sink cutout "Garage Sale" in dark blue lumpy letters. Prop the sign against the heap of discarded cans in the driveway to dry.
Now for the main event. Since I am already in the garage, might as well see what's here. On the shelves there are a lot of partial containers of various kinds of lubricants. Nope – might need them for the lawnmowers or something. Someday. Several bags of mulch on top of something. I want the mulch and they're too heavy to move right now. Assorted lumber. Nope. Chicken wire. Nope. Huge pile of nested cardboard boxes. Must try to remember to take them to the recycle. Meanwhile too many to move right now to look underneath. Sickle bar! The sickle bar I have been tripping over since 1992. The one that goes with the Gravely tractor out in the barn that is about my age and stopped working in 1993 and is gradually sinking into the dirt floor. We have much in common. There's a good possibility, along with the tiller attachment I know is back there under the chicken wire. But what if I managed to drag it out along with all its rusty attachments and nobody wanted it? Then I would have a Gravely tractor out there as a lawn ornament for the rest of my life, surrounded by its attendant accessories. I'll think about it. Firewood pile. Nope. That's it for the garage.
Walk around the sign, noticing idly that the "l" has dribbled, and around the back to the porch. The cat chair! Perfect! Move a bench, a ladder, a ShopVac, and some birdseed and rassle it out of the corner, through the door, across the deck and around the side of the house, leaving 2 parallel gouges in the grass and a lot of organic material stuck to the chair. Put chair next to the paint cans and sink into it, gasping for breath.
When fully recovered, cruise through kitchen, scooping up an armload of extraneous plastic bowls and pots from the back of the cupboard, a toaster with a dysfunctional element and the one-speed blender. Who would want all those cottage cheese containers? Eight mismatched glasses from broken sets. A dish drainer. 42 kitchen gadgets acquired by many past and present residents of this house and used at least once. Livingroom yields an apple box full of neglected books, a stack of plastic flower pots. An abandoned TV antenna, and an old AM radio. A vase, a candlestick, and a completely useless oil lamp. Cats still use all those bald catnip mice, and I have to sit on something.
The attic. The motherload. Surveying the cascades of objects here, stacked by size and shape in places, by relative fragility in others, I realize what I really need to dump is my acquisitive nature and the crippling notion that any of this stuff will ever prove useful to me. I scoop up a random armload and carry it down to the driveway. Then another and another. I prop the sign, which is now nearly dry, and at least no longer dripping, up against the newspaper box and sink back into the cat chair. I look around at this eager young landfill growing around me and anxiously await the first customers.
I open my eyes now before I can imagine the dust from passing traffic settling on the sprawl of extraneous goods clogging my driveway, or the mess resulting from an unexpected afternoon rainstorm. I sigh and comfort myself with the thought that I saved myself all the effort and frustration of dragging all that junk out to the driveway, and instead peer dispiritedly into the downstairs closet in case there is something there I can offload onto the Salvation Army.
This same principle also applies to the visual arena. Where once I could scan a packed closet, a cluttered desk, an overstuffed drawer and immediately find the green scarf, the felt-tip pen, the Philips head screwdriver, now it becomes an afternoon's project to find something, scratching through drawers and cupboards, upstairs and down and finally finding it someplace I already looked twice. Glasses do not help. They just add crisp definition to the clutter. It is a cognitive impairment as much as a visual one.
It is easy to follow a conversation where one person is speaking in a quiet room, or anyplace where there is no auditory clutter. Similarly it is easy to find your glasses when they are the only thing present on the table where you normally put them. The trick is to arrange your environment so that this is possible. Even occasionally.
Not so long ago when I was resting between donating 3 boxes of books to the library and a large bucket full of kitchen implements to Goodwill I tried to think of a better means of lightening the load. Some way to offload great heaps of stuff all at once rather than by one stingy carload at a time, but yet retain things I still want or need. I considered garage sales I had passed that looked like the house had vomited onto the lawn. Perfect. I wondered if that would work for me, here, 2 miles down the worst dirt road in Vermont. I close my eyes and imagined the process.
Easy things first to get a start. Drag out that bit of plywood the plumbers cut out of the counter 12 years ago for the drop-in sink and clean off the dead spiders and lumps of caulk. I knew it would be useful one day. Extract a gallon paint can that feels heavy from behind the kerosene. Open it to find half a gallon of completely fossilized dark red paint. Ponder it, trying unsuccessfully to think what there is or ever was around the place that was ever that color. Put it in the driveway and get another. This one is too light. A quarter gallon of light grey - floor of the back bedroom, last painted in the 70s maybe? There is a slime of linseed oil on the surface, but no useful paint left. Put it in the driveway. Continue this until there are 5 such cans in the driveway, and finally a partial quart of something dark with a skin that can be penetrated with a sharp stick. Remove the skin and stir what remains. Blue. Thick but serviceable. Get out a small, completely rigid, paintbrush and laboriously inscribe on the sink cutout "Garage Sale" in dark blue lumpy letters. Prop the sign against the heap of discarded cans in the driveway to dry.
Now for the main event. Since I am already in the garage, might as well see what's here. On the shelves there are a lot of partial containers of various kinds of lubricants. Nope – might need them for the lawnmowers or something. Someday. Several bags of mulch on top of something. I want the mulch and they're too heavy to move right now. Assorted lumber. Nope. Chicken wire. Nope. Huge pile of nested cardboard boxes. Must try to remember to take them to the recycle. Meanwhile too many to move right now to look underneath. Sickle bar! The sickle bar I have been tripping over since 1992. The one that goes with the Gravely tractor out in the barn that is about my age and stopped working in 1993 and is gradually sinking into the dirt floor. We have much in common. There's a good possibility, along with the tiller attachment I know is back there under the chicken wire. But what if I managed to drag it out along with all its rusty attachments and nobody wanted it? Then I would have a Gravely tractor out there as a lawn ornament for the rest of my life, surrounded by its attendant accessories. I'll think about it. Firewood pile. Nope. That's it for the garage.
Walk around the sign, noticing idly that the "l" has dribbled, and around the back to the porch. The cat chair! Perfect! Move a bench, a ladder, a ShopVac, and some birdseed and rassle it out of the corner, through the door, across the deck and around the side of the house, leaving 2 parallel gouges in the grass and a lot of organic material stuck to the chair. Put chair next to the paint cans and sink into it, gasping for breath.
When fully recovered, cruise through kitchen, scooping up an armload of extraneous plastic bowls and pots from the back of the cupboard, a toaster with a dysfunctional element and the one-speed blender. Who would want all those cottage cheese containers? Eight mismatched glasses from broken sets. A dish drainer. 42 kitchen gadgets acquired by many past and present residents of this house and used at least once. Livingroom yields an apple box full of neglected books, a stack of plastic flower pots. An abandoned TV antenna, and an old AM radio. A vase, a candlestick, and a completely useless oil lamp. Cats still use all those bald catnip mice, and I have to sit on something.
The attic. The motherload. Surveying the cascades of objects here, stacked by size and shape in places, by relative fragility in others, I realize what I really need to dump is my acquisitive nature and the crippling notion that any of this stuff will ever prove useful to me. I scoop up a random armload and carry it down to the driveway. Then another and another. I prop the sign, which is now nearly dry, and at least no longer dripping, up against the newspaper box and sink back into the cat chair. I look around at this eager young landfill growing around me and anxiously await the first customers.
I open my eyes now before I can imagine the dust from passing traffic settling on the sprawl of extraneous goods clogging my driveway, or the mess resulting from an unexpected afternoon rainstorm. I sigh and comfort myself with the thought that I saved myself all the effort and frustration of dragging all that junk out to the driveway, and instead peer dispiritedly into the downstairs closet in case there is something there I can offload onto the Salvation Army.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Hamlet Reconstructed
Last Wednesday I went up to the Town Hall Theater for a thoroughly captivating production of Hamlet as conceived by 3 elementary schools working in collaboration. Mary Hogan Elementary got Acts I, III, and V, while Leicester Central got Act II and Shoreham Elementary got Act IV. Each of the 24 scenes was presented by a different group of students thus providing the opportunity for every 12-year-old in 3 towns to have their moment in the spotlight.
It would have been a great advantage to have come with a clear idea of the story line. We were not far into the first act before I really wished I had read the play more recently than high school, as only about 1 in four of the players could be clearly understood. Among these were a couple of players who demonstrated a striking theatrical talent in their 45 second appearance before the footlights. Another 1 in four was completely incomprehensible. The rest scattered their lines like confetti in a snapping breeze and only if you were paying close attention could you hope to snatch some of the words out of the air. Not that understanding the lines was of primary importance since the fun lay in the overall flavor of the production.
The continuity was supplied by the costumes. Hamlet, for example, was provided with a sort of loose-fitting black velvet jacket with brass buttons. This garment was worn by each of the 18 Hamlets who appeared during the play and who were clearly chosen for their particular scene by some criterion independent of size. The smallest of the Hamlets looked like a comic strip sorcerer with the trailing sleeves getting tangled in the props and the hem nearly dragging on the floor, while the largest Hamlet wore it like a raggedy castoff long outgrown.
Many of the costume swaps took place tastefully offstage, but from time to time Hamlet or Horatio or whoever would freeze in place, dagger held high or deer-in-the-headlights stare, while his replacement jogged in from somewhere, snatched the clothes off his back and assumed the same dramatic stance while the original child faded off stage.
Claudius, the fratricidal king, was distinguished by a flowing green cape with gold spangles that was cunningly constructed so that any motion would cause it to balloon like a spinnaker sail. Nine of the ten Claudiuses reveled in this grand effect and swept expansively on and off stage followed by their retinue of queens and courtiers tripping on their own hems and sleeves and tassles like the royal barge pursued by geese. The tenth Claudius was clearly underrehearsed and spent much of his scene first getting himself wound up snugly in all that yardage and then thrashing his way out of it like a turtle hatching.
None of the nine Gertrudes had a clear understanding of or a good fit for their drapey gown or the odd little headpiece (I think "hat" gives it more credit than it deserves) which signaled her presence. One little moppet, in fact, looked more like a clothesline than a queen of the realm.
The 8 Rosencrantz-and-Gildensterns – 4 of each – were done up in matching vests and straw boaters and came and went as a soft shoe routine, their perfidies and sorry end enacted with lighthearted flourish.
There was one memorable scene where a be-draped young thing, fidgeting with anxiety like many of her fellows, had arrived at center stage for her scene with Hamlet. Looking nervously around at the conspicuous absence of Hamlet, she bravely started speaking her lines anyway, arriving at last at a place where Hamlet was supposed to say something. After a few beats and he was still absent she shouted crossly, "Hamlet, get out here!" in a voice that carried clear back to the cheap seats and out the door. Soon there was the patter of little feet and Hamlet tumbled onto the stage struggling with a sleeve of the Hamlet jacket.
Finally after much clashing of swords, sharp words mumbled toward the back of the stage, the arrival and departure of various unidentified persons, and the histrionic death of pretty well everybody, the lights dimmed and the corpses fled for the wings.
Following a brief uncertain silence there was loud applause that gradually swelled to thunderous as the parents in the audience spotted their offspring filing onto the stage. And then, of course, as is obligatory in the State of Vermont no matter how good or bad the performance, we all rose to our feet. There were 109 elementary school students listed in the program from named characters like Hamlet and Gildenstern to unspecified persons such as "Grave diggers" and "Hamlet's Thoughts." All of them dutifully emerged from the wings along with the numerous teachers and stage managers and technical directors resulting finally in a mob the like of which that poor old stage had never before sustained.
What gave this production such a high entertainment value was its sheer unpredictability. Even a detailed knowledge of the original play would offer no hint as to the nature or character of the next scene, each one a unique little surprise. I am already wondering what they will undertake for next year. I am not sure Waiting for Godot would be suitable, but it would be fun watching all the costume switches.
It would have been a great advantage to have come with a clear idea of the story line. We were not far into the first act before I really wished I had read the play more recently than high school, as only about 1 in four of the players could be clearly understood. Among these were a couple of players who demonstrated a striking theatrical talent in their 45 second appearance before the footlights. Another 1 in four was completely incomprehensible. The rest scattered their lines like confetti in a snapping breeze and only if you were paying close attention could you hope to snatch some of the words out of the air. Not that understanding the lines was of primary importance since the fun lay in the overall flavor of the production.
The continuity was supplied by the costumes. Hamlet, for example, was provided with a sort of loose-fitting black velvet jacket with brass buttons. This garment was worn by each of the 18 Hamlets who appeared during the play and who were clearly chosen for their particular scene by some criterion independent of size. The smallest of the Hamlets looked like a comic strip sorcerer with the trailing sleeves getting tangled in the props and the hem nearly dragging on the floor, while the largest Hamlet wore it like a raggedy castoff long outgrown.
Many of the costume swaps took place tastefully offstage, but from time to time Hamlet or Horatio or whoever would freeze in place, dagger held high or deer-in-the-headlights stare, while his replacement jogged in from somewhere, snatched the clothes off his back and assumed the same dramatic stance while the original child faded off stage.
Claudius, the fratricidal king, was distinguished by a flowing green cape with gold spangles that was cunningly constructed so that any motion would cause it to balloon like a spinnaker sail. Nine of the ten Claudiuses reveled in this grand effect and swept expansively on and off stage followed by their retinue of queens and courtiers tripping on their own hems and sleeves and tassles like the royal barge pursued by geese. The tenth Claudius was clearly underrehearsed and spent much of his scene first getting himself wound up snugly in all that yardage and then thrashing his way out of it like a turtle hatching.
None of the nine Gertrudes had a clear understanding of or a good fit for their drapey gown or the odd little headpiece (I think "hat" gives it more credit than it deserves) which signaled her presence. One little moppet, in fact, looked more like a clothesline than a queen of the realm.
The 8 Rosencrantz-and-Gildensterns – 4 of each – were done up in matching vests and straw boaters and came and went as a soft shoe routine, their perfidies and sorry end enacted with lighthearted flourish.
There was one memorable scene where a be-draped young thing, fidgeting with anxiety like many of her fellows, had arrived at center stage for her scene with Hamlet. Looking nervously around at the conspicuous absence of Hamlet, she bravely started speaking her lines anyway, arriving at last at a place where Hamlet was supposed to say something. After a few beats and he was still absent she shouted crossly, "Hamlet, get out here!" in a voice that carried clear back to the cheap seats and out the door. Soon there was the patter of little feet and Hamlet tumbled onto the stage struggling with a sleeve of the Hamlet jacket.
Finally after much clashing of swords, sharp words mumbled toward the back of the stage, the arrival and departure of various unidentified persons, and the histrionic death of pretty well everybody, the lights dimmed and the corpses fled for the wings.
Following a brief uncertain silence there was loud applause that gradually swelled to thunderous as the parents in the audience spotted their offspring filing onto the stage. And then, of course, as is obligatory in the State of Vermont no matter how good or bad the performance, we all rose to our feet. There were 109 elementary school students listed in the program from named characters like Hamlet and Gildenstern to unspecified persons such as "Grave diggers" and "Hamlet's Thoughts." All of them dutifully emerged from the wings along with the numerous teachers and stage managers and technical directors resulting finally in a mob the like of which that poor old stage had never before sustained.
What gave this production such a high entertainment value was its sheer unpredictability. Even a detailed knowledge of the original play would offer no hint as to the nature or character of the next scene, each one a unique little surprise. I am already wondering what they will undertake for next year. I am not sure Waiting for Godot would be suitable, but it would be fun watching all the costume switches.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Republicans Yet Again
It has been more than 2 months since the lesser lights of the Republican Contenders blinked out leaving only four still flashing. It looked good for a while, as if these skilled Vaudevillians would duke it out in a timely manner and leave the field clear for Mitt to get down to the serious work of molding lies and distortions about the current administration and generating impossible promises of a prosperous future with his glorious self at the helm. Instead what we have had is a seemingly endless parade of these indefatigable blowhards trumpeting lies into the 6:00 news and slinging little gobbets of feces at one another. What was once a bit of light-hearted fun has crossed over to the realms of pure tedium.
The latest opinions of those still paying attention suggest that Mitt is still considered "Most Likely to Succeed," which status he has been able to maintain through generous application of more money than an ordinary citizen can imagine. Rick is still baying at his heels, his campaign buoyed up by the noisy support of followers who are either deeply suspicious of anybody with that much money, or appalled by the thought of somebody in charge wearing magical underwear. Newt is still hanging on like a terrier on a rat, thanks in no small part to an open-handed Las Vegas billionaire. And finally there's poor Ron with only $1.6 million on hand, but ever hopeful.
Of course they must be getting pretty tired of the whole thing too. After all they have been addressing the same crowds with the same talking points, repeating the same tired threats and promises for months now, night after night. There is nothing new to be gleaned from these carefully choreographed events, so if we are to learn more about these contestants we need to look elsewhere. And what better way to get a good long peek behind the curtain than to study their blunders?
Take Mitt, for example, who in the midst of the worst depression in almost a century tries to connect with the unemployed by telling them that he too is unemployed and therefore sympathetic to their concerns. At least on this occasion he had the uncharacteristic insight not to mention his $200 million in assets that ease his heartbreak. He slipped a little when he went to reassure a room full of auto workers that he stood foursquare behind the industry, offering as evidence that his wife drives two Cadillacs. Maybe he thought that if he stunned them with this bizarre little factoid they would forget that he rabidly opposed the bailout money provided by President Obama, without which his audience might also have been in the unemployment lines. Then at a NASCAR rally while speaking off-the-cuff to a crowd of fans, he declared that he was a great fan of the sport, that in fact he had many friends who owned NASCAR teams.
What we learn from all this is that Mitt Romney is so completely out of touch with the world of the wage earner that he could not possibly understand, much less fix, any problems that the 99% might have.
Then there's Rick who thinks the President is a snob for wanting everybody to have the chance to go to college. And he gets hiccups at the thought of homosexuals wanting to marry, or blacks wanting decent schools, or women wanting any control over their own lives. He is frantic at the mere suggestion of contraception and abortion and believes that the "threat" of gay marriage is on a par with the destruction of the Twin Towers.
He stated, in public, his views of President Kennedy's speech in support of the separation of church and state: "Earlier in my political career,"
he said, "I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up," said Senator Rick Santorum. A man with such a delicate constitution should perhaps be spared the rigors of presidential politics.
Newt's gaffes have a more general interest flavor, and often sound more like the inventions of Jon Stewart than actual public statements of somebody hoping to occupy the White house. Like his promise to set up a permanent lunar colony. Or his explanation of his upcoming divorce from his first wife: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer." With regards to the Occupy Wall Street throngs he suggested they should get a bath and a job, in that order. When asked to explain how he ran up half a million dollars in credit card charges at Tiffany's, he just huffily insisted that he was really very frugal. There are a thousand of them.
Not that he is free of religious mania, having growled to some jostling multitude that he saw a time where the kindly Christian ideals that made the country great will be replaced by the apostasy of radical islam.
And finally, straggling in last and breathless, there's Ron, who, to his credit, beat out Newt in Michigan. His fatal flaw is that he makes sense. He is the only politician in the country who wants the military withdrawn from everywhere, not a popular idea among the bloodthirsty majority. He seems to be lamentably innocent of serious blunders, or maybe his chances are so slim that it is considered unsportsmanlike to record them, like snatching the chair out from under a blind person.
Whatever the case, now that we have had a close look at these creatures in unguarded moments, face to face, as it were, the options are clear.
As of last Friday, March23, 2012, 57% of Republicans were rooting for the guy who would sell his first-born to the gypsies if they offered a good price. 25% favored the one who wants to eliminate the teaching of science and bring back witch-burning. 13% were hoping that the classic Boss Tweed look-alike gets the nod, while only 4.5% thought that the irritating little man with the ideas that might actually work should get a shot at the prize.
The good news is that Obama's chances look better every day.
The latest opinions of those still paying attention suggest that Mitt is still considered "Most Likely to Succeed," which status he has been able to maintain through generous application of more money than an ordinary citizen can imagine. Rick is still baying at his heels, his campaign buoyed up by the noisy support of followers who are either deeply suspicious of anybody with that much money, or appalled by the thought of somebody in charge wearing magical underwear. Newt is still hanging on like a terrier on a rat, thanks in no small part to an open-handed Las Vegas billionaire. And finally there's poor Ron with only $1.6 million on hand, but ever hopeful.
Of course they must be getting pretty tired of the whole thing too. After all they have been addressing the same crowds with the same talking points, repeating the same tired threats and promises for months now, night after night. There is nothing new to be gleaned from these carefully choreographed events, so if we are to learn more about these contestants we need to look elsewhere. And what better way to get a good long peek behind the curtain than to study their blunders?
Take Mitt, for example, who in the midst of the worst depression in almost a century tries to connect with the unemployed by telling them that he too is unemployed and therefore sympathetic to their concerns. At least on this occasion he had the uncharacteristic insight not to mention his $200 million in assets that ease his heartbreak. He slipped a little when he went to reassure a room full of auto workers that he stood foursquare behind the industry, offering as evidence that his wife drives two Cadillacs. Maybe he thought that if he stunned them with this bizarre little factoid they would forget that he rabidly opposed the bailout money provided by President Obama, without which his audience might also have been in the unemployment lines. Then at a NASCAR rally while speaking off-the-cuff to a crowd of fans, he declared that he was a great fan of the sport, that in fact he had many friends who owned NASCAR teams.
What we learn from all this is that Mitt Romney is so completely out of touch with the world of the wage earner that he could not possibly understand, much less fix, any problems that the 99% might have.
Then there's Rick who thinks the President is a snob for wanting everybody to have the chance to go to college. And he gets hiccups at the thought of homosexuals wanting to marry, or blacks wanting decent schools, or women wanting any control over their own lives. He is frantic at the mere suggestion of contraception and abortion and believes that the "threat" of gay marriage is on a par with the destruction of the Twin Towers.
He stated, in public, his views of President Kennedy's speech in support of the separation of church and state: "Earlier in my political career,"
he said, "I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up," said Senator Rick Santorum. A man with such a delicate constitution should perhaps be spared the rigors of presidential politics.
Newt's gaffes have a more general interest flavor, and often sound more like the inventions of Jon Stewart than actual public statements of somebody hoping to occupy the White house. Like his promise to set up a permanent lunar colony. Or his explanation of his upcoming divorce from his first wife: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer." With regards to the Occupy Wall Street throngs he suggested they should get a bath and a job, in that order. When asked to explain how he ran up half a million dollars in credit card charges at Tiffany's, he just huffily insisted that he was really very frugal. There are a thousand of them.
Not that he is free of religious mania, having growled to some jostling multitude that he saw a time where the kindly Christian ideals that made the country great will be replaced by the apostasy of radical islam.
And finally, straggling in last and breathless, there's Ron, who, to his credit, beat out Newt in Michigan. His fatal flaw is that he makes sense. He is the only politician in the country who wants the military withdrawn from everywhere, not a popular idea among the bloodthirsty majority. He seems to be lamentably innocent of serious blunders, or maybe his chances are so slim that it is considered unsportsmanlike to record them, like snatching the chair out from under a blind person.
Whatever the case, now that we have had a close look at these creatures in unguarded moments, face to face, as it were, the options are clear.
As of last Friday, March23, 2012, 57% of Republicans were rooting for the guy who would sell his first-born to the gypsies if they offered a good price. 25% favored the one who wants to eliminate the teaching of science and bring back witch-burning. 13% were hoping that the classic Boss Tweed look-alike gets the nod, while only 4.5% thought that the irritating little man with the ideas that might actually work should get a shot at the prize.
The good news is that Obama's chances look better every day.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Rebirth
Six years ago I sold a house and bought another one.
On a cold, dark Tuesday in February a huge truck backed up to the door of the first one and emptied it. I mopped and vacuumed its echoing carcase, loaded a toothbrush and a clean shirt into my car and went to the lawyers to hand over the keys. It would not be until Thursday that I could move into the next place and all my clothing, books, furniture, pots and boots, towels and radios, bowls and brooms, sewing machines and pictures and computers and shovels, all the clap-trap and paraphernalia in which I am embedded would remain in that truck until then.
So there I was on that gloomy Tuesday afternoon, free of trammel and care. "Noplace to go and all day to get there."
I booked into a motel and went down to Church Street for a completely idle stroll and a bite of supper. It felt like a new life. As if I were suddenly somebody else. I was suddenly freed not only of all that stuff but of any other concerns, worries and problems that had been growling in the back of my mind. The slate was clean and inviting.
For two lovely days I was a happy person, poking through the library, reading newspapers, which I seldom do, but this was a different life, so it was OK.
Then Thursday overtook me. I handed over a heap o' money and the huge truck returned and filled my fine new house and ratty old life full of all those familiar chattels and worries.
So when I try to think what, above all else, I would like to achieve this year or in the next 5 years or before crossing to that promised land the only thing that springs to mind is a return to those 2 glorious untrammeled days. I would like to get that truck back and then as soon as it lumbers off to Colchester to wait for a fictitious delivery in 2 days I would like to hop in my car with a toothbrush and a clean shirt and vanish.
You'd think it would be easier to get rid of stuff that it is acquiring
it. But you'd be wrong.
On a cold, dark Tuesday in February a huge truck backed up to the door of the first one and emptied it. I mopped and vacuumed its echoing carcase, loaded a toothbrush and a clean shirt into my car and went to the lawyers to hand over the keys. It would not be until Thursday that I could move into the next place and all my clothing, books, furniture, pots and boots, towels and radios, bowls and brooms, sewing machines and pictures and computers and shovels, all the clap-trap and paraphernalia in which I am embedded would remain in that truck until then.
So there I was on that gloomy Tuesday afternoon, free of trammel and care. "Noplace to go and all day to get there."
I booked into a motel and went down to Church Street for a completely idle stroll and a bite of supper. It felt like a new life. As if I were suddenly somebody else. I was suddenly freed not only of all that stuff but of any other concerns, worries and problems that had been growling in the back of my mind. The slate was clean and inviting.
For two lovely days I was a happy person, poking through the library, reading newspapers, which I seldom do, but this was a different life, so it was OK.
Then Thursday overtook me. I handed over a heap o' money and the huge truck returned and filled my fine new house and ratty old life full of all those familiar chattels and worries.
So when I try to think what, above all else, I would like to achieve this year or in the next 5 years or before crossing to that promised land the only thing that springs to mind is a return to those 2 glorious untrammeled days. I would like to get that truck back and then as soon as it lumbers off to Colchester to wait for a fictitious delivery in 2 days I would like to hop in my car with a toothbrush and a clean shirt and vanish.
You'd think it would be easier to get rid of stuff that it is acquiring
it. But you'd be wrong.
Monday, March 5, 2012
In Search of an Exercise Program
I hate exercise. Not that I mind a bit of snow shoveling or digging of potatoes or cutting the grass. The thing is that after I have engaged in one of these training exercises I may be hot, sweaty, and out of breath just as if I had spent the time on the StairMaster, but in addition I have actually achieved something, something I can stand back and admire, congratulating myself on what a fine wide path I have sculpted through the two-foot drifts or what an impressive heap of potatoes I have grown to sustain me and the vermin in the basement through the short cold days to come.
However, exertion for its own sake holds no allure. So when I had finished planting my bright red peonies back at the end of August, and after I had gathered in the last of the butternut squashes, and after I figured the grass was as short as it needed to be until next spring, I flopped down into my La-Z-Boy with a large bowl of popcorn and haven't moved since except to heave to my feet occasionally to explore the possibilities of the fridge or waddle off to the store to replenish my dwindling supply of sausages or cupcakes.
The thing is, there has been no snow. In times gone by I was saved from atrophy by the need to relocate a ton or so of snow at least once a week, or failing that the opportunity to shuffle down to the creek on snowshoes once or twice a season. But alas, this year there has been nothing but sleet, drizzle, mud and frozen, lumpy terrain. To be honest these conditions are not sufficiently appealing to lure me out from in front of the stove except for a quick foray in search of a snack.
The result of this unfortunate diet and exercise program was made tragically manifest shortly after New Year's when I went shopping for clothes. Garments offered on the small/medium/large spectrum have always been rather whimsically sized. I believe I still have a shirt I once bought not because I liked it more than average but because the one that fit me had an S stitched into the collar band. That did not happen on this particular trip to the shops. Unfortunately the numerical spectrum of sizes is way more rigorous, and what I took away that day were items in sizes I thought I would only see lined up at the Italian sausage booth at Field Days.
I was so depressed by this that I went straight home and flopped into La-Z-Boy with a large bowl of popcorn and wallowed in the warm embrace of self-pity and specious rationalization. When this became tedious I stared out the window at the bleak, dead spectacle of a snowless winter – bleached-out grass, tangled brown weeds, frozen mud, skeletal black trees against the murky sky. I needed a plan.
I could stop eating everything I enjoy eating and replace it all with saltines and weak tea. This was so far into Fantasyland that it lacked the power even to depress me.
I could respond to one of those fliers inviting me to join a “health club” for the low,low price of way too much, and drive 10-20 miles to an underventilated facility smelling chronically of sweat, dust, and sneakers for the pleasure of stepping up and down on a box, lifting shiny metal objects, doing energetic things on a contraption that looks like a huge mousetrap. Tempting though this option might be, I put the idea aside in favor of wistfully hoping for snow.
The bicycle option, so attractive and effective when I lived near an actual bike path as opposed to the long, narrow gravel pit known to the state cartographers as Shacksboro Road, is another distant dream. In fact it has drawn yet further from the realms of possibility since I ripped the sidewall open on one of my new and costly winter tires on one of the razor-sharp stones that are a constant feature of the two miles of roadway before you get to the pavement.
Then one day I strolled out the back of the house to the greenhouse to tidy it up a bit in case this endless horrible winter ever ends. There were some tools underfoot that were of no immediate use, so I picked them up and headed off for the barn. From the barn I could see something down in the field I couldn't make out, so I went to see what it was. It was just a tangle of hay left from the last cutting, but there were some deer tracks nearby which headed off for a brambly clump further down the field. I went to see where they went after that. They continued into a thicket of prickly bushes that were tearing my coat to shreds so I backed off a bit and listened. There was a pretty loud running water sound from the creek so I thought “Ooooh, otters!” and went down to see. There were no otters, but there were definite reminders of Hurricane Irene in the form of washouts and downed trees even after all these months, so I picked my way among the flood-flattened grass and half frozen puddles alongside the creek to where there is a huge old willow that I was happy to see appeared untroubled by the extra water. The spring water that wound among its roots looked the same as it always had and then I was past the bend in the creek and could see down the next stretch to where there was a beaver dam.
This vision should have excited me more than it did, but by now the wind was picking up, my feet were wet, and my hair was full of burrs and twigs. Therefore, I resisted the impulse to thrash down through another prickly thicket to have a look and instead retraced my soggy steps back up the hill to my nice warm kitchen, puffing and sweaty. Once safely ensconced back in my La-Z-Boy I realized with surprise, over a collation of hot milk and Oreos, that what I had just had was a whole lot of healthy, wholesome exercise of a sort that I am hard-wired to avoid like a high colonic. While I was pretty sure I was the same size as before, and my fondness for grilled cheese sandwiches raged unabated, still I had moved more than the length of myself and it had done no lasting harm, it gave me pleasure, it smelled nice, and it involved no driving. These are the characteristics of a perfect exercise plan.
For my next training exercise I went back down to the creek from the other direction and had a look at the beaver dam. But that is another story.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Gerry's Tattoo
The sixties were a dreamy time, so many young people at one with the universe. Flower children with feathers in their beards and flowers on their raggedy T-shirts. Volkswagen vans with peace symbols and daisies, and it was perhaps this saturated atmosphere of floral ornamentation that propelled Gerry into Spike's Late Night Grocery and Tattoo Parlor to make just one tiny statement on his left butt cheek, a cheerful little posy with 5 petals, 2 leaves, and a stem. It was a secret shared with very few, but elicited that signature Mona Lisa smile when he spotted swaggering young men with rococo depictions of hearts or anchors or snakes peeking out from the sleeves of their undershirts.
Then one day, urged by several classmates, he obligingly went out for basketball, and a welcome addition he was, being a full 3 inches closer to the basket than the next tallest member of the team. It wasn't long, though, before one of the point guards noticed Gerry's little gluteal blossom in the shower and alerted the rest of the team to his discovery. This triggered, over the next few weeks, jokes, discussions, and at least one limerick, as the point guard was not one to allow a dead horse a moment's rest.
Gerry soon grew weary of the attention and after a great deal of thought he returned, one Friday, to Spike's Late Night Grocery and Tattoo Parlor to discuss his options. Spike was a clever and persuasive fellow, and a skillful artist to boot, and so it was that Gerry went home that evening with a flamboyantly modified ornament on his hindquarters in which his modest little flower had been subsumed in a considerably larger image of a northbound lizard whose sinuous tail effectively camouflaged the embarrassing flower with exotic symbols and shapes conveying stealth, danger, and cunning and probably other things, none of which echoed that sissy little flower. This was a predator, an alpha lizard, clawing its way inexorably up toward some unseen goal or prey, its fearsome spiky head emerging from Gerry's waist band, one clawed foot reaching for his left armpit.
It was with a firm step that Gerry joined his teammates in the shower the following Monday. The flinty glare and the reptilian transplant together effectively muzzled the point guard and ever after all editorial comment ceased; he was top dog among the pups.
Time passed, life unfurled and there came a day, well, an evening then, when Gerry was out on the town with some of his old friends celebrating something: a birth, a death, a wedding, who knows? They had talked about the celebratory event over a few beers, and then had solved most of the world's problems over a few more, dismissed most of the current sports teams as useless as tits on a sewing machine, and argued unconvincingly over which of the remaining few was best, and now Nigel, the de facto leader of the group, struggling to decide whether to go for another beer or another pee slurred “So, Ger, about time to update that old tattoo, doncha think?”
Gerry, who had been nodding amiably at anything anybody had said for the last half hour continued doing so.
A look of beery cunning jostled for dominance on the flushed face of Gerry's alleged friend as he wobbled to his feet and lunged off toward the Caballeros. When he returned, he and another of the group who may not have had Gerry's best interests at heart, got the gently nodding Gerry up on his feet and the whole parade staggered off down the street for Gerry's third visit to Spike's Late Night Grocery and Tattoo Parlor where he was laid out flat on the couch for a snooze and an upgrade while the balance of the squad adjourned next door for a game of snooker.
While Gerry snored that modest lizard expanded as a dragon rampant slowly emerged with green scales, blood-red eyes, serried rows of razor teeth, breathing red and orange flames up over Gerry's left shoulder, his right scapula gripped by a clawed fist.
When Gerry's so-called friends returned, Spike was just putting the final touches on the mythical beast's coiled tail writhing up to meet its fist, effectively filling the only remaining unadorned quadrant of Gerry's back. It was Spike's finest work, spanning as it did many years. The small audience gathered around, belching occasionally, and admiring the design, the balance, the dramatic tension. Spike was already twitching to flip Gerry over and start work on the Saint George he had already plotted out in his mind, complete with multi-colored pennants, lances, snorting war horse, maybe a virgin tied to a fence. Unfortunately Gerry was inconveniently showing signs of life, humming a scrap of a bawdy tune that they had been singing earlier, and finally sitting up.
“Hi, Spike,” he said, confused. “Why did we come here?” he asked his treacherous friends.
“Oh, well, we just stopped in to see if Spike had any sour cream and then you had a little nap,” said Nigel. “C'mon, let's go.”
“Sour cream?” said Gerry, trying to make sense of it all while Spike helped him into his shirt.
And so the happy throng all went their separate ways, Gerry thinking something had happened that he should probably know about, but didn't really, and the others to coordinate a story.
It was the flames that gave it away. The next morning Gerry noticed the flames edging up over his left shoulder, hardly visible from the front, but when he twisted around and saw the blood-red eyes and the lashing tail he had to sit down for a minute, try to reconstruct the previous night. It took 3 cups of coffee and a large greasy breakfast for the full sequence of events to emerge. By lunchtime Gerry had a plan.
One by one, Gerry had quiet conversations with all the celebrants except Nigel in which he casually let slip that Nigel had told him that they wore underwear from Victoria's Secret. “Is it true?” he asked with wide-eyed innocence. “Really I'm not judging,” he continued. “I was just wondering which garments you preferred. The camisoles or the padded bras? The split-crotch panties or those slinky peignoirs?” And finally when their faces were sufficiently purple with rage, he whimpered in distress, “Oh, I'm so sorry. I guess Nigel made a mistake. Please don't tell him I blabbed, you know how he is.”
Then when the stage was set, he talked them all, including Nigel, into another jolly evening at the scene of their recent celebration. Tensions eased a bit as beer after beer fueled discussions of the latest political scandals and sports doping and such. Nobody noticed that there was a large and expanding pool of beer next to Gerry's chair where he was pouring half of the beer that appeared before him, to ensure partial sobriety.
By the time Nigel was mellow enough for the next stage, Gerry and the one remaining accomplice still standing were both a bit unsteady on their pins, but they were able to mobilize Nigel sufficiently to get him out the door and over to Spike's. The couch there was pretty comfortable, as Gerry knew well enough, so it wasn't long before Nigel was fully unconscious. The two bystanders watched while Spike performed his magic.
And so, if you see a homeless guy with a thick, wooly beard through which butterflies can be dimly seen, and the rest of his face covered in daisies, petunias, rosebuds, and bluebirds, tell him “Hi Nigel” from Gerry.
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