Memories of a Retired Hitchhiker

Susie and I are at Kafé Kerouac, a coffee house/bar named for the patron saint of hitchhiking, Jack Kerouac, at the moment.  (Kerouac's 90th birthday would have been on the 12th of this month, but, unfortunately, he drank himself to death in 1969, aged 47.)  She and I are in the front room, and pages from the first several chapters of Kerouac's opus, On the Road, adorn the north wall.

The north wall at Kafé Kerouac, decorated with pages from On the Road.

Something that brought the long-moribund subject of hitchhiking to my mind was seeing that one of my Facebook friends was listening to Vanity Fare's "Hitchin' a Ride" on Spotify.  I've been in an advanced and rapidly progrssing state of ennui lately, which is one of the reasons for the paucity of blog entries.  (I deleted two previous entries after only writing a sentence or two, so I'm hoping to get myself back on track by writing in here tonight.)

I should preface what follows by saying that my hitchhiking days are far behind me.  I haven't done it since the summer of 1989, and I am sure that it's more dangerous now than when I was a teenager and a young adult.  (It's never been 100% safe.  When my thumb was my primary mode of transportation, it horrified some of my high school friends.  I still remember one of my classmates looking at me, slack-jawed, and saying, "Paul!  You're going to get your head blown off!" when I casually mentioned I would be thumbing to Athens--a distance of about 48 miles.

The first time I hitchhiked, it was not my idea, and I was far from enthusiastic about doing it.  It was in August 1979, and it was a relatively short trip.  I was 16 years ago, and I was traveling to OPIK '79, a regional Liberal Religious Youth conference.  (OPIK--rhymes with topic--was an acronym for Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky.  In 1979, it took place in Michigan, for reasons too complex to explain here.)  I had been on the bus from Columbus since noon on Saturday, August 18 (the conference began the next day) with a young woman from Columbus named Suzanne, who was also headed to OPIK.  We arrived in Kalamazoo around midnight, and no one at the conference site was answering.  (OPIK '79 took place at Circle Pines Center in Delton, which was about 25 miles away in Barry County.)  So, since we were marooned at the closed Greyhound station for the night, we sat on our suitcases most of the night, talked, ate date bars, and I read, wrote in my diary, and tried in vain to sleep, using my windbreaker as a blanket and my typewriter case as a pillow.

Morning came, and we splurged on a big breakfast in the Time Table Inn, the bus station's restaurant, tried Circle Pines Center again, and finally Suzanne heaved a sigh and said, "Well, let's hitch."  This was long before the days of Google Earth and GPS systems, so we roamed around a bit before we found M-89 West, the road that led from Kalamazoo to Delton.  Once we found that, a friendly guy in his 20s named Stephen gave us a ride straight to Circle Pines' parking lot.  I was happy to add a new experience to my résumé--hitchhiking--but my first order of business was to find a cot.  When I found one, I immediately collapsed fully clothed, shoes and all.

This experience emboldened me, and when I got back to Marietta, I talked the ears off anyone who asked me how I spent my summer.  I managed to resist the temptation to embellish the trip beyond the 25 miles from Kalamazoo to Delton, yet the account caused many to further question my sanity.

For the remaining three years I lived in Marietta, I overcompensated for my earlier reluctance to hitchhike. It was analogous to someone overcoming a lifelong fear of water and the next day deciding to swim the English Channel.  (The concept of the golden mean remains totally foreign to me to this day.)  The following summer, I stuck my thumb out on State Route 550, destination Athens.  I had not thought to let my dad know where I was going when I left the house that Saturday morning.

I did not make it to Athens, but the reason for aborting the mission were truly in character.  On the way up 550, I encountered Carpenter's Books, one of the most unusual bookstores I have encountered.  It was in a man's garage, and the place was wall to wall, floor to ceiling loaded with books.  Carpenter also raised chickens and sold eggs--quite a juxtaposition.  I spent maybe $2 to $3, and came home with a large box full of paperbacks and hardcovers.  As usual, my choices ran the gamut from Gold Medal originals by writers like Peter Rabe and Richard S. Prather to odd volumes of Harvard Classics and Black's Readers Service classics (The Works of Tolstoi and The Works of Doyle).

After some test runs to Athens, I made my first "big" trip in May of 1981, a month before I graduated from high school.  I was en route to Washington, D.C. for the biggest protest since the Vietnam era, protesting the military presence in El Salvador and the military buildup overall.  I took the bus as far as Cambridge, Ohio, and then set out on I-70.  I was dressed in jeans, a work shirt, and hiking boots, and I carried a small backpack--only enough room for a change of clothes, my diary, and a book or two.

I was buoyed by my success.  I made it to D.C. in three rides.  The longest was a driver who picked me up around Quaker City and took me as far as Hagerstown.  A second ride (by a contractor who was at Catholic U. the same time my dad was) got me to Gaithersburg, and a third ride dropped me off on M St. in Georgetown.  I had turned 18 earlier that week, which meant I was finally legal to drink beer.  And I marked the event in style.  I had my first legal beer at Clyde's of Georgetown, which was the prototype for the gathering place in St. Elmo's Fire.  Its lunchtime menu inspired Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight."  (Since I had just read William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, I had searched in vain to find The Tombs, the bar where whiskey priest Damien Karras cries into his suds to a fellow priest about his lack of faith.)  I remember the polyglot conversations at the tables around me, and the pay phones in the rest room.  I spent the remainder of the night wandering around Washington, and buying The Washington Post as soon as it rolled off the presses.

Getting home was no fun.  I had a ride to the infamous Breezewood, Pa. from Silver Spring.  Breezewood is the "Town of Motels" just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, eloquently described by Business Week in 1991 as "a polyp on the nation's interstate highway system."  I was stuck there for hours, so much so that if Breezewood is the first thing I see when I die, I will know beyond a doubt where I've gone.

I won't list every journey I made by thumb, but the memorable one came in the spring of 1982, when my LRY friend John (whom I met at the aforementioned OPIK '79) came to visit me in Marietta.  Going to all of Marietta's points of interest does not take long, even with a trip across the river to the Fenton Art Glass plant in Williamstown.  Bored, John and I were doing the "What do you wanna do?"  "I dunno--what do you wanna do?" thing, when I said, in jest, "Let's hitch to D.C."  The next several hours consisted my burning up the phone lines to find friends of friends (multiplied ad infinitum in the D.C. area where we could sleep.  The calls started at the Unitarian Universalist Association's Washington office, and became quite hydra-headed.)  Both of us owned Paul Dimaggio's The Hitchhiker's Field Manual, and we had both read our copies to tatters, since it had become a weird kind of Bible for both of us.  During the journey, whenever we argued over where to stand on the road, Dimaggio's word was law.

Our name for the trip was the "Nobody Said It Was Easy" tour.  Nobody said hitchhiking was easy, this is true, but the song "Nobody Said It Was Easy (Lookin' for the Lights)", by the Louisiana band Le Roux, seemed to be on the radio or tape deck of every car picking us up.  In Bethesda, we hopped a Metro bus that put us in Dupont Circle.  John and I were both tired and cross from the long journey and inadequate nutrition, and John was skeptical of my claims that we had made it.  I was vindicated when the escalator in the Dupont Circle Metro station brought us to street level.  I nudged John.  "What?" he said testily.  Without a word, I pointed at the lighted dome of the Capitol.

My final hitchhike was from Cincinnati to Columbus in 1989, illegally, since I used Interstate 71 the entire way.  Not a memorable trip.  In my journal, I wrote about it in two sentences, and devoted pages more to the subsequent visit with Adam Bradley.

Latest Permission Slip: So Susie Can See THE MATRIX at School

One of Susie's winter semester classes at The Graham School is "Utopian and Dystopian Literature," and earlier this week she brought home the latest of many permission slips her mother and I have signed since her first day of preschool.  This time it asked permission for her to see The Matrix, which is, I suppose, an example of a dystopia.  I signed it, because I have never been one for censoring what Susie wants to read or watch.  (I have never seen the movie, but Susie may whet my interest enough that I'll borrow the DVD from the library sometime in the near future.  I'm still enough of a typesetter to think of a matrix as the die on a Linotype machine that shapes the character.)

Currently, they're reading Anthem, Ayn Rand's only tolerable writing.  My guess is that soon they'll be proceeding to 1984, and when that happens, I plan to buy the DVD of the movie, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton (in his final appearance).

John Hurt as Winston Smith, rewriting history in the Ministry of Truth, in  1984.

And I'm sure The Matrix will hardly be the most violent film she will encounter before she reaches adulthood.  Recently, as part of my revived interest in Stephen King's epic novel The Stand (a Lord of the Rings-like tale transplanted to 1980s America), I've been lackadaisically making my way through the 1994 four-part miniseries.  I've gotten some heat for not shooing Susie from the room when I watch it, or for not watching it only after she's nestled all snug in her bed.  She's watched parts of it, and has read some of "Captain Trips," the first volume of Marvel Comics' excellent adaptation.  Apparently, letting a 14-year-old girl watch any Stephen King story other than Stand By Me guarantees that she'll turn into the next Aileen Wuornos.  I'm willing to take my chances--if Susie is uncomfortable with a scene, she'll bury herself in her journal or the latest book she's reading.  The worst that can happen is nightmares, and if they happen, you wake up, switch on a light, and maybe get a glass of water, and that's it.

A high school English teacher emphasized the point that in a good horror movie or story, the grossness is kept to a bare minimum.  Where they get you is with suspense.  Susie didn't fully understand this concept until she saw Jaws for the first time a week or so ago.  I brought it home from the library, and all that she had known about it previously was the F-F sharp tuba music playing whenever the shark is in the vicinity.  She was afraid that she would be totally grossed out by the movie, but she was able to watch it and enjoy it thoroughly.  There is only one scene where we actually see the shark's teeth actually touch someone.  Susie expressed the appropriate outrage at the blindness and callousness of the small town's movers and shakers to the danger the shark presents, which will give her an advantage if she ever reads or sees Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.


And no, she did not have nightmares about sharks for several nights afterwards.  The other night, we watched the first half of Jaws 2 (which was not as good as the original, but which never received the proper respect), and will probably watch the rest of it over this long weekend.

When I was younger than Susie, only television stations had access to video tape, and seeing movies at home was rare indeed, except on TV.  (I remember one friend of mine saving money from his paper route for months so that he could rent 16-mm movies and a projector for a New Year's Eve sleepover.)  Until my mother left us, it was rare indeed that I got to see a movie downtown, and when I did, it was usually a Disney movie.  I remember how much I had to plead for my dad to take me to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Once she left, that was when I began watching movies that were for a more adult audience.  Since Dad was gone from before the time I got home from school until I was nodding off in front of the TV, I had oodles of unchaperoned free time.  The first "grown-up" movie I saw (I am not saying "adult" movie for the obvious reasons) was a 1970 horror movie, Count Yorga, Vampire.  I saw it in the auditorium of Thomas Hall, the classroom building at Marietta College where my dad had his office.  On Friday and Saturday nights, they featured "Cinema 75," so-called because the admission price was $.75.  During that same period, however, my dad refused to give me money to see The Trial of Billy Jack with a friend.  Seventy-five cents, on the other hand, was a pittance to pay, and the movies at Cinema 75 were usually quite good.

The first movie I lied about my age to get into was Saturday Night Fever, although I told people for years it was The Exorcist.  The theater owner would not let anyone under 16 in to see Saturday Night Fever, and this was an occasion when I appreciated my dad's uncanny ability to turn morality and ethics on and off as though it were a light switch.  I was 15 when the movie came to town, so he told me to tell them, if they asked for my age, that I was in my 16th year.

Dad also went to bat for me when I got in trouble for using foul language at school.  When I was in sixth grade, a boy named Rex was taking too long (in my estimation) at the water fountain.  I said, "Hurry up, Sex!"  (I'm sure every kid named Rex has heard that one a few times.)  When the teacher who busted me explained this to my dad, he asked, genuinely puzzled, "What 'bad word' did he use?"  So I got a walk on that one.

I paid it forward a few years later.  During Fire Prevention Week in high school, our homeroom teachers handed out fliers about how to escape the house if it was on fire, and it featured drawings of the inside of a house, showing where fires can start, etc.  Before class, I had told a friend of mine that I had seen my first porn films at a guy's house the previous weekend while his parents had been out of town.  I was unnecessarily graphic in describing the films (as if they actually had plots!), and he had asked me if I enjoyed the films.  I seesawed my hand in a comme ci comme ça gesture, and added, "Now, the guy and the pig... I could have lived without seeing that."

My friend thought this was hilarious, and, out of boredom, he was doodling on the fire prevention flier, and got in trouble with the teacher.  What was the offensive doodle?  In the bedroom, he drew a man's head on one pillow, and a pig's on the other.  Neither were anatomically correct--only heads.  I mentioned this to a teacher, who grudgingly let it slide.

Since Susie will probably be spending the summer in Florida with Steph, my major project will be restarting the book-cataloging job I had underway when my other laptop was stolen from Weinland Park.  That may involve organizing the DVDs as well.  I am sure some parents would not be happy with the fact that Porky's and Se7en is on the same shelf with Despicable Me.  (I will never underestimate anyone's ability to zero in on the sketchier titles in my video or book libraries.  When Steph and I were first married, we had about 200 VHS tapes, of all genres, including many classic movies and TV moments, and the title that a guest could spot from a mile away was something like The Sadist or She-Devils of the S.S.  (The latter is more of a sex farce than an actual porn movie.)

And yes, if Susie wants to see The Exorcist or Porky's, she can.  The disks are not under lock and key.  The only restriction I have placed on anything is that if she chooses to see JFK, I have forbidden her to use it as source material for any paper on the Kennedy assassination she may turn in during the course of her academic career.

Kerouac's Biographer Reads at (Where Else?) Kafé Kerouac

Yet again, I have to kick off an entry by apologizing for my absence from this blog.  Several consecutive weeks of 56-hour work weeks does that to you.  (I thought my latest gig at the bookstore would end with the Winter Quarter rush, but that was not the case.  I emailed my supervisor to let him know I had a new cell phone number, and he replied by asking if I could work nights Monday through Thursday "until further notice."  I need the cash too much to decline, so I accepted.)

This past week broke the repetitious cycle of get up-work at Job #1-walk to Job #2-go home-collapse, at least temporarily.  Gerald Nicosia, author of the definitive biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, made a brief trip to Columbus, as a part of a trip to Oberlin.  He and I have corresponded (by snail mail, and less frequently by email) for the past seven or eight years.  While researching my near-completion-for-the-past-few-years memoir of Robert Lowry, There Are No Promises Here, I wrote Nicosia to ask him for information about Lowry's publishing a short excerpt of Kerouac's book of Buddhist meditations, Some of the Dharma in 1958.  (I go into more detail about this in this 2007 blog entry.)  I thanked him for his help, he wrote back, I wrote back, and we have been writing almost non-stop since then.

When Gerry began planning for a trip to Oberlin, he suggested flying into Port Columbus, renting a car, driving up to Oberlin, and then spending time with Susie and me before flying back to the Bay Area around San Francisco.  Since he and I had never met in person, I was crazy about the idea.  He has long been "the best friend I have never met," since our entire friendship had been one of correspondence.

He was sitting in his rental car on my street as I walked from the bus stop Wednesday night, after the bookstore job.  (He had heard me talking to someone as we walked up from the bus, and recognized my voice from the taped letters I had mailed him.)  He was staying in a motel near Riverside Methodist Hospital, but wanted to meet Susie and me, and spend some time before shaking off the jet lag and retiring for the night.  When Susie came home a little while later,  we headed for the Blue Danube for a late dinner.  (That's the first place that I take guests when they come to visit.)

When the plans for Gerry's visit to Columbus began to solidify, my next move was to email Mike Heslop, who has owned and operated Kafé Kerouac for the past eight years, and suggest that Gerry do a reading there.  Gerry and Mike emailed back and forth a few times, and then Mike emailed to let me know he had arranged a reading for Friday (last night) at 7 p.m.

I would have wanted a larger crowd, but the people that did come were genuinely interested in Kerouac, and were familiar with On the Road and Kerouac's other writings.  (One person asked questions about Satori in Paris.)  Gerry brought several trade paperback copies of his newest book, One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road, which appeared in November.  This is the story of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady's madcap trips back and forth across the United States, as told through the eyes of Cassady's first wife, Lu Anne Henderson (known as Marylou in On the Road.)  Gerry spoke of his friendship with her and with Kerouac's daughter Jan (who wrote the novels Baby Driver and Trainsong, and who died of renal failure in 1996), about his co-author on One and Only, Anne Marie Santos (Lu Anne's daughter), and about his role as a technical adviser on the On the Road movie, which began production in 2010.

Gerald Nicosia answering questions at Kafé Kerouac, February 10, 2012.

After living for many years in the Bay Area, Gerry was a little startled to see snow--the first in weeks--begin to fall in Columbus when he returned from Oberlin yesterday afternoon.  It's been a mild winter so far, and there have been several days when I was completely comfortable walking around in a hoodie or a sweatshirt.

Not the case now.  Normally, except for rush period, I do not work at the bookstore on Saturday.  Today was an exception.  A co-worker of mine is sweating blood about a calculus midterm that he has next week, and he wanted to spend the weekend studying for it.  Since it would mean a fatter paycheck for me, I agreed to fill in for him.  It was quite difficult to leave the warm confines of my bed and house to venture to the bus stop, especially when it's 17 degrees F. outside.  I had planned to go to the Adult Talent Show at church tonight, but once I'm indoors, I'm there to stay.  I think Susie and I will order in and watch a DVD of Young Frankenstein.

Gerry reading from One and Only.  I introduced him at the beginning of the presentation, but the flash on my camera didn't work when Susie took the picture of me at the microphone.

Damn, Damn, Damn...

I worked yesterday morning at the bookstore, and it wasn't until I was there, and well into the workday, that I remembered that I had signed up for "Mark My Words," a true crime-writing workshop at the Old Worthington Library.  The workshop was to begin at 2 p.m., and I debated leaving at noon, but my supervisor was not in, and didn't feel right about just disappearing at 12 noon and leaving a note on his desk.

Diana Britt Franklin led the workshop.  She is the author of The Goodbye Door, the story of Anna Marie Hahn, "the blonde Borgia," who is famous for being the first female serial killer executed in America.  (She was electrocuted at the Ohio Penitentiary in 1938, after killing many elderly people in Over-the-Rhine, the neighborhood just north of downtown Cincinnati.)  Franklin also wrote Gold Medal Killer.  I have read neither of these books, but just reserved them online from the library.

One of the reasons I forgot about the workshop was because I changed cell phones.  The Net10 cell phone I have carried for over a year is finally dying on me, and on Friday night I began using the Verizon phone a co-worker gave me.  I had not entered my calendar events into the new phone, so I forgot about the event until I had a "Wow, I coulda had a V-8!" moment while re-shelving the buyback books.  Meanwhile, on my dresser at home, the old cell phone had beeped to remind me to head Worthington-way.

I think my interest in true crime began in 1974 or so, unless you count my endless research on the Lincoln assassination.  When Charles Lindbergh died, the news programs ran small biographies, including the 1927 New York-to-Paris flight, his isolationism in the pre-World War II days, his environmental activism, and his writing.  Until I heard these, I had not known about the kidnapping and murder of his first son in 1932.  (For those of you who don't know about this, Lindbergh's 20-month-old son Charles Augustus, Jr. was kidnapped from his crib in New Jersey in 1932.  The kidnapper left a note demanding $50 thousand ransom, and mailed several other notes afterwards, including one attached to the boy's pajamas.  Lindbergh paid the ransom, but no one found the child at the Massachusetts location the kidnapper had mentioned.  Six weeks after the ransom payment, the boy's body was found in the woods by the Lindbergh home.)

Lindbergh had been a hero of mine, after I read about his flight to Paris, and before I knew about his flirtation with eugenics and Nazism.  I knew remarkably little about his life other than the flight, and knew nothing about the kidnapping.  (I wrote him a fan letter, which I never mailed, and its P.S. was "I was wondering--are you related to Anne Morrow Lindbergh?)  I went to the library and borrowed the best book at the time on the case: George Waller's Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case.  It's a very thick book, with small type and no index, but I read it over a three-day period in the summer of 1975, and immediately went on to The Hand of Hauptmann, by J. Vreeland Haring.  Reading these books opened the door to my interest in true crime, and I began haunting the 364 (Criminology) section of the library.

In the last 10 or 15 years, I have become a bit more snobbish about my tastes in true crime.  I have bought true crime books by writers such as Aphrodite Jones and Ann Rule, but I usually relegate them to the less visible bookshelves in my house, like a teenager hiding pornographic magazines, or the same way I would hide Harlequin Romance novels... if I owned any.  To me, the three best true crime books written were Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song.  (In Cold Blood is a "non-fiction novel," and later research bears out the thought that it's more novel than non-fiction.)  The Executioner's Song is a novel, but it is much more thoroughly and meticulously researched than many true crime books I have read, including the hastily produced ones that hit the newsstands days after a horrendous crime.  (I remember two books on the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide appearing less than a week after it happened.)

First edition of In Cold Blood.

Currently, I'm immersed in Stephen King's newest novel, 11/22/63, about a Maine high school teacher who turns time traveler in order to prevent John Kennedy's assassination.  I have yet to reach the part of the story where he meets Lee Harvey Oswald, but I am currently quite fascinated by his sojourn to Derry, Maine not long after the 1958 events in It.  (Derry reminds me in many ways of my hometown, Marietta, Ohio.)

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, a holiday for State workers, and Susie has the day off from school as well, so we're going to mark the event with eye examinations.  Long overdue, but quite necessary for both of us.

Winter Solstice is Officially Here

It seems that I have to kick off more and more blog entries by apologizing for not posting more frequently.  I plead the usual--work overload and utter exhaustion once the work day finally ends.  I'm logging the usual 40 hours per week in service to the State of Ohio, and two or three nights per week at the Discovery Exchange.  (The winter quarter is in full swing at Columbus State, but my supervisor asked me if I would stay on until the end of next week.  I need the extra cash too much to decline such an offer.)

As I left the DX (as Columbus State people call it) last night, the snow began to fall.  I was under-dressed for this, since the temperature was in the mid-40s when I left my house around 7:30 a.m.  It was cloudy and gray, but I didn't give that any special consideration.  From mid-November to about March, Columbus residents speak of seeing the sun the same way other people talk about UFO or Loch Ness Monster sightings--and usually receive the same skeptical responses.

When I left the Industrial Commission at 5 and started to make the 0.8-mile walk east on Spring Street, a cold rain was falling, and I was, as usual, hatless.  I managed to keep busy by re-shelving buybacks and customer assistance, so I was astonished when the work day was winding down and I saw that wet snow was starting to fall.  Snow had covered most of the ground, including the sidewalk and streets, much thicker than the very light dusting that covered the grass just before Christmas.

Susie came home about 30 minutes after I did, not happy about having to walk from High St. to our house in the snow.  Now that she is older, snow is definitely losing its allure.  The Susie and snow memory that I will retain until the day I die was the sudden dumping of snow in February of 2010.  I was lying abed, recovering from my gallbladder surgery, and Susie and one of her friends shouldered snow shovels and went all over Baja Clintonville, coming back $40 richer.  They were out earning money, and getting some major exercise, while my major accomplishment that day was that I managed to get from my bedroom to the bathroom and back without having to hang onto the wall the whole way.

One of the books I got for Christmas when I was about three or four.

I still enjoy snow, although, as I get older, I like it more while I'm watching it from inside.  I never willingly participated in a snowball fight (I knew kids in Marietta who were not above putting M-80s and rocks in their snowballs), although I enjoyed sled-riding.  I was a bit of a chicken when it came to sled-riding--I stuck to my easy-to-manage flexible flyer, inviting ridicule from kids who used saucers, car hoods, flattened cardboard boxes, etc.  (I have never ridden on a metal saucer.  Once they started going downhill, you were a projectile, with absolutely no way of stopping until the hill bottomed out or until you hit something.)

The hill next to Mills Hall on the Marietta College campus was the one we used most often.  The campus was private property, and security officers had repeatedly run us off, but we had the rules-are-for-canasta attitude that I still retain to a lesser degree, even now, and security finally gave up.  It was steep enough to get up a good head of steam while you were headed downward, but not so fast as to instill terror.  Usually, your ride would stop when you hit the chain-link fence that enclosed a small basketball court at the foot of the hill.  It would smart a little, but usually the kids wore enough heavy clothes that it wasn't more than a bump.

Susie had school today, and I went to work.  I took for granted I'd be working, since the State barely agreed to close all offices during the 1978 blizzard.  I made the lunchtime walk to the Payroll office at Columbus State, but moved a little more slowly than usual, since I was afraid of slipping and falling.

The snow hasn't kept Susie and me confined to quarters.  We're both at Kafé Kerouac right now, and I'm typing away while two aspiring guitarists play on the stage.  (Listening to these guys, I think they will be aspiring for a long, long time!  Susie reviewed them in her blog and her critique is quite accurate.)  High St. looks pretty clear, and there's plenty of condensation on the windows, which makes the streetlights and car headlights look a little ghostly.

While we were walking here tonight, the neighborhood seemed to be pretty quiet, other than some music from some of the houses we passed.  This is quite a contrast from last night, when the sound of the wind howling up and down Maynard Ave. awoke me several times.

Marietta did not get the full force of the 1978 blizzard, although we missed a lot of school because of the snow, and because the Bituminous Coal Strike drove up the price of heating.  When snow came, it was quite subtle.  I remember one Sunday night calling a friend of mine and saying, "Hey, it's snowing."

"It is?" he said, quite skeptically.  There was silence on the line for five or 10 seconds, and then he gasped, "My God, it is!"  He and his older brother made the 15-minute walk over to my house, and the three of us left together about 15 minutes later.  His brother was disappointed, as we retraced their path, to see that their footprints hadn't been covered up.  A day or two later, snow was falling fast enough and heavily enough that footprints disappeared almost as you made them.

Happy 2012 to All!

And may there be many years ahead of you!  I'm excited right now because Susie will return from Florida in a little over 24 hours, in time to begin Winterim at The Graham School on Wednesday.  I haven't been completely as productive as I wanted to while she was gone, but I've put the time to good use.  I'm as ready as I'll ever be to return to work tomorrow morning.

I worked New Year's Eve day at the bookstore, so I couldn't sleep in.  I went to Kobo, a nightclub on High St., for the evening.  I saw a co-worker of mine from the bookstore, and he immortalized my presence there by photographing me deep in my (Diet Coke) cups.

Me at Kobo, January 1, 2012

I declined a drink of champagne from the brother of another bookstore co-worker, and when I left, I bumped into some pretty graphic evidence of why I'm glad that I no longer drink.  (I don't think I am/was an alcoholic, but I was definitely headed in that direction, and with two alcoholic parents, the deck was definitely stacked against me genetically.)

I stepped out onto High St. and there was a woman huddled on the ground in the fetal position in the alley next to the bar.  Her friends--both male and female--were helping her, but she was so out of it she couldn't even make the initial moves to get on her feet.  My first thought, shared with many of the onlookers who had come outside to smoke, was that she had overindulged, had gone outside to vomit, and then had passed out.  Her friends' attitude ran the gamut from commiseration to impatience to disgust.  One wanted to get her a cup of water, but another friend wisely pointed out that she wasn't conscious enough to swallow; if they gave her water, she would probably drown.  They kept her turned on her side, so she wouldn't aspirate in case she vomited.

My mind flashed back to a fall night in the '80s, back at Ohio University, when there was a party in one of the dorms.  This was typical for a Friday night, but it was a freshman dorm, which meant the hosts and many of the guests were underage, and the noise could be heard all over East Green.  One of the clowns attending the party decided the action was a little dull, so he/she went out into the hallway and pulled the fire alarm.

Everyone--party-goers or not--soon came out of Shively Hall because of the fire alarm.  All but one, a guy at the party who really had his load on, to the point that he was unconscious.  The squad came for him, and two EMTs brought him out, his arms around their shoulders, his feet dragging, swaying back and forth between them and his head dangling down.  Everyone was still in the parking lot, waiting for the all-clear to go back inside, and not at all happy about having to go outside for no reason.

Their mood changed when the EMTs came out with this guy.  The entire crowd broke into applause, whistling, and foot-stomping.  "Buy that man a drink!" several people shouted.  Had Twitter and the Internet existed in 1984, I am sure that the video would have gone viral in hours.  My amusement was not a "Well, that's what you get for overindulging," but it was more along the lines of "Can't hold your liquor, can you, tenderfoot?"  (I haven't drunk anything stronger than Diet Pepsi for over 13½ years, but I don't think the Straight Edge community would claim me as one of their own.  My love of meat and my excessive caffeine consumption would negate any claims of being Edge.)

The woman in the alley was drunk, but, as it turned out, there was more to the story.  After 15 or 20 minutes of debate, one of the bouncers finally called 911.  It looked like this overindulgence was going to be costly to more than just the woman's pride, because she was barely responsive at all.  The bouncer also flagged down a police car as it was headed up High St.  I talked to the brother of the woman's boyfriend, and it turned out she had been assaulted, and her cell phone stolen from her.  She didn't seem bloody or bruised, and when she was finally with it enough, the police officer took a statement from her.  (By this time, she was able--barely--to stand under her own power, and she leaned against the wall with her boyfriend, while the officer stood there with his notebook and his pen.)  I asked her if the cell phone had a GPS, so they could track it down, but she said it didn't.  (I have one on mine, but it's only activated when I dial 911.  My thinking is that if I have a heart attack or stroke, and can only manage to dial 911 before I lose consciousness, the paramedics can find me.)  And she ended up going home with the boyfriend and her retinue of friends, and the police car made it less than a quarter of a block up High St. before they had to quell some other fracas at Ledo's Lounge.

My friend Jeff from Marietta, whom I met in 1977 when he was working at the public library, came up for a long overdue visit on New Year's Day.  I had sent him Google Map directions, so he had no problem finding my place, and we walked over to the Blue Danube for dinner, caught up on our respective life situations, and he fell in love with the 'Dube immediately, as does almost anybody I've ever brought there.  (It was my second day in a row going there.  On Saturday, after the bookstore closed at 2, I took a co-worker and her father there.  She is 19, and grew up on Indiana Ave., but did not know the place existed. I could not allow this state of affairs to continue, so when the bookstore closed, she, her dad, and I went there for lunch.  In addition to the food, she fell in love with the jukebox and the painted ceiling tiles.)

After Jeff left to return to Marietta, I had a pretty sedate evening, which lasted until about 4 a.m. this morning.  I put on hours' worth of music (I patched my old Dell laptop into my Crosley phonograph, so the Crosley can serve as an amplifier), stretched out on the love seat, and read until I finally felt tired.

There's a slight dusting of snow on the ground right now, and the Weather Channel icon at the bottom of my screen says 24 degrees Fahrenheit right now.  In the early hours of New Year's Day, there was a windstorm.  Coming back from Kroger yesterday afternoon (I went there to pay the electric bill), I saw that a tree in Brevoort Park had blown across E. Torrence Rd. and totally blocked it.  Also, the screen on my living room window is completely ripped, and I saw quite a few limbs and spilled trash cans as I was out and about in Clintonville during the day yesterday.

More Productive Than I've Been in Months

I will be back on the job in less than 12 hours, and I mentioned in my last entry that I was banishing all mention of "work" from my vocabulary for the four-day Christmas weekend.  That does not mean that I've been completely idle since I left work at 5 Friday evening.

I wasn't exactly a white tornado, but the too-long cluttered living room is almost presentable for company now. Part of the reason I launched into this project was to find a notebook from earlier this fall that seems to have been buried under all the flotsam and jetsam that Susie and I generate.  (I think being a bureaucrat is hard-wired into my DNA--I can generate paper and other paraphernalia almost logarithmically.)

My longest (but most welcome) respite came on Friday night, courtesy of my across-the-street neighbors.  I was taking a break from excavating cleaning the living room, and was walking to a convenience store up the street, and my neighbor was tending a barbecue in the postage stamp of front yard.  "You alone tonight?" he asked.  I told him I was; my daughter was in Florida visiting her mom.  "Well, party going on.  We'll be serving the food around 11!"  I bought some Coke Zero to bring to the party, since I figured (correctly) that I would be the only teetotaler in attendance.

But that didn't matter.  The company was fantastic, and, although I was probably the oldest person there, most of the music was from my high school and young adult days--lots of ELO, Gary Numan's "Cars," and a series of one-hit wonders, such as The Zombies' "Time of the Season" and Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come on Eileen."  The turkey and the spare ribs filled me up quite well, and I enjoyed the many conversations.  The down side was that, since I was drinking Coke all night, even though I came home around 2:30, it was well after dawn before I actually slept.

Earlier in this blog, I posted the dilemma faced by every bipolar person's spouse: What do you do when your bipolar significant other, not famous for cleanliness, goes on a cleaning jag, quite likely as a result of swinging toward the manic end of the arc?  I do have a clean(er) living room, master bedroom, and office to show for it (pictures are forthcoming in an entry or two, I promise), but the down side is that I ended up missing both Christmas Eve services at church.  I didn't want to lose the head of steam I'd managed to generate, because I know from bitter past experience that if I stop work on a project like that, it takes forever for me to resume the work, if at all.

The worst part of missing the Christmas Eve service was missing the dedication of my friend Ramona's little daughter.  I learned about it the next day, when her folks, Steve and Kittie, invited me over for Christmas dinner.  I ate quite well, and enjoyed the company of Ramona, her daughter, Steve and Kittie, and Steve's grown children (including his daughter Amelia, my companion on the journey to Washington last year for the One Nation Working Together march).  I ate buffalo meat for the first time, and loved it.  TBS was running A Christmas Story over and over for 24 hours beginning at midnight, and after seeing it for three or four times in a row, Kittie got a little bored with it, so she popped in a DVD of The Polar Express, which I had never seen before, but which I enjoyed.

Susie left me a voice mail message thanking me for the books I sent down to her in Florida.  (I made Steph promise to hide them from her until Christmas morning.)  In the message, she told me where she had hidden her present to me.  It was a book that was ideal for someone with a love of trivia and other minutiae--World War II: 4139 Strange and Interesting Facts.  It's not the type of book you sit down and read from cover to cover, so I've enjoyed going from entry to entry.

I guess I'm still a little shell-shocked from the ordeal of NaNoWriMo, but other than this blog and diary entries, I have not done any writing.  In my defense, I am already planning next year's NaNoWriMo project, but I am not going to tip my hand here, so publicly.  The rules say that you can take all the notes and write out all the outlines, etc., you want, but writing the novel proper cannot take place before 12 midnight on November 1.  I was hoping to get back into the mood by re-reading James A. Michener's generically titled book The Novel, which I enjoyed when I bought it in Cincinnati in 1991--one of the few hardcovers I bought new.  I liked the book (and I was in the minority, even with Michener fans), and I've been carrying it around in my knapsack the past week or so, although I am not all that interested in Pennsylvania Dutch culture--the backdrop of much of the story.

This is the ultimate "Keep it simple, stupid!" when it comes to titling a manuscript.

I'm hoping it won't take the next NaNoWriMo for me to start producing again.  The title of this entry is a little misleading--I was more productive on the domestic front than I have been when it comes to anything literary.  As I was getting my study arranged, I found the fat New Yorker diary from 1983 that I've used as an idea log and a place to write notes for future projects.  (I thought I had left it behind when I left Weinland Park.)  Maybe I need to keep it in my pack so I can jot down ideas for next fall's NaNoWriMo project.

Who knows?  Maybe now that my work space isn't quite as much of a shithole, I may actually be able to bear to spend time in it!