Melville at the Customs-House

Damn, Damn, Damn...

2012-01-15T15:45:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-14T00:13:00.000-05:00

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!

2012-01-02T14:27:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-26T21:35:00.000-05:00

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!

Banishing Thoughts of Work Until Tuesday

2011-12-23T20:31:00.000-05:00

When I left the job today at 5 p.m., I made it a point to shut off the weekday and Saturday alarms on my cell phone--your faithful blogger/online diarist does not have to work anywhere until 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. I did set the 8:45 Sunday morning alarm, so I can go to the informal 11 a.m. Christmas service at church on the 25th, but, other than that, my sleep will be open-ended.

The only downside to this news is that Susie is not here to celebrate the holiday with me. Late Wednesday afternoon, she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando, so she can spend Christmas with Steph. My friend Steve took us to Port Columbus International Airport, and her flight left on time, at 4:50 p.m. She was due to arrive in Orlando at 7:05 p.m., but, according to Steph, she actually arrived a few minutes early. After I saw that her plane took off on time, I went to the Discovery Exchange and worked the usual 2½ hours. (I had given my supervisor a "definite maybe" about whether I'd be there. If Susie's flight left on time, I would be in for work, but if it was late, I would not come in.) The last day of school at The Graham School was Tuesday, and Susie will return to Columbus on January 3, the day before Winterim starts.

I won't be totally alone for the holidays. I will be having Christmas dinner with Steve and his family after the service at First UU, and I am planning to go to the 10 p.m. Christmas Eve service. Nor did I go overboard with gifts. I bought for Susie, and she will open my gifts to her on Christmas morning in Florida.

My period of solitude at work has ended. Due to an organizational shuffle at work, I am in a new department, and I was working alone in its new area on the 10th floor, but my co-workers joined me this week, so now I have other people around me while I'm working, and I am glad to have them. My desk is near the south-facing window, so I have a good view of the Leveque Tower, and a not-so-scenic view of the back of the YMCA.

One of our supervisors has donated a small library of audio books. Currently, when I have been scanning documents, and not listening to doctors' audio dictations, I have been listening to The Stand (the original edition, although I hope Stephen King decides that The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition should be recorded. (A co-worker has generously reduced this large novel to three optical disks by recording it as MP3 files.) I have that and It (also on MP3 files) at my desk, along with cassettes of Kerouac's On the Road read by Matt Dillon. The only other audio book I have is an abridged reading of Thomas Merton's Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, which is the journal covering the years between his conversion to Roman Catholicism and ending a week before he entered the monastery in Kentucky where he spent the rest of his life.

I was excited when my supervisor sent this email about the collection of audio books she was donating. I went over to see what she supplied. One was To Kill a Mockingbird, and there were some Nicholas Sparks novels (the only one I ever read was The Notebook), and some abridged James Patterson novels, not all of them Alex Cross novels.

However, she did have--unabridged--all of the Twilight novels. I probably will not read them. Except for Dracula, vampire stories have never interested me that much, and my attraction to Dracula was because Stoker told the story in an epistolary format. Susie read the first two novels in the Twilight series, reading them over her friends' shoulders. Since then, she has come to agree with Stephen King, who so famously wrote that

Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.

Before I worked for the State of Ohio, I worked as a data entry typist (known as a "header entry operator") at Medco Health Solutions. I had brought my love of audio books with me, a love that began in the summer of 1986, when I was working as a temp for the State, in the Division of Elevators (and Boilers before that). At Medco, enough of us listened to audio books that there was a lot of swapping and borrowing back and forth. Because of this, I read things I would not normally have read, such as Sue Henry's Murder on the Iditarod Trail and the novels of Clive Cussler. The only time I voluntarily did without was when the only books available to me were Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind novels.

Their lunatic theology aside, the books are not that well written. I learned this when I was waiting for a bus, and someone had left behind a copy of Glorious Appearing: The End of Days at the bus stop. (This is apparently Volume XII of the series.) Bored, I read the first few pages, and shook my head and left it behind for the next poor bastard. (I think the person left it behind the same way some people do with the little religious comic book tracts of Jack T. Chick, in a bizarre way to proselytize.) The late Christopher Hitchens (I won't call him great, because no one who supported the Iraq War is great) described the Left Behind series most eloquently and accurately as "generated by the old expedient of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor."

I had thought that I would be working at the bookstore tomorrow morning, but a four-, instead of six-hour day. Yesterday morning, however, there was an email from my supervisor, wishing me a merry Christmas and telling me the bookstore would be closed Christmas Eve. So, I am going to stay up as late as I want to tonight, and sleep as late as I choose. With the 12-hour work days I have been logging lately, that is indeed a welcome gift.

It's 100% irrelevant to the entry, but here is a plate from Christmas 1988, depicting the President's House at Marietta College, a scene from my home town. (My dad was never president of Marietta College--nor did he want to be--but I went to three or four functions here in my day.)

An All-Too-Short Breather From Moonlighting

2011-12-09T22:29:00.001-05:00

I can tell that the end of the academic quarter looms at Columbus State Community College when I begin logging 12-hour workdays--my usual "day job" at the Industrial Commission, and the 2½ hours I work afterwards at the Discovery Exchange. I wasn't expecting to be back at the bookstore until Christmas, but I emailed my supervisor there to find out when he wanted me to start, and he asked me if I could start the first week of December. My finances--or the lack thereof--made that an easy decision, quite a no-brainer.

So, starting Monday evening, I have been working at the bookstore, arriving home just before 9, and by then I'm usually so exhausted that I tumble into bed right away... and still don't feel all that refreshed when the alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning.

It may some lingering NaNoWriMo mindset. Even though I no longer have to type at breakneck speed to produce writing of questionable--if not outright nonexistent--literary merit, I still feel like I've expended an enormous amount of energy during the day, and just the proximity and practicality of sleep is enough of a suggestion that I tumble into bed at an early hour, often times before Susie. (Even when I do stay up late, it is difficult to pinpoint when exactly she falls asleep. She often dozes off reading or writing in her journal, so there's light coming from under her bedroom door regardless of how late the hour. If I'm passing her room at 2:30 a.m. en route to the bathroom, I'll see the light, and long ago I came to realize that she's sound asleep and has no problem sleeping in a brightly lit room.)

Susie and I are at Kafé Kerouac right now, just north of the Ohio State campus. This is a good post-NaNoWriMo location, and a good place to host a write-in next year. Kerouac wrote the version of On the Road that catapulted him to literary fame (and fortune--most of which he drank) in a style that NaNoWriMo writers would make famous over 35 years later. After many false starts, Kerouac wrote On the Road in about three weeks, fueled by amphetamines and black coffee, writing on a long scroll of Teletype paper and getting up from the typewriter only for trips to the bathroom. I am 48 years old now, so I have outlived Kerouac by a year, but I doubt that I would ever have had the spontaneity or the stamina to try such a project in such a radical way. Several years ago, Viking published Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, and the work notebooks show that the writing of On the Road may have been spontaneous, but the text and the story was quite premeditated.

The famous scroll manuscript of On the Road.

This is the calm before the storm at the bookstore. I have spent most of my workdays (-evenings?) re-shelving returns as students return them. There are usually about five of us working on the second floor at night, and as one quarter winds down and the new one has yet to begin, there is not much customer traffic. Sometimes I have to combat boredom, but shelving is a task that I genuinely enjoy. During the lull in activity, when there aren't even any books that need to be put back, I remind myself about how much I'll relish moments like that once the onslaught starts again after Christmas.

One of my favorite isolated lines in Stephen King's The Stand describes one of the heroes, Larry Underwood, tending to his mother when she becomes ill with the flu that eventually kills her and 99.4% of the human race. Before anyone realizes just how deadly this is, he helps settle her in bed, moves the TV to her bedroom, buys her some paperback books at the corner store, and fixes her a small meal. "After that," says the narrative, "there wasn't anything to do except get on each other's nerves." To a much lesser degree, that's kind of what we're like on the second floor when there are no customers and no books to shelve.

The cashiers and customer service people downstairs place returns on a library cart, and when one is full enough, that's when someone from the second floor (lately, me, but not exclusively) will come down and get it, exchanging it with an empty. Because a loaded cart weighs so much, we take it up in the bookstore's freight elevator.

One of my coworkers is a young woman from the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, who is taking pre-med classes at Columbus State. She was a little scared when I told her the books had to go up in the freight elevator. (I had seen her wheeling the cart toward the passenger elevator.) Having worked at the Cincinnati post office, I have no fear of freight elevators. The one at the Discovery Exchange could accommodate a small Toyota, but it has a mesh gate that raises and lowers, and the heavy steel external doors smash together with a sound that can make you jump. As she and I waited for it, I'm sure my casual references to the "Elevator of Death" didn't put her at ease. (I suppose I should never let her see the L.A. Law episode featuring the death of Rosalind Shays.)

When I was 15 and living in Marietta, I helped a friend of mine deliver newspapers in the business district. He had several customers in the Dime Bank Building at Second and Putnam Sts., across from the Washington County Courthouse. The Dime Bank Building had an old, antiquated hand-operated elevator, complete with an old, antiquated elevator operator. You got in, he would slide the accordioned gate shut, flip the lever (I always thought it looked like a ship's engine order telegraph), and up you would go, watching the floors go by as you rose.

I made an all-too-quick trip to Cincinnati the first weekend of November, while Susie was at a church Coming of Age retreat in the Hocking Hills. One of the people I took to lunch was George Wagner, who managed the apartment building where I lived. George worked part-time as a clerk at Ohio Book Store on Main Street, and he had a healthy fear/respect for its freight elevator. He emphatically stated he was not afraid of the elevator. "I burn incense to it. I pray to it. I recite the 23rd Psalm before I get aboard it. But no, I am not afraid of it!" he told me many times when I lived in Cincinnati.

NaNoWriMo - 30 -

2011-12-02T20:51:00.001-05:00

And this year it ended triumphantly for both Susie and me! Completely in character for me, I was working on my project until the bitter end, logging 50,028 words when I submitted it to the NaNoWriMo Website for verification. I sent it in around 4:40 on Wednesday afternoon, and Susie followed around 9 p.m. the same evening. Very little incentive to cheat, since bragging rights and a neat little graphic for your Facebook page are really the only "prizes" you win.

The contest has not been without cost. Susie has been sick with a sore throat and a headache (she even stayed home from school today, which has been completely out of character for her since she started at The Graham School), and I have been rather draggy and unmotivated in both physical and mental energy. I've had a hard time focusing at work, and seem to want to sleep more than usual. I've always liked wintertime, so I can't rightly attribute it to seasonal affective disorder, but I do find myself in a bit of a slump mentally. My way of celebrating the completion of the project was going to bed before midnight for the first time in God knows how long. I am hoping that this cafard will only be temporary, and, since Susie is going down to Florida for Christmas break, I really need to keep it from getting out of control. (Again, cafard is a word that I picked up from reading The Journals of John Cheever. He experienced enough of it for 10 people.)

Just by re-reading the two paragraphs I just typed, I can see that I've made some progress in coming out of NaNoWriMo mode. To wit, I am using contractions again. As a way to pad my word count, during the narrative of the novel, I stopped using contractions. (I continued to use them in dialogue, and I admit that dialogue has never been my strong suit when it came to writing.)

My manuscript was called Founder's Day, and Susie's was/is Vengeance is Sweeter. I am not sure what the fate of mine will be. Even as I was writing it, I knew that I am capable of much better, and that I was pouring on the excess verbiage for the mere purpose of increasing my word count. If you have ever seen You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, or listened to a recording of the music, you would understand what I was doing by following Lucy's part in "The Book Report." Right now, Founder's Day is hermetically sealed on my hard drive, and I can't even bring myself to open the file, let alone start editing it. I have a feeling that I may be working on it from the ground up if I ever decide to write it with an eye toward publication. (And yes, I do have fantasies that it ends up being my breakthrough book, and then years later, I'll do what Stephen King did with The Stand and publish "the NaNoWriMo edition.")

I left work early today to run some errands (paying rent and getting a long overdue beard trim headed the list), and when I came back home, Susie was fast asleep in her bedroom. I followed her lead and collapsed for an hour or so in my room. But, she is awake now, and it is amazing what a little food did to perk her back up. (I think the fact that she wants to go to the Marriage Equality rally downtown with me tomorrow morning, and see her friend in Romeo and Juliet at Dominion Middle School tomorrow night, may also have played a role.)

Another temporary casualty of NaNoWriMo has been that--completely out of character for me--I have barely written in my diary for all of November. I guess what energy I did have, I poured into the NaNoWriMo project, and I was either too written out or too exhausted to turn my attention and energy to the pages of the composition book that always comes in my knapsack with me. One of the reasons I'm writing in the blog tonight is to see if that will kick-start me toward resuming daily diary entries. I don't want to be as meticulous or as compulsive as the late Robert Shields, but when I go back and open the book, with my pen in hand, I am going to feel like I'm meeting someone and having to explain to them why I haven't called them back.

I posted on Columbus Underground about needing to find someone to repair my Royal Royalite manual typewriter, and have yet to follow up on the suggestions folks posted in response. I wish I could have used it for NaNoWriMo, but that would not have been practical, since you need to cut and paste your finished product into their Website so they can verify your word count. Here is a picture of the Royalite, which has been on the receiving end of much abuse from me, in my old home office in Franklinton:

I loathed almost every TV series he produced, but, in the pre-YouTube days, I always loved seeing the ending credits of any Stephen J. Cannell program. (Cannell, who died last year, produced 21 Jump Street, Silk Stalkings, and The A-Team.) It is especially appropriate to post, as someone who "won" NaNoWriMo:

(I can never decide which one I like best, so this one seems to be the most inclusive.)

Blog is the Victim of NaNoWriMo

2011-11-23T18:57:00.001-05:00

National Novel-Writing Month--the annual race to write a 50 thousand-word manuscript in 30 days--is what literate people do in November instead of following college football. It is also what has consumed all of my writing strength and energy. Not only have I neglected the blog, I also have not written in the holographic diary since very early this month. After working like mad to get in x number of words per day, I am too exhausted to produce any other writing.

Susie is participating this year as well, and she is ahead of me in terms of word count. I currently am at 28,894 words, or about 58% of the minimum I need to "win", so I will be at the laptop keyboard any moment I can/should be between now and 11:59:59 p.m. on the 30th. (The "prize" for winning NaNoWriMo is bragging rights, plus, I believe, a nice little icon to put on your Facebook page.)

So, I'm posting to the blog before I start tonight's writing. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so I can stay up as late as I want and sleep in during the morning. Susie and I are having a quiet fête at home, which probably means eating off our laps and watching a DVD of The Social Network. I have to produce about 2700 words daily between now and the end of NaNoWriMo to be able to "win."

This is because I went entire days (never more than one at a time) without writing, and playing catch-up is a nightmare. On the fifth of the month, I was in Cincinnati for a Marriage Equality rally on Fountain Square, which meant leaving Columbus at 8:30 in the morning and not getting home until nearly midnight. (Susie was at a Coming of Age retreat with the church, so she was in the Hocking Hills all weekend; otherwise, she would have come to the Cincinnati rally with me.) The following weekend, both Susie and I were in North Olmsted for a youth conference (I was a sponsor, she was one of the youth) at the Olmsted Unitarian Universalist Church. I brought the laptop along, but there was just too much going on, including lots of kids going in many directions at a mile a minute, that I didn't have the privacy or the concentration to get anything done.

For the first time with a writing project, I began keeping a work log with this NaNoWriMo manuscript. At the union convention last August, OCSEA's Office of General Counsel gave away neat little black spiral notebooks, and mine has sat on my desk, blank, until NaNoWriMo started. Some days, I record more work information than others:

The first few days, I was keeping meticulous track of what music I listened to while I worked. You probably have noticed that my working music is quite catholic, lower-case C, when I'm going to be at the keyboard for awhile.

Last night, I felt really cruddy after dinner, with no energy and feeling lightheaded. So, I decided to go out and see if some fresh air would perk me up. Susie was in the living room, busily working at her laptop, being a role model to me by writing, while I was outside.

I drifted over to Mirror Lake. The Ohio State-Michigan game is Saturday at noon, and I have zero interest in it, since I have zero interest in football, and because I attended neither school. On the Thursday before the OSU-Michigan game, the students at Ohio State jump into Mirror Lake, regardless of the temperature. Channel 10 had predicted thunderstorms, and the Lantern, Ohio State's student newspaper, thought that lightning would deter anyone would making the jump.

There was no lightning, but I knew that would not stop anyone. I remember inviting myself to an after-hours party in the spring of 1986, after the bars on High St. (the bars themselves razed a long time ago) had closed for the night. The party was in the courtyard of an apartment building near High and W. 10th (where the Taco Bell is now). There was a hot tub in the courtyard, and there were about eight or nine people in it, even though the sky was very cloudy and at some point before dawn, there was thunder and lightning.

I came early to Mirror Lake. I had no plans on diving in--I would not go in Mirror Lake if you paid me. At its best, it smells like Roadside Rest pump water. The bacilli that live in it, and all the rocks, broken glass and other trash that line the bottom, would not make me go in it at all. (I remember during Comfest 2010 seeing some high school kids swimming in the pond at Goodale Park. I had the same feeling, and thought someone should have a booth offering free tetanus and hepatitis shots.)

Maybe I was too early, but I didn't see that many people there at 10 o'clock. I have seen videos of previous jump-ins where kids were shoulder to shoulder in the Lake, but I don't think I saw more than 20 or 30 people in at a time. It was very popular to jump in groups of four, so you could stand in the Lake and do the O-H-I-O with your arms. (O = Arms over your head with your hands joined together above your head. H = Arms over your head, the palms held parallel. I = Like O, except that your fingers form a point.) What I found funny was how many people would swear up and down they had no intention of going in the water, and then would suddenly bolt in and do it, often holding hands with a friend as they jumped. Two young women planned, I think, to swan dive into the Lake. They had stripped down to bikini briefs and sports bras, scampered hand in hand to the lip of the water, and then decided to sit down and slide in, like they were entering a wading pool. When they came out, their teeth were chattering and they were running like mad to put on their dry clothes. (A lot of people who jumped in fully clothed didn't have that option. The temperature was in the mid-50s when I got there, but it dropped almost into the upper 40s by midnight.)

I never saw the allure of football, college or otherwise. When I was younger, my dad took me to Saturday afternoon games of the Marietta College Pioneers at Don Drumm Stadium, but I was not very good at masking my boredom. (I went on my own when I was older, but because it was free to me, since my dad was on the faculty. Since it was free, I would take advantage.) I went to a few Marietta Tigers games my sophomore year of high school, but paying to be bored was even sillier.

When Susie was first learning to read, I went to Abebooks' Website and ordered a copy of All Through the Year, the Harper and Row reading textbook I had in second grade. I had always liked the book, and put off ordering it until I tired of reading the Berenstain Bears and Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? repeatedly. The only section of the book I disliked as a second-grader was called "Captain Sam," and it was about one of the major characters' hero worship of the high school football captain. Besides the fact that I didn't care about football, I remembered one scene that bothered me. David, the boy who looks up to Captain Sam, will have his birthday the same day as the high school home team goes against their arch-rival. (It's apparently their version of OSU-Michigan, or Harvard-Yale. In Cincinnati, the big high school sports rivalry seemed to be between two boys' Catholic schools, Elder and Archbishop Moeller.)

In the story, David tells his parents that he doesn't want a party or a birthday cake. All he wants to do is go to the game. His parents agree, but also add that he would not get any presents. At the time, I thought that was a bit mean, and I still did when I read the story to Susie--knowing a story about football would put her to sleep with little difficulty. I came around a little when I saw that David's parents paid for all his friends to go to the game, plus paying for their hot dogs and soda pop, I suppose, which does demand a significant outlay of money.

Football and writing in the same blog entry... I am as surprised as you are, folks. I first heard about NaNoWriMo when we were still living in Franklinton. I was at the library, using the computers there because we didn't have any Internet at home, and I overheard one of the kids that worked behind the counter tell one of his co-workers that he knew a woman who entered this contest every year. I Googled "novel writing in one month" and that was what led me to NaNoWriMo's home page. It was mid-October by then, so I didn't have long to prepare for the project.

I usually have tanked by now. In 2008, I didn't even make the effort, since my mother had died on October 30, and I was preoccupied with her memorial service and cleaning out her apartment in Athens. Today is the 23rd of November, and I'm farther along than I ever have been before, but I am not going to get cocky. I guess it's good that this guy never attempted NaNoWriMo. It sounds like he won it on a weekly basis.

I am multitasking while I write this. Susie and I are having a little pre-Thanksgiving meal tonight, so I am upstairs with the computer, typing away, and trying to keep track of the turkey and potatoes I have in the oven in the kitchen. Unless the next entry describes a house fire, you can safely assume that we had an edible meal tonight.

My very amateurish footage of the beginning of the Mirror Lake OSU-Michigan jump-in last night. One of the funniest moments I captured was a guy berating his friend for losing his lab goggles in the Lake, and insisting that he submerge himself to locate them.

Hubris Can Hurt

2011-10-27T22:20:00.000-04:00

Mrs. Curtis, an English teacher at Marietta High School, taught a Greek mythology class. I took the class my senior year, and one thing I never forgot was a sentence she wrote on the blackboard and never erased the entire semester: Beware excessive pride. (She was a bit of a grammar Nazi--I've been called that as well--so I suspect that was why she never wrote the rest of the sentence, for it is a failing we are all open to. There were certain things up with which Mrs. Curtis did not put!)

"Beware excessive pride" is a maxim that lay deeply buried in my subconscious until this week. As I'm sitting here in my study typing this entry, Susie is downstairs watching a video, I have Jethro Tull comfortably blaring from my speakers, and I am in pain.

The pain is an aftereffect of my own hubris ("excessive pride, presumption, or arrogance (originally toward the gods)", per Wiktionary.org). A co-worker of mine has been ribbing me for weeks about my avoidance, if not complete aversion, to joining the gym at work. He has even offered to pay for my first month's membership.

He and I trade barbs about my lack of physical fitness and I come back with remarks about his age. (He is several years older than I am, and played football and baseball in high school, and coached track when he was in the Army. He spends every lunch hour on the treadmill or working out with weights.)

Last week, he challenged me to walk with him from our floor in the William Green Building (the 10th), all the way to the topmost floor. He knows that I enjoy walking long distances and for hours at a time, so I guess he wanted to see just how fit I truly was. (According to body mass index charts, I'm constantly straddling the dividing line between overweight and obese.) I shrugged this off, thinking, "Piece of cake." Walking was walking, wasn't it? After all, I reasoned, I did plenty of walking during the six years I lived in Cincinnati, and no two neighborhoods are on the same level there.

Chuck, my co-worker, said, "Tuesday morning, 10 o'clock. Meet you at the door to the stairs."

I told him I'd be there. When I got back to my desk, I logged into GroupWise (our combined email and scheduling software platform) and under October 25, 10 a.m., I logged, "Walk to the top of the building with Methuselah," making sure he would get a copy.

So Tuesday at 10, I met him at the door to the stairwell. Usually, I spend my 10 a.m. breaks in the Bureau of Workers' Compensation library, reading The Columbus Dispatch or The Wall Street Journal, but I decided that I would forego this until lunchtime. So there I was at 10, and Chuck was at the door. We exchanged the banter about whether we had the paramedics on standby, should we have a defibrillator waiting, etc.

The William Green Building, my workplace since 2004.

And then he and I began trudging. I knew he would be faster, since he habitually uses the Stairmaster in the gym. I sailed up the first two or three flights, and then I took 10- or 15-second breaks after I had gone up four or five floors.

The William Green Building is 530 feet tall, and it has 33 floors altogether. I did not realize, until this trudge was in progress, there were three additional floors. The Industrial Commission's executives' offices are on the 30th floor, known either as "Thirty" or "the Vatican." I had assumed that was the topmost floor. But, as we kept going upward, Chuck informed me that there were 33 floors altogether. Floors 31-33 contain the air conditioning equipment, the elevator mechanism, and generators.

The walk up to 33 was not fun. I have occasionally walked from the lobby to the 10th floor, and came through the door at the conclusion of the walk thinking someone would have to jump-start my heart. My legs were aching, but I felt okay as far as my breathing was concerned. Chuck told me later he worried a little when I stopped to take the mini-breaks. My legs were hurting a bit by the time I triumphantly placed my hand on the door to the 33rd floor, like a mountain climber planting a flag.

Then came the trip back down. When I've started the day (or returned from lunch) by going up to the 10th floor by stair instead of elevator, at least I could be sure that I'd be sitting for awhile thereafter. According to my stopwatch, Chuck and I took 8½ minutes to go 23 floors. I shut the stopwatch off once I touched the door with "33" painted on it, so I didn't time the trip back downstairs.

We hadn't descended very far before I felt like my legs were going to buckle. I've heard expressions such as "It's all downhill from here" all my life, and that would lead me to believe that downhill would be easier. Wouldn't gravity be doing most of my job for me?

Yes, it would, and if I wasn't careful, gravity would be doing the job too well. I had to make sure my shoes were firmly planted on each step, and I held onto the handrail until my knuckles were bloodless. This was one of those situations where you just had to ignore the pain. I had taken Monday off from work, so the untyped ex parte orders and doctors' reports were piling up on my desk. I couldn't just stay in the stairwell indefinitely. So I paced myself, gritted my teeth, and made it back to the 10th floor. "I'm proud of you, man!" Chuck said. He had been worried when I wanted to take a break on the way up, but I did it.

Once I got back to my desk, that was when I began to sweat, and that was when the pain in my gastrocnemius muscles really began to hurt, and the pain hasn't let up yet. Since Tuesday morning, I have dreaded stairs, especially when I have to go down them. When it's necessary, I hold my legs rigidly, like a wishbone, and you can tell from my expression that it's an ordeal I want to finish as soon as I can.

Compare this to when I was at Ohio University, in the fall of 1986 through the spring of 1987, when I steadfastly refused to use elevators, in an effort to lose weight. (During high school, I resembled Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! cartoons, more so when I grow the scraggly goatees that preceded my first real beards.) I drove my friends crazy by insisting on using stairs, thinking I would burn off any excess weight. Never mind that I was going to bars almost nightly and drinking beer by the gallon.)

So where do I stand right now? The pain is still there, and it's not limited to when I'm climbing stairs. I usually carry a bottle of Aleve in my knapsack, since I'm so prone to shin splints, and I've been using it pretty heavily these past few days. Tonight, I walked the 1.2 miles from Giant Eagle to my house. (I had gone to the Whetstone library to pick up reserves, and, as I left, Susie asked me to pick up some bread. I took the bus from home to Whetstone, and from Whetstone to Giant Eagle, but decided to walk back home.) I'm not sorry I did it, but I was hoping I could walk out whatever cramp or knot I gave myself during my marathon stair climb on Tuesday.

Pride goeth before leg cramps.

Here I Come to Save the Day!

2011-10-13T22:56:00.000-04:00

When the start-of-quarter rush ended at Columbus State Community College, I left the bookstore thinking I would not be back again until December. I was grateful for the extra money, and usually the job is fun, but at the same time I felt bad about leaving Susie home alone.

Yesterday, I came back from lunch and read a panicked email from my supervisor at the Discovery Exchange. The night manager was unable to come in on Wednesday, Thursday, or Monday. I know it's last-minute, but could you possibly...?

It didn't take long for me to hit Reply and say "yes," I would be there. I left Susie a voice-mail message, and typed an email to her, telling her I'd be home late, and to leave me some food in the Crock-Pot, and be sure her homework was finished. And when 5 p.m. came, I did not head north to Baja Clintonville, but walked the 0.8 miles to the bookstore.

Once I stepped through the front door, it felt like I had only left the day before, not two weeks. Cashiers who worked with me before said hi, the coordinator handed me my old apron (a black apron with my round name tag and my Buy Local! pin), and I had been upstairs less than a minute before I was pushing a book cart and shelving buybacks and returns.

No class at Columbus State uses this textbook, but the title is just too good not to share!

The temporary bookstore gig has also been helpful to my mood. After the initial euphoria and adrenalin about the move, and the splendor of our new place, wore off, I began to sense the red flags that signal a depressive episode. We often tell children, "Listen to your body" when we toilet-train them, so they don't have accidents in their pants, but too often we don't "listen" to the symptoms that indicate a depressive (or manic) episode is just around the corner.

The lack of energy, the urge to sleep all the time, no motivation (despite having a crap ton of work to do to get this place ready for visitors and to look like we live here--as opposed to crashing here), all of it was starting to worry me. I made it a point to refill my lithium prescription at CVS on Tuesday, since this would not be the time to run out of it.

So, armed as I was with a 30-day supply of lithium carbonate, the email from my supervisor was an added bonus. I felt honored that he turned to me in this semi-crisis. It would be unrealistic for me to write or believe that I am unneeded--as a single parent, and as a full-time civil servant, it would be the epitome of self-pity, and completely unjustified at that. Nevertheless, it improved my mood and my overall mental level of functioning when I received this email. Feeling needed in a crisis is a positive supplement to the extra money I will earn as a result of this.

I'm glad to be inside. The rain is falling outside. No thunder or lightning, but there is a steady rainfall just outside my window, an interesting counterpoint to the crickets. It's 61 degrees outside--I walked from the bus stop to my house with my shirtsleeves up. We had spaghetti ready to go in the Crock-Pot when I arrived home, but I had to run an errand to the little market around the corner to buy some vegetable oil and Parmesan cheese. It was misting at that time, but the sky was cloudy. Now the rain has begun to fall. And it's having a tranquilizing effect on me, which is a good thing. (I was virtuous and drank Diet Rite this evening, which is caffeine-free ~~and taste-free~~.)

Planes and Backyard Movies--All Under the Harvest Moon

2011-10-11T00:21:00.000-04:00

Every day I'm happier about Susie's and my move to Old North. The cleanliness, pride, and simple respect the neighbors have makes it infinitely preferable to Weinland Park, but the friendliness has made me feel even better.

After Susie came home from Youth Group yesterday afternoon, she and I were walking to the bus stop, so we could go shopping at Kroger. There were about five people standing on the sidewalk as we went by. I recognized one of the men as someone who often rides the 4 bus to and from downtown with me every morning. (He's in the minority on these particular schedules, since he works neither for the State of Ohio nor Nationwide Insurance.) They invited Susie and me to a backyard movie at 8 p.m. Without even asking what they were showing, I accepted.

The movie was El Mariachi, which I had never seen (neither had Susie). Our hosts, Jeremy and Deborah, made us feel welcome right away. The temperature was in the mid-60s, and I was perfectly comfortable, since I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but Susie was wearing a T-shirt and was about to head back to the house to get a blanket, but Deborah very quickly produced one, so Susie was all set.

Fortunately, Jeremy put on the English captions. My knowledge of Spanish is confined to counting to 20, and I only know this from years of Sesame Street. Susie is taking a Spanish class at The Graham School, and she mastered counting to five, thanks to Dora the Explorer. Jeremy and Deborah hung a bed sheet across the back wall of the garage for a screen, and put brick-sized speakers at either end of the row of chairs. (There were six of us there altogether.)

Airplanes seem to fly over every four or five minutes throughout the movie. (And El Mariachi is not a long movie--it's less than 90 minutes.) Sometimes the planes flew so low their navigation lights cast shadows on the ground. None of us had ever seen that many commercial planes flying over the neighborhood with so little time between them. (When I lived in Franklinton and Weinland Park, police helicopters, along with their mega-candlepower searchlights flashing around the neighborhood, were so common that we paid little attention to them.) Last night, we only saw one helicopter, which was flying at high speed, and which I suspect was on its way to Riverside Methodist Hospital. All of the planes were eastbound, so I suspect we're in Port Columbus' flight path.

The moon is not officially full until tomorrow night, and it is the harvest moon. The Wikipedia says that October 11 is the latest that the harvest moon can be. (The harvest moon is the first full moon after the start of the autumnal equinox.) The moon was very bright last night, and there were white ringlets of clouds in the night sky almost directly above the yard. The movie, the moon, and the company made the evening a very pleasant one.

The movie Susie and I saw last night in our neighbor's back yard.

Susie and Rising Voices sang "Night Winds" at the 9:15 service yesterday morning, so we had to be at church early. (I almost always go to the 11 a.m. service, and rarely am out of bed before 8:45 Sundays.) We left just before 8, because Rising Voices' director wanted to have a small rehearsal on the risers, and wanted all hands on deck by 8:45.

I was glad I went to the early service. Susie and the kids sang quite well. I shot the first non-test video with my new Kodak Easy Share C143 (my DXG camera gave up the ghost this summer, so I replaced it, going back to the model which worked the best for me) when they sang. Below is the video I made:

There was a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown stalks into the panel fit to be tied. He had gone to the store to buy a Hallowe'en mask, and the store didn't have any. One of his friends asked if they were going to order more. Furiously, Charlie Brown said no, they weren't. "They were too busy putting up Christmas decorations!" This afternoon, I received a Facebook invitation to the church's annual winter concert, which will be December 18 at 4 p.m. (Mark your calendars now, folks!) I will be front and center, since Susie will be performing. I'll be missing her for Christmas, since on the 21st, she'll be flying to Florida to spend Christmas and New Year's with Steph. Susie will be headed to Orlando on the last day of school (she'll be leaving school a little early that day), and will be flying back the day before Winterim begins at Graham, January 3. (Steph forwarded me Susie's Southwest Airlines itinerary the other day.)

I wasn't the dynamo I planned to be today when it came to getting this place completely ready. I had vague memories of hearing Susie getting ready for school--getting dressed, fixing her lunch, shutting the front door, etc.--but it wasn't until almost 11 a.m. when I hauled myself out of bed. I bought some kitchen and cleaning supplies at Dollar General, and managed to set up my Crosley phonograph, but there is still a scatter of boxes in the living room. And I confess I wasn't all that organized when it comes to list-making. I don't realize we don't have something until the need arises. I took some lasagna out of the oven tonight and then saw the only knives we had were butter knives, so I put the lasagna on top of the oven to cool and then dashed around to the corner market and bought a cheap set of steak knives so I could cut the lasagna.

The Upside of Autumn

2011-10-09T00:42:00.000-04:00

I grumble about the end of summer as much as any schoolkid (including my own), but one of its bonuses (at least for those of us who toil in the vineyards of civil service) is that, from September until February, there is at least one paid day off per month. Monday will be such a day. Tomorrow night, I will not set the alarm, but that tomorrow will still be a semi-work day for me. My goal is to make some serious headway in making our new home look more like a home--we've hung up clothes, and the office is starting to take shape, but we still look like we're in transit.

Susie turned 14 on Thursday, and she was quite happy with the Seventeen subscription I bought her, although the first issue has yet to arrive. (I remember receiving a subscription to Mad for my 11th birthday, and feeling just as good.) I bought her subscription through Amazon.com, and they sent her an email Thursday morning notifying her, so now she'll haunt the mailbox until the first issue arrives. Susie's grandfather sent her a sketchbook and a pen, and her mom mailed her clothes. Susie and I had chicken soup at home (the same chicken soup I made two weeks ago--freezers and Crock-Pots are wonderful inventions) and then I took her for dessert at Groovy Spoon, a frozen yogurt restaurant on N. High St. just south of Whetstone Park.

She had a sleepover last night with a girl from The Graham School, so I stayed up almost until dawn, but was awake again by 9. Susie and I went to Studio 35 to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, although we declined the chance to dine with the Klingons. (We ate lunch at Burger King beforehand.) Between lunch and the movie, we went to a garage sale on E. Weber Rd. Susie bought a purse and a scarf. There was an entire rack of women's clothes, but nothing she liked fitted her. I bought a DVD of Kissing Jessica Stein and a two-disk set of Beethoven's Favourite Piano Sonatas (I'm listening to the "Moonlight Sonata" as I type this, which is appropriate, because the moon is very bright tonight, although it's not officially full until Tuesday).

Where Susie and I went to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The downside of a three-day weekend is that my sleep schedule is now off track. Since I didn't get to bed until close to sunrise, and was awake again a mere four hours later, I crashed for an hour or two almost as soon as Susie left for dinner and a movie with her godmother. Susie is singing at the 9:15 service at church, so we'll be out of the gate sooner tomorrow morning than usual. And I'm hardly leading by example! It's nearing midnight, and I'm sitting here typing this entry with a bottle of Coke Zero at my elbow.

As I was unpacking, I was scared to death that I had lost the manuscript of my memoir about my friendship with Cincinnati novelist Robert Lowry during the move. (Most of the text was on the hard drive of the stolen laptop.) I sent a panicked letter to my friend Robert Nedelkoff just outside D.C., since he has been my consultant and father confessor for much of the project. (I sent a letter rather than emailing so he could have a hard copy of my new address.) About two hours after I dropped the letter in the mailbox, I was unpacking one of the big Staples boxes (my packing lacks organization--it always has, it always will), and, voilà, there it was. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. A day or two ago, RobertNed sent me an email thanking me for notifying him of the change of address, and he attached the Word file of the Lowry manuscript, as well as other items.

Now that I have an extant copy of the hard copy, rewriting should head the "to do" list, since--as Robert has not so subtly pointed out--I am in the home stretch of finishing this book. (Lowry died in December 1994, and the last time I added anything to the manuscript, I was describing the period between the spring of 1992 and the summer of 1993.) However, it has been so long since I wrote anything, the voice has changed, I've fallen out of love with some of the prose I wrote, etc., so it's best if I did the whole damn thing from the ground up. Before she moved to Florida, Steph made some invaluable comments and edits in pen and ink on the manuscript, and I plan to incorporate some of these changes in the next incarnation.

An aside here--I changed the music while writing the last paragraph. Currently, I'm listening to Vivaldi's "Double Trumpet Concerto for Two Trumpets, Strings, and Continuo in C Major, RV 537 Allegro," from the album Greatest Hits of 1721. I love this piece. What's funny is that it first came to my attention when I saw All the President's Men. During the scene when Woodward and Bernstein suspect that Nixon's people are wiretapping them, they sit at a typewriter and "converse" by typing, and Woodward blares this music on the stereo to drown out the sound of the typing.

As I was rereading the pages of the Lowry manuscript, I seem to mark the decline of my daily conduct with him to my return to gainful and stable employment, particularly my third-shift job at the main post office in Cincinnati. I've often said that my conversations with him at the Bay Horse Café started off as resembling William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, since Lowry's life and work fascinated me since I read about him in a 1989 Clifton magazine article. Toward the end, as Lowry declined mentally, it more resembled Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

All Within Reach

2011-10-05T23:59:00.002-04:00

Pictures of our new place will appear soon in this blog. There are two reasons why they have yet to appear. One is that Susie's and my new, beloved half double is still quite cluttered and disorganized.

The other is that the cord connecting my digital camera to the laptop seems to have been a casualty of the move. Replacing it cost me less than three dollars online, and there was an email yesterday saying it was in transit. So, even if I had taken pictures of my new abode, they are hermetically sealed in my camera until this new cord arrives.

Because of Columbus Day, I have a three-day weekend, and my numero uno project will be getting the place in order. It still won't be guest-ready for awhile, but I will be able to share some pictures quite soon, if I can stay motivated and focused enough to keep working.

I was not a little kid let loose in Santa's workshop when I went to the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio last Friday, so I am still furnishing the place piecemeal. On Saturday, my friend Steve and I made a few trips back and forth from my former place in Weinland Park (that has such a beautiful ring to it!), and between trips, he helped me move some of the more cumbersome furniture. Thanks to him, Susie's and my desks are now in place, as is my dresser. It took him, Susie, and me, working and sweating together, to get my king-sized mattress up the narrow stairway. (Once on the second floor, moving it into my bedroom was easy.) During moves, I have said (and heard) that recurring reassurance, "This isn't heavy, it's just bulky [or unwieldy]," but I didn't dare insult Steve's intelligence by saying that, especially when it came to the desks.

As I started to organize my study, I cursed myself for not taking the long table with me from Weinland Park. I paced the small room (where I am now writing), thinking about what to do in the meantime until I made a trip to Goodwill to buy a table. Then, I made my first trip to the basement since the leasing agent walked me through the place the first time. I wasn't sure why I was going down there. Susie and I hadn't taken anything down there.

Soon, I was glad I made the trip. I found an old door leaning against the basement wall, and hauled it up to the office. I stacked milk crate bookcases two high on the left and the right, and put the door across them. I plan to go to Family Dollar and buy a folding chair for Susie's and my desks, but in the meantime I am sitting on a small wooden workbench that I found downstairs.

The people who live on N. 4th St. between Maynard and Hudson must have had a good laugh early yesterday evening. Susie is currently sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor, since the Furniture Bank didn't have a box spring. While I was between projects at work yesterday, I sneaked a peek at Columbus Underground's Website, just in time to see a notice from a woman pop up. She had a queen-sized box spring free for the taking, and she lived in Clintonville. She had brought it from her previous apartment, and found her stairs were too narrow for the mattress to fit.

Three or four emails later, I was headed north on N. 4th St. wheeling a dolly a friend loaned me. (This friend works at Lowe's, so obtaining dollies is as easy as my bringing home pens and tape from my job!) This person's house was several blocks north of Maynard, north of Hudson and near the rim of the Glen Echo Ravine. She and I managed to get the queen-sized mattress onto the sidewalk, and she centered it onto the dolly.

And then the fun started. She was trying--mostly in vain--to suppress her laughter as I made my way back toward Maynard. I decided to pull the dolly, holding the mattress up against it with one hand and letting it rest on my shoulders. Pushing it ahead of me was out of the question--I would have no visibility.

The half mile distance never seemed so long. The mattress was just too wide, so I had to stop and turn it sideways for telephone poles, or to avoid breaking limbs off small trees, or tearing off the mirrors on parked cars. The mattress completely dwarfed the dolly. (It was like when a friend and I moved a queen-sized box spring and mattress on the top of his small car, tied there only with bed sheets. I'm sure we resembled a ladybug trying to carry a two-by-four.)

Crossing Hudson Street was a nightmare. It is a major entryway to Interstate 71, so there is traffic almost constantly. Many motorists stopped for red lights sat behind their steering wheels with dropping jaws looking at this bearded lunatic with his pathetic dolly and his gigantic burden.

The railroad bridge near the intersection of Hudson and N. 4th Sts. (The bridge crosses above Hudson St.) The picture is from Amymyou's Photostream on Flickr.

I was frustrated enough to consider abandoning the box spring in the nearest obliging alley, trying to be as inconspicuous and innocent-looking as possible as I leaned it against someone's garbage cans and then beat a hasty retreat, dragging a clattering metal dolly behind me.

A young (late teens, early 20s) couple walking their dog took pity on me. The guy and I carried the mattress at waist level the two or so blocks (but never had two blocks seemed so long than it did last night!), and his girlfriend followed us with the dolly.

The box spring is on the front porch. After I clear a path, I will make an attempt to get this unwieldy piece of furniture up to Susie's bedroom, although I think I'm procrastinating because I'm afraid I'll discover the same thing my benefactor did--that the stairs are too narrow, and this box spring can't fold in two, the way a mattress can.

And if this turns out to be the case, the next step for the box spring is the Columbus Freecycle.

Susie turns 14 tomorrow. She understands that her big gift was the new computer, replacing the one the thieves took. She and I will split a small cake, and on Saturday I'll take her to Studio 35 to see Star Trek II: ~~Chekov Screams Again~~ The Wrath of Khan. I have already ordered a gift she has wanted for some time--a year of Seventeen--but the first issue has yet to arrive.

Despite my loathing of Bill O'Reilly, I am reading his current book, Killing Lincoln, mainly because any new book about the Lincoln assassination is a must-read for me. Already his narrative style is starting to grate on me. He has introduced Lincoln several times as "the man with 14 [or 13, or 12] days to live...", which reminded me of a Discovery Channel show I liked, Final 24, describing the last hours of the lives of notable people, such as Jim Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, and Nicole Brown Simpson.

Don't Know My Own Strength

2011-09-30T23:37:00.003-04:00

In less than two hours, it will be October 2011. Indeed a red-letter day for Susie and me, since we will officially be in residence in Old North Columbus (informally known as Baja Clintonville). As I was there today, I saw all the external signs that the place is indeed our new residence. (You'd think that the three new keys on my ring would be assurance enough for me, but I still seek other evidence as well.) There was a change-of-address acknowledgement from the U.S. Postal Service, a notice from the credit union letting me know my change of address went through okay, and a letter to Susie from her grandfather in Wisconsin.

The first piece of mail addressed to me at the new place came from my ex-employer.

The books came over on Tuesday night. My friend John, who labored with me in the purgatory known as Medco Health, helped me transport two pickup truck loads of books from Weinland Park to Old North. (We stopped at Tee Jaye's for a late meal in between runs.) Wherever my books are, that is home for me. So, one whole corner of the living room contained stacks and stacks of milk crates.

Today marked the arrival of the furniture. In the previous entry, I included a plug for the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio, and thanks to them, we have furniture in the new place. My associate pastor Eric met me at their headquarters on S. Yale Ave., not too far from my old house in Franklinton, and I went through the warehouse picking out dressers, mattresses, box springs, a love seat, and a La-Z-Boy. Susie and I have identical desks--heavy oak desks that were once in dormitories.

Two thirds of the way through the selection process, the warehouse foreman casually mentioned that it was curbside delivery. The truck driver and his assistant would not carry the furniture inside the house. That was totally on me.

I was happy to pay the $55 delivery fee, so I didn't fume too much about their not bringing it into the house. The title of this entry came from my realization that, although it wouldn't be pleasant, I could indeed haul everything inside. It took the better part of two hours, and I had to resort to such creative tactics such as pushing the dresser end over end, and singlehandedly moving Susie's dresser up the stairs. (Gravity was not my friend during that experience, and I am still marveling over the fact it did not shift and come down on top of me.) During the time I was moving the mattresses upstairs, I came away convinced they were alive.

Common sense prevailed enough to keep me from being completely foolhardy with the furniture moving. There is a large TV sitting on top of the refrigerator, but under no circumstances will I bring that down by myself. The desks are so heavy that tonight they are sitting on my new front porch.

Tonight was Community Presentation Night at The Graham School, where Susie is a freshman. Each class presented its Septemberim projects, including Susie's "Writing for the Internet" class. (During the first month of school, the students spent entire days in a single class of their choosing.) Of course, Susie's blog was among the many displayed in the classroom. (The teacher arrayed laptops around the room, each open to the home pages of the students' blogs.)

This indeed has been one of those overloaded days. I came in to work for two hours before I headed over to the Furniture Bank, and that was the slowest moving part of the day. There were no doctors' reports awaiting dictation when I logged on at 8 a.m., but the rest of the day went manic really quickly. I filled out two pages of paperwork before I went to the warehouse to select furniture. As soon as the furniture guys left (around 12:45 to 1 p.m.), I immediately went to work getting the furniture indoors. It looked like a cross between an eviction and a yard sale when the truck left, so I moved everything out of the yard and either onto the porch (the desks) or into the house (everything else). As soon as I finished that, I headed straight to Columbus State to get my paycheck, and then to the credit union to cash it. (It wasn't until I was back downtown and walking from Rhodes Hall to the credit union that I realized that I had done the entire furniture-moving project on an empty stomach! Next stop was Subway.)

Susie has a slight cold, but she's soldiering on with school, and her enthusiasm about the new house is keeping the symptoms at bay. I think that all the heavy lifting (literally!) gave my immune system a boost. I'm one of those people who doesn't get sick easily, but when it happens, I make up for all my health all at once and get dreadfully ill, with a vengeance.

As long as I get sick once this move is finished, and not during, I won't complain too excessively.

What Hath God Wrought?

2011-09-26T00:05:00.000-04:00

I guess the first words Samuel Finley Morse sent by telegraph are an appropriate way to christen my new computer. After the theft earlier this month, I spent much time on the phone and online with Purchasing Power, a union benefits which enables me to buy computers through payroll deduction. (Thirty-nine payments, and this baby--and the computer I bought for Susie--will be ours free and clear.)

So, this is the first blog entry on my spankin' brand new Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv7. The two computers (along with the various accessories and program disks) have been arriving all week, but tonight I finally cut the boxes open and set up both machines.

My new machine.

This afternoon, the leasing agent gave me the keys (all three of them) to our new half double on Maynard Ave. Officially, Susie and I will be in residence Saturday, although we're going to begin moving in piecemeal during the week. (I am leaving most, if not all, of the furniture behind. One of the reasons I'm leaving Weinland Park is to get away from the two-legged pests around me. It would be counterproductive to take six-legged ones with me. Thanks to the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio, I'll be able to start over from the ground up with new furnishings in our new place.) Susie was happy as ever when she came home this afternoon (from a Unitarian Universalist Youth Conference in Kirtland, Ohio) and walked through the house the second time. The floors smelled of fresh varnish, and all the keys worked.

Susie and I are "in exile" this week. Last Sunday afternoon, I was jumped and robbed on E. 6th Ave. while walking to Kroger, after cutting across Weinland Park Elementary School's playground. If I wasn't already vacating the neighborhood, I think I would be much more traumatized by the event, especially if I had the feeling that there was no escape. The kid that ran up behind me and sent me sprawling across the sidewalk didn't cause any physical damage, other than some pulled muscles in my shins and two skinned knees. A bizarre byproduct of the mugging was that I am so grateful that I use a debit card much more often now. If this had happened anytime before this spring, I would have cashed my paycheck on payday and carried one or two weeks' worth of wages around in cash in my wallet. So, as it was, this thug came away with $7 in cash, but I still had money available, even with payday almost a week away. So, we've been staying with Pat and his family until we officially move into our place in the Old North.

I spent much of this weekend working. The fall quarter started at Columbus State Community College, so I worked eight hours yesterday and four hours today. The four hours today were much more boring. I was operating at a serious sleep deficit, because Pat, his daughter, and some of his friends and I went to see Metropolis at the Grandview Theater. It was the first time I had seen Fritz Lang's dystopian 1927 movie, and it was Fritz the Nite Owl's September offering. The show started at 11, with the latest episodes of Aidan 5 and Metropolis-related music videos. I wasn't in bed until nearly 4 a.m., and out of bed again a little after 7:15. I ran outside after showering and dressing, and barely made it to work on time. As Messrs. Lennon and McCartney would say, I made the bus in seconds flat.

So what was the high point of the work day? Nationwide Insurance's world headquarters looms to the east of the Discovery Exchange, and I watched workers on a scaffold (like high-rise window-washers use) install a letter t at the top floor of One Nationwide Plaza. They've already installed Nationwide's trademarks and the letters N and a. Looking out the windows facing west, I could watch the workers as they set the t in place.

Even a four-hour work day, on very little sleep, seems to drag on forever. It was a little more bearable because there were two overflowing carts loaded with returned books, so I disappeared into the shelves and put the books back where they belonged. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't at church, but this is the only Sunday of the quarter that the bookstore is open, and every little bit of extra cash comes in handy. It was both a blessing and a curse that I had something to look forward to--Susie's return from the conference, and getting the keys to our new abode.

Amazing that I'm able to hit the right keys, and so post a blog entry that looks like passable English. I am still learning this keyboard--it doesn't quite feel right to me yet, although I know I am going to spend many quality hours with it in time to come (especially if I make another quixotic attempt at National Novel Writing Month come November). Add to that the fact that I am quite exhausted, and I'm surprised this post doesn't resemble a spilled type tray.

Another milestone of the weekend: I made a pot of chicken soup for dinner tonight, a very generous portion that served all six of us, with ginormous portions left over. Tanya walked me through the procedure step by step, and I ate two whole bowls of it, and everyone was sated. I received a lot of compliments. Next week, I'm learning split pea soup.

Susie Sees Her New Home--Inside and Out

2011-09-17T17:23:00.000-04:00

Around dusk last night, Susie and I took the bus from our soon-to-be-ex neighborhood (Weinland Park) so I could give her a brief tour of the half-double in Old North Columbus (known more informally as Baja Clintonville). I was racing the sunset, and only expected her to see the exterior. I won't have the keys in my possession until a week from tomorrow, and we don't officially live there until October 1.

Our timing was excellent. We got off the bus and were walking westward on East Maynard, and the first thing I noticed was that our half double was blazing with light. I looked up and I saw Jerome, the leasing agent I've been emailing, speaking with, and meeting with since the word go, as he crossed the street from his truck, paintbrush in hand. I was glad to see him, and asked if I could give Susie a brief tour of her new home. He said sure, so we went in.

Normally, a house full of empty rooms doesn't attract much interest, but Susie walked from room to room, quite enthralled. The fact that it's not in Weinland Park is 95% of the charm, to be sure, but she was already mentally planning where her bedroom furniture will go in the new place. (She's decided she doesn't want to have the head of her bed under the windowsill, because she's tired of hitting herself in the head upon awakening.) She took over the master bedroom when Steph moved out, but I'm reclaiming it in this new place. All of the rooms smell like fresh paint, and Jerome said the only major project remaining was to stain and varnish the floors. (I like hardwood floors, especially since I don't own a vacuum cleaner at present. There was shag carpeting on the upper floors when I took the first tour of the place, but it's gone now. That was mainly because the previous tenants had a big dog they let run wild--which may be okay if you live out in the country, but not in a half double in the big city. The shag carpeting smelled of dog urine, but when I came to hand over the check for the deposit, the carpet was gone and the second floor deodorized.)

Susie and I spent the next hour at Kafé Kerouac, using their computers. I thought about writing a blog entry last night, but I was using a computer that dropped its Internet connection whenever somebody sneezed, and a machine that was very slow to respond to anything I typed. I am a very fast typist, and using that computer last night reminded me of what I heard about Linotype operators back in the days of molten lead and hot type. The mark of a good linotypist was that he would have to stop and wait for the machine to catch up to him. For me it was just frustrating.

We walked south on Indianola most of the way home. The evening was young, and students are starting to return to Ohio State for the fall quarter, so there were students wandering around with cases of beer. It was barely 11 p.m., and already quite a few of them were under the influence.

We began to smell smoke around Indianola and E. 11th Ave. At first, it was a sooty smell, like someone had been barbequing and had removed the food from the grill. But the smell kept getting more intense the further south we walked, and before long I suspected there was probably a fire somewhere nearby. We were close enough to campus for me to think at first it was someone being careless with an impromptu bonfire or couch-burning, but as we walked further from campus, we began heading east toward our house.

It says a lot about Weinland Park and how unsafe we feel when I told Susie we should walk toward the fire. I knew we would be safe there, because a fire would have police officers and firefighters everywhere, so nothing could happen to us. We were walking past St. Sophia Orthodox Cathedral at Indianola and E. 9th Ave. when I looked east and saw a column of black smoke rising up against the night sky. I knew the fire had to be pretty much under control, because I saw two fire engines leaving the scene at a rather leisurely pace. As we walked, I saw a few embers of flames glowing here and there on the roof of a building, and I guessed right away where the building was.

There was a 1969 comedy movie called If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. A similar phrase would be, "If it's burning, this must be N. 5th St." (I've explained it before, but to avoid confusion: The numbered streets in Columbus are the exact opposite of Manhattan's. In Columbus, streets run north-south, avenues run east-west.)

And sure enough, a white frame duplex on N. 5th St. was on fire. To my untrained eye, it looked like a total loss. I've walked past it before, when headed toward OSU or anywhere else north of Weinland Park, and the doors were boarded up and the windows painted shut. Whether this was arson or not, I have no idea. Before I began typing this entry, I looked at The Columbus Dispatch's Website, and there was no story about it. Fires on N. 5th St. no longer count as news. My neighbor Rory's blog hasn't mentioned it yet, and he has had an ongoing series about Weinland Park fires.


Weinland Park's official flag.

Last night's fire made me more thankful than ever that we will be leaving this dismal neighborhood. During the year it has been home, I tried to reassure myself I was living there ahead of the curve. (I have vague memories of when the Short North was a neighborhood no sane person would venture into after dark, and now it's the trendiest neighborhood in Central Ohio.) If anything, the neighborhood has deteriorated even further in the past year. The drug peddling, the mugging, and the burglaries have become more brazen.

Susie wants out of Weinland Park as much as I do, and it is two weeks before we officially live in the 'Ville again. However, she did show a naivete about the neighborhood that almost made me laugh. I went ahead and ordered two new laptops, and asked that they be shipped c/o a friend's house--he works at home a lot, and his wife is usually home during the day. I wondered about bringing them home to Weinland Park, and our neighbors seeing us bringing in new computers. "We can do it while everyone is at work and school," Susie suggested.

Work? And school? Weinland Park residents?

A Memorable 9/11 for Susie and Me

2011-09-11T16:19:00.000-04:00

In perusing the blogosphere and Facebook posts today, it would almost seem like self-indulgent sacrilege to post anything other than reflections and reminiscences about the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Maybe, like me, you are 9/11'd out. I do not downplay the horror, bloodshed, and tragedy, but I write of personal matters today because it may be a little while before I will have access to a computer for blogging purposes.

Why? Both Susie's and my laptop computers, as well as our Wii console, were stolen last night/early this morning. I am just thankful that Susie was not in town when it happened. She was at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Dayton, at youth chaplain training. It may be fortunate that I was not at home. I was at a concert at the Dude Locker in Clintonville, and discovered my back door ajar and both computers missing upon my return. (It shows how little I use the Wii--Susie noticed it was gone; I didn't.)

The event finalized any lingering doubts that I have had about getting the hell out of Weinland Park. I moved there last year with the same high hopes and enthusiasm as I did when we lived in Franklinton, eager to do good and go a step beyond the people who were full of solutions about a blighted area, retreating at 5 p.m. to the safety of Worthington or New Albany. Now I see it's an area where the children are out of control and where the civic leaders who see it as the next Olde Towne East seem to think of mugging, burglary, and drug pushing as performance art.

Happily, I can report that our exodus from Weinland Park is a fait accompli. Soon after Susie came home from Dayton, I met a leasing agent and handed over a cashier's check. As of October 1, Susie and I will be returning to the 'Ville (Clintonville). I found a three-bedroom half double in Baja Clintonville, around the corner from the Maynard Avenue United Methodist Church. The price is affordable, and the landlord has been hard at work on improvements in the week or two since I first looked at the place. The previous tenants were two graduate students who liked to party and who must have thought it was bad karma to housebreak their dog, so the leasing agent, I think, was happy to be renting to a single parent and teenage daughter.

Aerial photograph of the general area where Susie and I will live.

The news about the burglary was pretty upsetting to Susie, so I was glad that I was able to offset with the news that our time in Weinland Park is very brief. I think she had begun to despair of our ever getting out of there, and I admit that I was mysterious about the fact I was meeting with a rental agent this afternoon.

We don't have the keys yet. The owner still wants to do a little more work, but he will hand me the keys on the 25th (two weeks from today), and that is when the move-in process begins. Since my soon-to-be-ex-landlord was not all that conscientious about keeping vermin at bay (the two- and six-legged variety), Susie and I will not be moving as much. The biggest pain, as always, will be books. (I have three milk cartons consisting of diaries alone. You can imagine what the rest of the library is like!)

I am hoping the computers are insured. I am buying them through a purchasing plan my union sponsors, and theft should be covered under that. If not, back to the drawing board and start buying another computer. This is the one time in my life I've been thankful for a dry spell, writing-wise. I have to admit there is not much writing that was lost on my laptop. I wrote The Sad Hospital on a typewriter, and my memoir about Robert Lowry (which has been in the home stretch for over a year and a half, "in measurable distance of its end," to quote the telescreen announcer in 1984) exists in several incarnations, including a hard copy I printed out and an optical disk. Susie, I am afraid, has lost several poems, stories, and projects with the theft of her machine.

Mixed Feelings About a Street Shrine

2011-09-05T02:36:00.000-04:00

Columbus police fatally shot a 21-year-old man a month ago, about a hundred yards from where I live. I was not home when this happened, and thankfully Susie was in Florida when it happened. Apparently, the police came to serve arrest warrants on the guy, and he bolted from the house on N. 5th where they found him, and ran out to N. 4th, shooting at the police on the way. They fired back at him, and he was dead at the scene. Most troubling, this happened around dinnertime, when N. 4th St. is quite busy. Across the street, elementary school-aged children were on the field at Weinland Park Elementary School, with football and cheerleading practices.

A picture of Weinland Park (with Weinland Park Elementary School in the background) that Steph took in November.

On my way home from work the next day, I glanced out the bus window and I saw an impromptu shrine at the site where he died. Mylar balloons and flowers clustered around a foam rubber cross, and people had left cards and small stuffed animals. (My first experience with these little street shrines was in Cincinnati, where I would occasionally see them set up at the site of fatal car accidents.)

I confess to some ambivalence when seeing this shrine--now dismantled, since the guy's burial. My first feelings were in no way charitable. Why is anyone honoring this guy? I wondered. According to the newspaper, his resumé included outstanding warrants for receiving stolen property, aggravated robbery, and illegally possessing a firearm. The police were not coming to get him because of too many jaywalking tickets. He pulled his weapon on the officers first. This was not a case of a trigger-happy officer who fires on someone, only to find out the person had been reaching into his pocket for a cell phone or a pack of cigarettes. Nor was this a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time while on his way to visit his bedridden grandfather. (I thought of an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street when Detective Frank Pemberton sees graffiti memorializing a thug who had died in an exchange of gunfire with police. Pemberton looks at the graffiti with contempt, and proceeds to spit on the dead criminal's name.)

But equally disturbing were some of the comments posted on the TV news Websites. I looked at the video clips of the news coverage, and almost all of them thanked the police for saving the taxpayers money on trial and prison expenses. The most brutal comment was "Cleanup on Aisle 5!!" My normal reaction is to scroll past wisdom like this and say, "What an asshole!", but I was caught up short by the first thought that ran through my head when I saw the shrine.

It takes effort, but I have to remember that this young man was someone's son, maybe someone's father. I even try to remember John Donne's words:

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

And that includes the death of this young man, or even the death of Osama bin Laden.

My feelings for police have been lukewarm at best for most of my adult life. I never considered becoming a police officer, mainly because part of the job involved carrying a weapon. (The only law enforcement job I ever seriously considered was Postal Inspector, but that too involves carrying a gun. Weapons are deal-breakers for me, job-wise.) As a teenager, I compiled a rather impressive portfolio of status offenses, but I was only arrested when I was in my 20s, arrested for disorderly conduct in Athens while I was a student at O.U. When I appeared in Athens Municipal Court, I pleaded no contest. I was quite under the influence when arrested that night.

That didn't elevate my esteem of police, but I never embraced blind hatred of them. When I lived in Cincinnati and habituated the Subway on West McMillan, the people behind the counter often played a compact disk of anarchist punk band Chumbawamba's 1992 album Shhh, an album I enjoyed (and recently downloaded from Amazon.com) immensely. One of the songs was "Happiness is Just a Chant Away." The last half of the song parodies the Hare Krishna mantra with the words "Harry Roberts, Harry Roberts, Roberts Roberts, Harry Harry." Harry Roberts was a British career criminal who killed three police officers, and soccer hooligans and rioters are fond of chanting his name, along with a charming little song "Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers," sung to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down."

Discussion about Weinland Park crime seems to bring out the opposite of "the better angels of our nature" cited by Lincoln. In this entry, which I posted in May, I described when a child, aged six or seven at the most, walked up to me for no reason and hit me with a closed fist, running away giggling to his friends who watched him from a street corner. I described the incident on a message board on Columbus Underground, and I was appalled when one reader suggested I start carrying pepper spray or a Taser, and if it happens again, use them on the kid. The debate about whether or not it was appropriate to Taser a six-year-old went on for days.

In this morning's Columbus Dispatch, I read an article about the 1996 murder of the owner of the D&J Carryout, an eyesore and blight to Weinland Park located on the corner of N. 4th St. and E. 8th Ave. The current owners have learned nothing from this legacy. They allow the place to be used for drug deals, kids are loitering on its stoop each hour it's open, and the owners turn a blind eye to the kids who attack pedestrians for their money and cell phones. This Google Maps picture (enter "1395 N. 4th St., Columbus, Ohio 43201" in the search engine) accurately depicts the intersection, although the apartment building on the northwest corner has been razed since this was taken. Do a 360-degree turnaround on the picture and see the disrepair of the buildings and properties.

I barely knew that the previous owner of the D&J was murdered. When the murder happened in January 1996, Steph and I were living in a furnished one-bedroom apartment on Highland Ave., just south of the OSU campus, and planning our wedding. (These were rather cramped quarters, since I rented the place fully intending it to be a bachelor apartment.) I had no reason to be on that corner. I came away much more informed once I finished reading this article. Yet one of the comments posted on The Dispatch's Website doesn't mention the senselessness of the murder, or the fact that it left a family without a husband and father. All it said was, "He was probably another Muslim terrorist who could not speak English and paid no taxes." (The murdered owner of the D&J, Dib Yasin, was Palestinian, born in Jerusalem.)

Below is a video that I took last December, when the apartment building in the Google Maps shot was beginning to come down:

I guess gone are the days when tragedy brings out our nobler instincts. I have lived almost a year in Weinland Park. I was attracted at first by its cheap rent, and its proximity to the Really, Really Free Market and the Sporeprint Infoshop. Careful readers of this blog will also recall that when Steph and I first realized 'tis time to part, we originally planned that Steph would have custody of Susie. Now that I am raising Susie on my own, the urge to vamoose from this area takes precedence over many other things. Gandhi often said the only tyrant before whom he bowed down was the "still small voice within me." The still small voice within me is saying to try and leave this neighborhood as soon as possible.

Note-Passing is Alive and Well

2011-08-28T03:39:00.000-04:00

Your humble blogger has been away from Blogspot these past few days because of pressing business elsewhere. Susie arrived home from Florida early Wednesday evening, and I feted her at our beloved Blue Danube Restaurant. Both of us stayed up way too late. She had a great time in Florida, and regaled me with stories of her visits to the Salvador Dali Museum and Weeki Wachee Preserve.

Then, I was a delegate to the 29th Biennial Convention of OCSEA (the Ohio Civil Service Employees' Association) and AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees). This took up my attention from Thursday morning until mid-Saturday afternoon. I won't bore my readers with gavel-to-gavel accounts of the general sessions, or the elections. There is nothing to report on the travel front, since the convention was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown, a mere block and a half from the William Green Building. Representatives came from all over Ohio, from almost every agency.

The convention, and Susie's month in Florida, made me realize how much instant communications have come to dominate us, and how we didn't even miss them as recently as 25 years ago. During the convention, many people had their cell phones out, texting to people not on the floor in Battelle Hall. I sent several messages to an alternate delegate, keeping him abreast of the election and the floor fights. When someone proposed rewording an article in the constitution, lo and behold, it was up on the big screen within a minute or so. Delegates and others with loved ones on the East Coast kept news and weather Websites handy on their iPads to track Hurricane Irene as it roars northward.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Instant communication, beginning with the telephone, created a false sense of urgency that we will never overcome. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, and before then, you had to wait for news from relatives worldwide until the mail arrived. I will grieve the death of the letter if it ever happens. The voluminous post-Presidential correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is invaluable and excellent reading--I'm surprised no one has made it into a two-character play. What would have been lost if they had telephones?

Henry David Thoreau

I realized during the convention that note-passing, which many teachers saw as a grave sin, never really went away. Instead of the surreptitiously folded piece of paper moving discreetly from hand to hand below the teacher's line of vision, we're now texting back and forth. At the convention, we were seated by districts, so someone in District 6 (my district) could easily communicate with a friend across Battelle Hall by touching a few buttons on a cell phone and hitting SEND.

Earlier in this blog, I described the 1925 crash of the naval airship Shenandoah, and how my grandfather ran home to get his camera when he saw the ship was in imminent danger. A co-worker mentioned that some kids today would ask, "Well, why didn't he use the camera on his phone?"

I grudgingly use cell phones. I am not sure I would if I didn't have a daughter living with me. My cell phones are usually a pretty sorry lot. I buy pre-paid ones at Family Dollar and use them until they break. My current one has no back. The back of the phone disappeared at the party after the World Naked Bike Ride, and I'm sure it was stepped on within minutes. So, I'm holding in the battery with a wide strip of Scotch tape, which I know is a Band-Aid measure. (I was amused by Stephen King's brief bio on his novel Cell: "Stephen King lives in Maine with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He does not own a cell phone.")

Susie is grateful, I think, to live in this era. Near the last day of school in June, she was going on a field trip, and realized, after she arrived at school, that she had forgotten the permission slip that I signed and gave to her. When I was in middle school, I would have just been shit out of luck. No permission slip, no field trip. But there was no problem, no crisis. She called me at work, and the school secretary faxed me the permission slip, I signed it and filled in all the appropriate information, faxed it back, and she was able to go on the trip.

5.8, or "But Did Thee Feel the Earth Move?"

2011-08-24T01:09:00.001-04:00

The two biggest events on my mind today are Susie's imminent return to Columbus (her plane will be landing at Port Columbus at 6:35 p.m. tomorrow night), and the earthquake that briefly rattled us here in Columbus today. The "5.8" title I gave this entry refers to the Richter scale reading. The other title is a line from For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Hemingway, a post-coital question that has become a cliché for romance (and comedy) writers worldwide.

We did feel the earth move at work today. The day was a slow one, as it often seems to me when I'm transcribing my least favorite doctor. Just before 2 p.m., I was at my desk releasing a batch of ex parte orders I had typed earlier in the day, when I saw my computer monitor jiggle just a little bit. At first, I thought I was seeing things--my mind was on an appointment later that afternoon, and I can't always trust my senses when I'm not sleeping well. I realized I wasn't hallucinating when two ballpoint pens perched near the edge of my desk rolled off onto the plastic mat under my chair's wheels. I jumped a little when they hit.

Two women who work in my area were giving each other What was that? looks, and one said, "Did you feel that?" The other said yes, although no one had any idea what "that" might be.

People in other sections of the 10th floor said they felt something as well. That was when the word earthquake began to travel from person to person--it was almost visible. The thought didn't come to mind, even after I saw the pens fall from my desk to the floor. A new supervisor is moving into our department, and I thought that workers transporting furniture into what will be her office were rolling something heavy (like a credenza or a desk) over a bump in the carpet.

I collapsed my work-related screen and pulled up The Weather Channel's Website. Even after typing in the ZIP code for my office building (43215), there was nothing about the earthquake, except in Tweets from readers (viewers?). There was a one-paragraph story about an earthquake in Virginia, however. I don't have access to Twitter or Facebook at work, but I can post to Twitter by sending texts from my cell phone. So, once I learned about the Virginia earthquake, I texted, Think we got a piece of the earthquake that hit Virginia. Shook my monitor and knocked some pens on the floor. My Twitter posts simultaneously appear on my Facebook page, and within minutes my friend Ivan in Vermont emailed me that he had been at the library in Fair Haven and his table wobbled. Another friend posted House rolling here in Massachusetts.

This is my second earthquake. I experienced a similar one in the summer of 1980, during my first visit to Cincinnati (no idea it would be my home by the end of the decade!). I was staying at a friend's house in College Hill, and mid-Sunday afternoon, I was riding a bike down his driveway and felt a small tremor, like an elevator stopping too abruptly. My friend's neighbors came out of their houses, and the word "earthquake" came up almost right away. One of the people had a weather band on his radio, and sure enough, that's what it was. I called Dad in Marietta, and he had felt it there as well.

The epicenter of this earthquake seems to be near Louisa, Virginia. This is a small town (pop. 1401), but I had heard of it. It is home to Twin Oaks Community, an intentional community that is still going strong, 44 years after its humble beginnings on a former tobacco farm. At loose ends as the end of high school neared, I wrote to Twin Oaks, contemplating going to live there, back in the long-ago days when I thought I could live communally. (I have nothing but respect for those who are able to do it, and who do; I just don't think I'm wired that way psychologically).

Below is an unusual move for this blog. I started this entry by clicking the Blog this! post from WBNS-TV's (Channel 10) Website, where the earthquake was the lead story. I wasn't home at 6 p.m., so I watched the news from their site. So, I've written this entry around the link to the video of tonight's news.

Since I sometimes allude to the music I'm playing while I type these entries, I want to go on record as saying that I don't have Carole King's album Tapestry ripped to this laptop, so therefore I was unable to commemorate the day by playing "I Feel the Earth Move." (I'm actually listening to The Marcels' cover of "Blue Moon," from 1961.)

Quake Rattles Buildings In Central Ohio

This Entry Shouldn't Be Happening

2011-08-22T05:05:00.000-04:00

That is to say, it shouldn't be happening at the present moment. The clock on the computer says 3:41 a.m. My cell phone is in agreement. In just under four hours, I need to step out the door and make my way to the bus stop, and then put in eight hours at the Industrial Commission.

Yet here it is, with the hands of the clock nearing 4 a.m., and I am wide awake. I did go to bed just before midnight, but did nothing but lie there in the dark for hours. This is ironic, because with narcolepsy, it's often a minute-to-minute struggle to prevent falling asleep, but try though I might, I couldn't wind down enough. When I was in a child, my bedroom was situated in such a way that the cars passing by on 7th St. cast moving shadows along the opposite wall from my bed. It didn't always work, but oftentimes that had a lulling effect on me, almost like counting sheep.

My current wakefulness may be because of a weekend of excess. From the late 1970s until Susie's birth in 1997, weekends of excess were not unusual for me. This weekend, I overdid it on two things--walking and sleeping. (There are worse things, I'm sure, but I am having a hard time understanding that at this precise moment.)

I've been overdoing it on the walking partly because I was making up for lost time. It's been too hot and too humid to walk for much of the summer, and the first day that the relative humidity was under 70%, I jumped at the chance, walking 5½ miles after work to Great Southern Shopping Center to pick up my new camera at Wal-Mart. Re-embracing walking also came as an attempt (not always successful) to shake off a bout of depression that has gripped me for much of the summer. One of the things I do when I'm on the "depressive" end of the bipolar pendulum is self-isolate. I'm not financially secure enough for the luxury of total agoraphobia, so I have managed to get out of the house to get to and from work each day. And at the end of the day, just doing that made me feel like I've donated a pint of blood.

I spent much of Friday night through Sunday morning pounding the pavement. I was out walking into the wee hours of Saturday morning, tumbling into bed as it was getting close to dawn. (Campus is quieter on weekend nights than it will be when OSU is in session, but there were still quite a few drunks out on High St.)

One thing I noticed while out walking around the bar patrons (and weaving through crowds of them on the sidewalks or at United Dairy Farmers) is the change in my attitude about seeing drinkers, and how radically it's changed from when I first went off the sauce. I made several halfhearted attempts to quit drinking after I left Athens in 1989, but they never lasted more than a few months at best. I didn't become a complete teetotaler until after Susie was born. For the first year or so, every time I passed a bar, saw people have a glass of wine with dinner, or even take Holy Communion (when I'd go with Steph to an Episcopal service; Episcopalians, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians use wine, and not grape juice, for Communion), a jealousy I didn't even know was there would surface. Looking inside a bar made me feel like the diabetic kid with his nose pressed against the candy store window. I don't feel that way anymore. And I haven't developed the convert's zeal that leads me to look down my nose at those who still imbibe. (I guess I could classify myself as straight edge these days, but my excessive caffeine consumption and the fact that I am an unapologetic carnivore would bump me from that culture in some circles.)

I burned quite a few calories walking (about 320 per hour at the pace I walk), but unfortunately I was too exhausted to go to Grandview in the morning for the matinee showing of The Terror. It would be weird to see Fritz the Nite Owl's show by daylight, but this was the movie that Susie and I missed because the 5 bus, snagged in post-Comfest traffic, never came.

I wrote about retiring a pair of shoes and replacing them at Goodwill in my previous entry. Saturday, Scott and I walked around the area north of Lane Ave. and west of High St., but stopped a little short of Clintonville itself. My pedestrian urges were not 100% sated, so after he dropped me off at home, sometime around 11:30, I couldn't concentrate on reading or writing, so I went out again.

Classes haven't started at Ohio State, and the football season doesn't start until September 3, so I wonder why the fires are already starting. Friday night-Saturday morning, someone on E. 11th Ave. set an old love seat on fire and threw it into the yard. Everyone seemed content to sit and watch it burn until the flames caused a wooden deck on the apartment next door to start smoldering. (All the lights were off in that apartment, so either everyone had gone to bed or no one was home.)

Early Sunday morning, I saw some smoke and an orange glow in one of the alleys just south of Lane Ave. I went over to see what was happening. A dumpster was burning. Three or four guys (and one woman) were standing in the alley; one had called 911, and the others were taking pictures of it with their iPhones. I have a cheap Motorola cell phone that can take about 20 seconds of footage at a time, so I turned it on and shot some pictures of the blaze before the firefighters arrived:

My guess is that someone set this fire. The young woman thought that it started when someone pitched a cigarette into the dumpster, but this had the earmarks of a deliberate fire. On the other side of the alley, several people stood in their yards and doorways, clustered around holding beer bottles and cans, watching it like it was a movie. I tried to keep my distance, before and after filming the above, mainly because I didn't know if anything explosive was in the dumpster. For all anyone knew, someone had discarded gasoline or aerosol cans in there.

I awoke late this morning with a bad pain in my left shin (and the right, but to a much lesser degree), and I knew that walk-a-thons like the ones of Friday and Saturday were out of the question. I geared down my pace considerably for the one-mile walk to Family Dollar to buy some socks and underwear, and negated all my healthy walking with a too-big lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken on W. 5th Ave. While I was at the main library later in the afternoon, I Twittered: Real dilemma on my hands here. Should I ignore the pain in my shin and walk today, so I can work off the huge meal I ate at KFC? A friend in San Francisco posted Listen to your shin, a reply that was "liked" by three people. (My Twitter posts automatically appear on my Facebook page.)

And I did listen to my shin for most of the day, but I came home and napped for an hour or two (thereby missing an early Sunday night meeting I had planned to attend, and had entered onto my cell phone--which is my appointment diary these days). When I awoke, the shin pain was bearable, but it was there. So I walked to Kroger and bought some naproxen, which may keep the pain at bay enough for me to do some walking for recreation and exercise.

I have had my Windows Media Player on shuffle while I've been typing, although I limit to the songs I ranked as five-star songs--a potpourri that varies from classic to New Wave. Considering my situation, it's bizarre that Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" came up just now. I guess it could have been worse; it could have been The Beatles' "Good Night."

Lazy Saturday: Missing Movie, Buying and Christening New (Old) Shoes

2011-08-20T20:03:00.002-04:00

My job at the Discovery Exchange (Columbus State's bookstore) is on hiatus until the day after Labor Day, so I've been enjoying this time off to the hilt, including a very open-ended Friday night bedtime. The downside to this is that I've ended up sleeping through Saturday morning and early afternoon events that I've not wanted to miss. But I am boasting a new--to me--pair of shoes.

Even though it was close to 5 a.m. when I tumbled into bed ~~last night~~ this morning, I fully intended to walk to Grandview this morning for the matinee re-showing of The Terror, starring Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff. (Fritz the Nite Owl showed it at midnight the Saturday of Comfest, and Susie and I waited and waited for Bus 5 to take us to Grandview Ave., but it never came, hopelessly snarled in all the northbound traffic exiting Goodale Park.)

The show started at 11 a.m., so I planned to have pavement under me by 9:30. My alarm went off at 8:45, I cursed it, shut it off, and promptly went back to sleep. It was past noon when I finally got out of bed for good. (I rationalized it by remembering my years of third-shift work, at The Crimson and at the Cincinnati post office, when 12 noon would be considered rising too early.)

I also took a pass on two chances to be civic-minded. The Stand Up for Ohio Festival was at the Ohio State Fairgrounds today, easily within walking distance (for me), and my original plan was to go after the movie. (The event featured the Ohio Players, Grand Funk Railroad, and Nikki Giovanni.) I couldn't summon the interest or mental energy to make my way there, despite being 100% on the same page with the goals of the organization--namely the repeal of Senate Bill 5, the bill which effectively ended collective bargaining for Ohio's civil servants.

The same was true for the Weinland Park Festival. Even though it was much closer, I declined to go to this as well. In the year that I have lived here, I have fallen almost completely out of love with Weinland Park, and I would have felt hypocritical going to the Festival, as if my warm body being there indicated that I affirmed and took pride in being a resident. At best, it would have been like going to the Thanksgiving dinner of relatives you loathe because they happen to set such a good table.

So what did you do, O blogger? I went to the Goodwill in Baja Clintonville (by the Giant Eagle) to buy shoes, since there were holes in the soles of the pair I was wearing. In my un- or underemployed days, I would have remedied this by filling the holes with newspaper and using the shoes until the soles started flapping. But today, for a little over $7, I came away with a gray and white pair of Adidas tennis shoes, and a black T-shirt from Sloppy Joe's in Key West. (I have never been to Key West, nor to Florida, but I bought the shirt because of the picture of Hemingway on the front. (Hemingway and friends habituated this bar until he moved from Key West in 1939.)

Once I put on the new shoes and pitched the ones I had been wearing, I broke them in by walking about three or four miles around Clintonville and the North Campus area. (I remember when I was delivering newspapers on Knox St. in Marietta when I was in high school. I overheard a little girl tell her mother, "I'm putting on my new shoes so I can break out in them!" Art Linkletter was right.)

When I sign onto online chat boards, I've considered using Walkingman as my screen name, but I haven't. I would think people would associate it with the James Taylor album of that name--one of his least commercially successful and one of my least favorite. A friend suggested Walkingdude, but I vetoed that right away. I've never liked the word dude, and I think it sounds idiotic without the word ranch after it. But the main reason is because this is one of the many nicknames Stephen King uses in The Stand for the demonic Randall Flagg, the novel's mega-antagonist.

Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg in the ABC-TV miniseries of The Stand.

I thought of this while I was eating a quick meal in Subway this afternoon. One of the books that came in at the library for me was Hardcases, which is Volume IV of Marvel Comics' graphic novel adaptation of The Stand, and I was reading it while I ate.

More walking is on for tonight. My friend Scott and I were going to go to the Eid ul-Fitr (end of Ramadan) celebration tonight at the Al-Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Hilliard, but then he remembered he promised to go to a bonfire at his brother's house, so we're walking after he comes back from the bonfire.

Meandered to St. Louis and Back

2011-08-15T23:31:00.000-04:00

The last time I was in St. Louis was in June 1993. I went with a Cincinnati friend who had an interview at St. Louis University Law School, so I came along to see my old friend John Bilgere. We saw firsthand the Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 during the trip, watching the Mississippi River running wild and viewing a completely flooded Laclede's Landing from the observation deck in the Gateway Arch.

The most recent journey to St. Louis just ended. Due to modem issues, I was unable to post contemporaneous entries, so now that I'm back at home, I can recount the highlights of the trip. I took pictures (officially christening my new Kodak EasyShare C143), wrote diary entries, and jotted down notes throughout the entire time I was on the road.

I've logged literally tens of thousands of miles on Greyhound since I was a teenager, but this was my first trip anywhere on Megabus. I have seen their brightly painted blue and yellow double-decker buses downtown and around the Ohio State campus, so I finally decided to try them for this long overdue trip--the first time I have seen John since 2001.

Megabus is not for the impatient traveler. Besides the reduced price, I thought it would be fun to take a circuitous route to St. Louis. I have hitchhiked there (from Marietta, in the summer of 1981), and once did a ride-share with someone going from Cincinnati to Kansas City, but otherwise have gone by Greyhound. All involved straight shots down Interstate 70.

Not this time. When Megabus emailed me my confirmation and my schedule, I saw that I would be going to St. Louis by way of Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Never take a child who says "Are we there yet?" on a Megabus.

I enjoyed the trip thoroughly. This was the first time I had ever ridden in the upper deck of a double-decker, and I was amused that I, at 5'8¾", was almost too tall to stand up straight in the aisle. I felt like I was being carried in a sedan chair as the bus climbed north up High St. through the Short North and the Ohio State area, just as the bars and nightclubs were starting to get busy.

Megabus passengers, at least from what I've seen on this little safari, are much more polite than the ones I've experienced in my many trips on Greyhound. If someone had an MP3 player, the volume was low. Cell phone conversations were in stage whispers. I was able to doze, write, and read without interruption. This was a far cry from my 1987 bus trip to California, when four or five guys (whom I knew by sight from O.U.) weren't happy that the bus was quiet, and decided to serenade everyone by loudly playing the theme from The Andy Griffith Show on their kazoos.

One way Megabus keeps their prices so low is that they have no physical ticket counter and no bus stations. I picked up the bus Saturday night at the corner of N. High St. and Nationwide Blvd., and, as dawn was breaking, our bus came to a stop on S. Canal St. in downtown Chicago, near Union Station. It was a warm morning, but I would have had to take shelter in Union Station itself had it been cold or rainy.

There was a billboard on the garage across the street. Advertising deals on a new condominium in downtown Chicago, it said, It would suck to miss this! The same could be said for Megabus, especially if you're between buses.

The layover was not a boring one. As I stepped off the bus, I saw a police officer putting two sawhorses across Canal St. where it intersects Jackson Blvd., and saw people standing around on the sidewalk. I explored the inside of Union Station for awhile, which didn't take too long, since many areas were restricted to Amtrak ticket-holders only.

Once back outside, I saw that the street was blocked because of the third annual XSport Fitness Rock-N-Roll Mini-Marathon. After hearing for years about the health-restoring power of running, whether jogging or all-out marathon racing, I become more and more committed to walking. I took some pictures (both still and video) during the race, and I guess running is the origin of the expression "No pain, no gain." I watched the videos after I downloaded them onto the laptop, and almost everyone looks like they're in agony.

Many people seem to be westbound this weekend. When it was time to continue the trip, Megabus had two buses at the ready. The Megabus coach was going straight to Kansas City, without taking on or dropping off any passengers anywhere else. They called in a charter (not a Megabus) to take passengers who were going to St. Louis, and it was a direct trip south on Interstate 55, except for a lunch break in McLean, a village just outside the Bloomington-Normal city limits

Mike Nevins met me at Union Station on Market St. in St. Louis, when my bus arrived--on time. He spoke about the condo where he will be living this fall. (His wife died this spring, and he is moving from their house into a condominium that would accommodate a childless widower much more practically.) Mike also presented me with a signed copy of Night and Fear, another posthumous collection of Cornell Woolrich's short stories, which he edited and for which he wrote the introduction. He gave me a brief tour of the Delmar Loop, which is "One of the 10 Great Streets in America," according to a 2007 report by the American Planning Association. I hadn't been to the Delmar Loop since 1993, so it looked completely different than I remembered it. (I was relieved to see that Vintage Vinyl, where I spent plenty of money on my 1993 trip--on everything from Dave Brubeck to Pink Floyd to Bach's Mass in B Minor--is still alive and well.)

My friend John has changed significantly since I last saw him in 2001. We met at a Unitarian youth conference, OPIK '79, in August 1979 in Delton, Mich. (OPIK--rhymes with topic--was an acronym for Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky, the states where most of the attendees lived. The reason the 1979 conference took place in Michigan is a long story I will not go into here.) I was 16 years old and full of piss and vinegar, and grateful to be away from my father, stepmother, and stepsisters, and meeting entirely new (to me) people. John and I picked each other, almost by default, in a workshop where you were supposed to pair off with someone you didn't know previously. And we've been friends since.

John developed multiple sclerosis last year, and initially it was the relapsing and remitting variety, but now it seems to be more degenerative. He is in a wheelchair, and is living in a skilled care facility a few blocks south of the Delmar Loop. We caught up on our lives in the last decade, although we have filled the gaps by phone calls and correspondence--both by U.S. Mail and email--throughout. I knew about his deteriorating physical condition, and he knew about the end of my marriage and my new life as a single father. The place where he lives is more hospital than apartment, and he is grateful for chances to go out to physical therapy, doctor appointments, and visits with his family. It was a far cry from the spring of 1982, when he came to visit me in Marietta and spoke of wanting to see Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. He had learned in school that Martha, thanks to the art of taxidermy, was at the Smithsonian Institution.

"Why don't we go see her?" I asked. I made a blizzard of phone calls, beginning with friends at the Unitarian Universalist Association's Washington Office, and found some generous friends of friends² who let us sleep in the living room of their D St. NE rowhouse. The next morning, we marched out to U.S. 50 on the outskirts of Parkersburg and put out our thumbs. That night, John saw the Capitol dome for the first time.

Our last road trip was the last time I saw him, in November 2001. He, Rich, and I went down to Hodgenville, Kentucky and saw the site where Abraham Lincoln was born at Sinking Spring Farm. (John is like me: Both of us have been to where Lincoln was born, and where he was assassinated and the room where he died--he for the first time on our 1982 hitchhiking trip--but not to Springfield, where Lincoln is buried.)

I restrained myself and did not buy anything at Vintage Vinyl, mainly because I wasn't sure how I'd transport LPs. As much as I love them, they are clumsy and would not fit in my backpack. I filled a few pages in my notebook with titles of albums that struck my fancy, and explored the Loop until I walked down to Skinker Blvd. and walked to the MetroLink stop there. (The MetroLink, St. Louis' light-rail system, was not there during my previous visit.) I rode the train to Union Station, and found I had several hours to kill before the 1:15 a.m. departure of my Megabus to Columbus (again via Chicago). I decided to walk toward the Gateway Arch.

Even as I walked easterly toward the Arch, I was wondering how foolhardy this was. I was worried that downtown St. Louis would be deserted on a Sunday night, even a warm summer Sunday night, and walking alone with a knapsack would broadcast "out of towner" to any potential thief. For a block or so down Market St., I felt like a big red neon arrow was following me, but it turned out downtown was anything but deserted. I knew the Arch would not be open, and I have made two or three trips inside on its tram to the observation deck, but I wanted to see it at night and get a few pictures.

The second of Taylor Swift's two Scottrade Center concerts was last night, and I had to thread my way through the blocks-long crowd of concertgoers who were leaving. Most of them were teenage girls, and younger, accompanied by their parents or other adults. I felt a lot better than I did during my 1992 trip, when I ran into the crowds leaving a Danzig concert at the American Theater. I saw quite a few kids ask their friends or parents to photograph them by Taylor Swift's trucks, which were all decorated with the artwork from her current album, Speak Now.

A very small portion of the post-Taylor Swift crowd as they left the Scottrade Center. Many were behind me when I took this picture, and the crowd (and the cars) stretched far beyond my range of vision.

The Taylor Swift crowd was much better behaved than the crowd leaving Busch Stadium, where the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Colorado Rockies. I'm glad there was enough down time between the two that the groups did not cross paths.

I slept most of the way northward on I-55 on the return trip. I had seen the terrain during the trip the day before, and it was dark out, so there wasn't much to see. During my Chicago layover, I was amused by the juxtaposition between all the white- and blue-collar people pouring out of buses and Union Station to head to their jobs, and the excruciating, though comparatively carefree, hurrying and rushing of the runners on Sunday morning.

Once the bus was southbound on Interstate 65 toward Indianapolis, the driver got on the speaker and told us that we'd be heading straight to Columbus after Indianapolis, which meant a straight shot east on I-70. I was pleased, because I knew that meant we'd pass through Henry County, where my stepmother's parents lived after their retirement. (During our visit in 1978, I decided to hike from their house in Spiceland to New Castle, nearly eight miles north on Indiana State Road 3. I wasn't feeling particularly energetic; I just wanted to get the hell away from everyone.)

The only diversion in the small town was watching teenage boys trying to puncture Spiceland's water tower with their BB guns. I guess we all need a Sisyphean task to make life truly worthwhile. One time I actually heard a BB make contact with the water tower, and we all waited to hear the sound of water trickling. (The BB bounced against the metal and flew off, of course, but what did we know of ballistics?)

I told John this story at another Unitarian youth conference, this one in Western Pennsylvania. Years later, when he came to visit me in Columbus, he said he had a surprise for me. It was a picture of the Spiceland water tower that he had taken on a previous journey on I-70!

Heading Into One of My Stephen King Bacchanalias

2011-08-09T23:52:00.000-04:00

I can go for years without reading anything by or about Stephen King, and then, for no reason whatsoever, I'll start immersing myself in his works--mostly the older stuff (1970s-1980s). I think the newest of his novels I've read is Under the Dome, but I love to read and reread the novels and short stories I discovered in high school. (Anyone who knows me at all will not be surprised to know that I am eagerly awaiting November 8, when his science fiction novel 11/22/63 appears. Two of my interests--the John F. Kennedy assassination and Stephen King--will intersect in that book.)

Thunder crackles lightly outside right now, which is appropriate for the subject matter of this post. I'm offsetting it with The Beach Boys, my two-record vinyl copy of Endless Summer. (Right now, I'm typing with "Surfin' USA" blasting from my turntable.)

Boredom at work was the impetus that launched my latest Stephen King binge. When I have no doctors' reports to transcribe, and have completed the stack of ex parte orders, I spend the rest of the day re-indexing the medical documents that both Injured Workers and employers submit.

How do I approach this task? George Orwell described it eloquently in Chapter IV of 1984:

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite toward him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

To alleviate the boredom, I looked through the extensive disk collection of a co-worker, a woman in Indexing. (I have plenty of music disks, but wasn't in the mood to listen to any music that day.) To my delight, she had the Books on Tape edition of The Stand. She had managed to put the complete reading on three MP3 disks.

I need to qualify my use of the word "complete" above. When King first published The Stand in 1978, entire sections went by the wayside. The editor was quite brutal with the blue pencil. (As a character once said on Lou Grant about an editor: "With him, War and Peace becomes War and you don't even bleed!") The original hardcover was 823 pages. I read the book during high school, over most of an Easter weekend. I thought initially that it was a run-of-the-mill science fiction novel, since the first section described an artificial influenza virus made by--who else?--the military. The virus has a 99.4% mortality rate, and I followed the main characters, part of the 0.6% immune to the virus, trying to bury their dead and reestablish their lives with fellow survivors. I followed intently as the survivors gravitated toward the Stand described in the title, as some follow the shadowy and faceless Antichrist figure Randall Flagg as he establishes a cruel law-and-order technology-efficient society in Las Vegas, punishing disobedience with (literal) crucifixion. Some follow a centenarian African-American woman from Nebraska named Mother Abigail, and attempt to establish a democratic society in Boulder, and struggle with waste disposal, getting the electricity going again, etc.

Hardcover dust jacket of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (1990).

The version I listened to at work was the 1978 edition of The Stand. Only Stephen King would have the chutzpah to take a book that many reviewers said was already too long, and in 1990 reissue it. This time it was The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, with 329 additional pages. I was living in Cincinnati when it came out, and decided to forego buying groceries to go down to B. Dalton downtown and buy it the week it appeared. The added tonnage turned out to be quite valuable. It filled in a lot of backstory, clarified questions that arose as a result of careless editing, and I enjoyed the book a lot more.

My apartment building manager, the myopic George Wagner, who would introduce me to the world of pulp conventions and the Old-Time Radio and Nostalgia Convention, went a step further. This epitomizes the person with way too much free time. He sat down with the 1978 edition of The Stand and the hardcover edition, ballpoint pen in hand, and marked what had changed, and how. (He later gave me this book as a birthday present, and it sits on my shelf between Signet paperbacks of the 1978 and 1990 editions, as a transition volume.) "All new," "mostly new," "about 35 words missing here" dot the pages, along with brackets and parentheses representing where the text changed one edition to the next.

I ordered a DVD of The Stand miniseries from Amazon.com recently, and it came in the mail on Saturday, waiting for me when I came home from work at the bookstore. This finally caused me to get off my ass and buy the appropriate cord to hook up my VCR/DVD to the TV. I stayed up late Saturday night and watched the first two parts, "The Plague" and "The Dreams."

I was quite happy when Recorded Books issued an unabridged reading of It, which is my all-time favorite Stephen King novel. It is the story of a shape-shifting, child-killing monster that lives in the sewers and tunnels underneath a city in Maine. The monster goes on a killing spree every 30 or 40 years and then goes dormant. Seven outcast teenagers (a girl emotionally and physically--and possibly sexually--abused by her stepfather, a bookish Jewish boy, a stuttering aspiring writer whose brother was killed by this monster, and the only African-American kid in town are among the seven) come close to killing It in 1958, and make a pact to return to their city should It ever return. In 1985, murders and disappearances happen again, and they come back to do battle.

It was another huge book (1142 pages), but I read it over the course of almost one day--"a day" being a 24-hour period. I remember that it was the summer of 1987, and I was living in a furnished room above the Dairy Barn in Carthage (in the Mill Creek Valley, about six miles north of downtown Cincinnati) while working as a typesetter at Feicke Web. I started reading about midnight one Friday night, propped up in bed with the fan and the radio going full blast, and by morning being unable to put the book down.

Here is just how much the book drew me in. In mid-morning, I decided to escape the confines of my room (and the Carthage neighborhood--go to Google Maps and type in "6901 Vine St., Cincinnati, OH 45216" and you'll completely understand!), so I took the 78 bus downtown and had an early lunch at the Frisch's Big Boy on E. 6th St. downtown. My nose remained buried in It as I worked my way through a few glasses of Diet Coke, some fries and a cheeseburger.

One of the forms the monster possessing the city of Derry, Maine assumes is the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, making him more attractive to naive children who love the circus. After paying the bill and tipping the waitress, I made my way outside the restaurant--

--and damn near had a heart attack! Standing on the sidewalk was a street person who dressed head to toe in a one-piece clown suit, a white hard hat, and basketball sneakers. He carried a plastic Igloo in one hand. Despite this gala attire, he never spoke or smiled. (I asked the Westin Hotel's barmaid about him once. She said she had no problem with him. He would come in, order a Coke, and sit by himself quietly drinking it, and then leave, and always left her a decent tip.)

Susie claims that the brief glimpse she saw of Stephen King's It, the 1990 two-part miniseries, has given her an unshakable case of coulrophobia, an abnormal fear of clowns. I was afraid this would poison her enjoyment of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, since Tim Curry portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror and Pennywise in It. But when I took her to Studio 35 to see Rocky Horror, she loved every minute of it.

Susie and I plan to watch The Stand once she returns from Florida. I was a teenager when I first discovered Stephen King, and picked up an abandoned copy of Carrie at the free book giveaway shelf at the Washington County Public Library. I gloried in this Revenge of the Nerds on steroids, and rooted for the oppressed as she brought down the school building, and eventually the whole city, on her tormentors' heads. Several friends have told me it is not a good idea to show The Stand or Carrie to Susie when she's 13. I have never censored her reading, and never will. These works of Stephen King's qualify as literature--my grandchildren will be studying them. University libraries include doctoral theses about King's works.

My job is to keep Susie safe from the real horrors--of which there are many. I won't waste my energy shielding her from the ones that reside on paper and ink, and which will vanish with the STOP button or by returning the book to the shelf (which never happens in our house anyway!).

I Sought, and Eventually Found

2011-08-03T23:35:00.002-04:00

Last Saturday night, I was in such a hurry to type up the blog entry about Pulpfest that I neglected to write about the very pleasant denouement of the whole day. (I was racing the clock, making sure I finished and posted the entry before making the 3¼-mile walk to Grandview to see Teenagers From Outer Space.) During the day I spent at Pulpfest, I successfully ended long searches for a book that I had lost (the Ace Giant Double Novel(s?) They Buried a Man and The Dark Place by Mildred Davis) and found a DVD of a made-for-TV movie I had seen in 1977 that had affected me deeply (Alan Alda in Kill Me If You Can, a biopic about Caryl Chessman).

Between coming home from Pulpfest and meeting Mike Nevins and Steve for dinner, another long search came to an end. Propped against my front door was a package from Classic Vinyl in Gaithersburg, Md. It was not a total surprise, since I had mailed payment for it at the end of the previous week, but seeing the package there was reassuring and made me feel rewarded for hard work and effort.

My parents played many classical music records when I was a child, especially in the house on Third St. in Marietta where I lived until I was six. Part of my love for classical music came because my parents watched NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report every evening, instead of Walter Cronkite and The CBS Evening News. (The Huntley-Brinkley Report's closing theme was the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.)

When I was an adult, my mother told me that she first began to suspect I had some type of clinical depression because, after school, I showed little interest in playing outside or watching TV. "You'd just eat your snack, and then go up to your room and put on Vivaldi and stay there until dinnertime."

Although I could identify my favorite Vivaldi composition if I heard it, I could not remember its title. I do remember that, on Sunday mornings, while my mother slept in, my dad and I would remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy (Exodus 20:8) by having pancakes or French toast instead of cold cereal, and by playing a record of Vivaldi's Gloria. But I loved one instrumental piece so much I took it from the record cabinet of my parents' Magnavox console and kept it in my bedroom, where I could play it on my orange and white monaural General Electric phonograph.

My desire to find this recording began anew in December 2009, when the church featured the Gloria as part of the winter concert. That triggered the memory of the instrumental piece I so loved, and I checked out a six-disk Vivaldi set by Deutsche Grammophon, and, after going through the entire recording, could not find it.

This did not deter me. I could physically describe the album. I knew it was from the Musical Heritage Society. Its cover featured no graphics--just a list of the works on the album and the personnel. It had blue letters against a white background. The other side of the album cover was blank--just black, with nothing on it.

The piece's being instrumental made it more difficult. If a song's title eluded me, I could always log onto Lyrics.com and type whatever phrase I remembered into its search engine, and the song would pop up in front of me.

Besides remembering the album cover, I remembered that the bassoonist was named Anthony Checchia. (I had a rudimentary knowledge of the instruments of the orchestra due to playing and replaying my Vanguard Everyman Classics record of Peter and the Wolf--incomparably narrated by Boris Karloff--until it was marred and scratched.) Earlier this summer, I Googled his name, hoping to find the album, or at least something that would trigger a distant memory of the title of the piece. Much to my delight, I found out Checchia is alive and well, artistic director of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. (The album came out in the mid-1960s, so I was not taking for granted any of the performers were still alive.) I emailed Checchia in Philadelphia and, to my delight, he replied a few days later. He thought he knew the record I described, but was in Vermont overseeing the Marlboro Music Festival, and would not be able to go through his personal files until he returned to Philadelphia in September.

I went back to Classic Vinyl and Googled Vivaldi's and Checchia's names, and found an album that I thought may be the one I wanted. I was wary, because it cost $26 (not including postage), and it may not be the right one. Finally, after some emailed conversation with the owner of the site, I bit the bullet and mailed him the $26 money order.

I held my breath when I unpacked the record Saturday evening and put it on my turntable. I put the tone arm to approximately where I remembered my favorite piece being, set it down...

...and it turned out I hit paydirt! Indeed, it was the recording that I remembered. I was 99.8% sure when I turned the album cover over and saw the black side, but I wasn't sure until I heard my favorite Vivaldi piece for the first time in over 40 years. (By the way, its title is "Concerto in G Minor for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Bassoon and Figured Bass, P. 403.")

When in search of a book or music title, I will leave no ~~turn unstoned~~ stone unturned, and will make many people who know me get down on their knees and pray that I please find it, and soon, so they won't have to hear about it anymore. I have two friends who live quite some distance from me, and I have fired off many emails to them titled, "You Would Know This If Anyone Would..." Robert Nedelkoff in Silver Spring is my Delphic oracle when it comes to matters literary, although his musical knowledge is quite encyclopedic as well. (Robert is the only person--other than myself--who had heard of Lauran Paine, who was the most prolific author in history. Paine had published 880 books, mostly Westerns, under 74 different pseudonyms, when People wrote about him in 1985, "Author Lauran Paine Rewrites the Record Books Every Time He Sits Down at the Typewriter.")

My St. Louis friend John Bilgere, whom I met at a Unitarian youth conference in Michigan in 1979, has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock and pop music from the British Invasion until the end of the 1980s. One day, bored at work, I had an earworm for a song from 1974 in my mind. I emailed John:

In 1974, there was a one-hit wonder that I heard on the radio quite frequently. I can't give you the title or the artist, because the song was completely in Spanish, so I think the title probably was, too.

Any idea of who that might be, or what the song is?

And John did not disappoint! A day or two later, I checked my incoming email box, and he had written:

The song which you speak of is possibly "Eres Tu" by the Mocedades (key of E flat). Another one, which did not make many waves in the U.S., was "Jesuscristo" by Las Fresas Acidas (1972?).

I pulled up "Eres Tu" on YouTube, and John had been right. My Spanish fluency consists of counting from 1 to 20, thanks to many afternoons watching Sesame Street until I was a teen, so I would not have been able to identify the song otherwise.

The pre-Internet days were much worse. When my parents gave me a record player for my fourth Christmas, they also gave me an Apple single of The Beatles' "Hey Jude." I was happy to receive this, along with The Archies' "Bang-Shang-a-Lang" and Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days." There was another recording I wanted, but, since it was instrumental, I did not know its title.

I would not know its title until the summer of 1990. That summer, I worked as a medical billing clerk for a company contracted by Christ Hospital, and we kept WRRM-FM (Warm 98) on the radio in the office. One day, while typing the prices for rhythm strips and EKGs into the database, I heard the song that I had liked so much as a preschooler. I heard it from the transistor radio of a teenage girl sunbathing in the next yard while I had been playing outside. Warm 98, like many other stations, now posts its playlist on its Website, but this was several years before anyone had heard of the Internet. I stopped what I was doing and called the station. I didn't get the DJ on the line, but I asked the receptionist who answered the phone, "What was that song you just played?" She put me on hold, and she came back on the line in seconds. The song was "The Horse," by Cliff Nobles and Company. I jotted that in my pocket notebook (I had started the habit of always having a notebook and pen handy my final months in Athens), and then began to plague record-store owners in Cincinnati with requests to find it for me. Even PhonoLog's three-ring binder on the counter didn't yield any results, and I was all prepared to pay for an ad in Goldmine. Then, one day I lucked out. In a St. Vincent de Paul (where I also bought most of my clothes), I found a Billboard compilation album from 1968 which featured "The Horse." (When "The Horse" was the number-one song, the number-two song was Mason Williams' "Classical Gas," maybe the only time when instrumentals held both number-one and number-two spots.)

Of course, my neighbors were not happy that I had this stroke of luck, and they prevailed upon me to use headphones for my many replayings of the song!

I like to think of myself as a generous type, so I now share with you the earworm of "The Horse."

Pulp Non-Fiction

2011-07-30T22:45:00.001-04:00

This afternoon, I spent several hours at the Ramada Plaza on Sinclair Rd. at the 40th annual Pulpfest, moving from vendor table to vendor table in the hotel ground floor. I've become much more choosy at events such as these, and gone are the days when I could blow an entire paycheck at something like my beloved Old-Time Radio and Nostalgia Convention in Cincinnati. It would have been impossible for me to scrutinize every book, DVD, poster, and pulp magazine for sale, but I am pretty sure I got a pretty representative picture of what's available.

There was a we'll-look-back-on-this-and-laugh moment during the convention. A seller from Michigan specializes in manuscripts, first editions, and signed copies. On his table, he displayed a two-page handwritten letter (circa 1928) from H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. I asked how much it cost. "Twenty-five," he said.

My friend Steve wrote his master's thesis on Lovecraft's body of work, so I went outside and texted him immediately. (Cell service is nonexistent in the ground floor of this hotel.) I texted, 2pp Lovecraft letter (handwritten) on sale for $25!. He texted back, Wow. Authenticated? He was wise to ask this, because I went down and spoke to the dealer, and this brief discussion brought me back down to earth. I went back upstairs to where there was cell reception, and sent another text message, Never mind. It's $2500!" Steve texted back, That sounds more like it. :-D. Lovecraft died in 1937, and any of his papers, hand- or typewritten, appreciate more and more annually.

I was able to keep my spending reasonable. When I was going to St. Mary's Middle School, I gave a speech in my forensics class (a classy way of saying "public speaking") on my growing book collection. Among other gems (nothing particularly valuable or collectible), I showed a double novel, They Buried a Man. The husband and wife who own and operate Hooked on Books in Bolingbrook, Ill. had the book. (My copy disappeared in the many moves from Marietta to Boston, Cincinnati, Athens, etc. over the years.) So, for a mere $5, I now own They Buried a Man once again. Ace Books published an entire series of "Ace Giant Double Novels." They're the size of a typical paperback of the period (1955), selling for $.50. Mildred Davis was the author of both They Buried a Man and the other novel, The Dark Place (G-543). When you finish reading one novel, you would turn the next page, and the final page of the other book would be there upside down. Two covers, two complete books, two for the price of one.

I learned about Pulpfest from mystery writer, law professor, and attorney Francis M. ("Mike") Nevins, Jr., whom I met several years ago at the Old-Time Radio and Nostalgia Convention in Cincinnati. The convention came to Columbus in 2009. It had previously been in Dayton, so I never attended until it came to the Ramada Plaza. I am not surprised at the overlap between the old-time radio crowd and the pulp enthusiasts' crowd. I saw some of the same faces, and some of the same merchandise was available. (There were very few audio recordings for sale, but several vendors sold DVDs of movie serials, 1950s TV shows, and B movies.)

Very interesting choice of music right now. I've programmed my laptop to shuffle the music files stored there. Here I am writing about a convention for pulp fiction and genre enthusiasts--the theme is the 80th anniversary of The Shadow--and the song that came up just now was "Spooky," by the Classics IV. (When I was in high school, the Atlanta Rhythm Section's cover was quite popular, but I admit I like the Classics IV version better.)

And now for a double whammy music-wise. The next song that came up was "Read 'Em and Weep," by Barry Manilow. Besides admitting for all the world to read that I have a Barry Manilow album ripped to my laptop, I'll 'fess up the reason why this song hits me in the gut. Steph and I were married 15 years ago tonight at Highbanks Metro Park in Powell. In the eyes of the law, we are still married, but tonight we are over a thousand miles apart. And now, it's a thousand statute miles apart--we have been thousands of miles apart spiritually, mentally, and emotionally for much longer. I know it's best that we're apart, and I think I've adapted well to single fatherhood (and this month of full bachelorhood), but that doesn't make this date any easier. Anyone who has suffered the bitter end of a relationship can appreciate the lyrics of this song.

I am not long back from dinner with Steve and Mike Nevins at Noodles and Company (I highly recommend their Wisconsin macaroni and cheese with meatballs, by the way), and later tonight I will make the three-mile trek to Grandview for the Return of Nite Owl Theater. The film tonight is Teenagers from Outer Space. I have never seen this, nor have I heard it before it appeared on Fritz' Website.

I bought two DVDs at the convention at $10 apiece. One was Barfly, a movie that had me in stitches when I first saw it in the early 1990s. The only Charles Bukowski book I had read at the time was Post Office, a novel I loved but did not fully appreciate until I went to work at the main post office in Cincinnati in May 1992. Barfly's setting reminded me very much of the 600 block of East Main Street in downtown Cincinnati, where I spent many afternoons and early evenings with Robert Lowry, the once-famous Cincinnati novelist who died broke and out of print in 1994. I was a bit of a snob about where I drank, and I considered Lowry's hangout, the Bay Horse Café, to be beneath my station--I was used to college bars, and thought they were a step up from Skid Row establishments such as The Saloon and the Bay Horse. (The college bars were, after all, college bars, even if you had to step through a minefield of spilled beer, broken glass, and vomit to get from the bar to your seat.)

The other was Kill Me If You Can, a 1977 made-for-TV movie starring Alan Alda as Caryl Chessman, a career criminal executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in 1960 for rape and kidnapping. I was in junior high when I saw the movie for the first time, and it turned me into an opponent of the death penalty, and it led me to read the four books Chessman wrote while on Death Row, including his autobiography, Cell 2455, Death Row and his only novel, The Kid Was a Killer, published two or three months before his execution. I have not watched the movie in its entirety, and I won't tonight, but I am glad to finally have a copy.

Many of the vendors organized their products by genre, author name, or publisher, and many issues of Argosy, The Phantom Detective, and Dime Mystery Book were in chronological order. That was good, because I was on a mission to find a specific 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a friend. (I came away with two "I have it, but not here"s, but I collected email and snail addresses from both vendors, and will contact them in the next day or so.) At the same time, serendipity can be your friend as well. I have lost track of how many books I now own by discovering them completely by accident while in search of something else. I have prowled bookstores and a misfiled book just happens to me one I've tried to find for years.

Some typical PulpFest fare.

These books were considered the epitome of risque fiction in the 1950s. I did not see much gay or lesbian pulp fiction, but I am sure many of the vendors had it for sale. Gotta love it: "It was a beautiful honeymoon--for four!"

I first became aware of Mike Nevins when I read his massive biography of mystery and suspense novelist Cornell Woolrich Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. I did not meet him for several years afterwards, and he was pleasantly surprised that I knew of his book about Woolrich. Tonight at dinner, he signed the introductions he wrote for Woolrich's posthumously published Tonight, Somewhere in New York and the Ballantine reprint of The Black Path of Fear.

One dealer was selling a $100 copy of Woolrich's 75-page novella Marihuana (originally on sale in 1944 for a dime!), and alongside it was a title I found much more intriguing. This was Frederic Brown's The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, both published by Dell. The title did not intrigue me enough to fork over the price he wanted. Just coincidentally, it was the same price as my electric bill, and I think Susie would like to come back to a house with electricity.

If I knew for sure it worked, I would have bought a big outdoor dial thermometer that advertised Blue Coal ("America's finest anthracite"). When I've streamed episodes of Suspense from Archive.org or listened to the disks and tapes I've bought over the years, Blue Coal came up quite often as a sponsor, as did Roma Wines and Autolite Spark Plugs.

It's miserable out tonight, and the relative humidity is sky-high, as it has been for much of July, yet I will soon be lighting out for Grandview. Susie and I wanted to go last month, but the post-Comfest traffic snarled all buses headed away from Goodale Park and the Short North, so we didn't get to go. (Susie didn't want to walk, as I usually do, and as we did when we saw Dementia 13 in May.)

Next stop: Grandview.

Susie: From Heat to Heat

2011-07-24T18:02:00.000-04:00

I've informed my Facebook friends that today begins the longest month of my life. To be specific, this morning at 8:55 Susie boarded a Southwestern Airlines plane and flew to Tampa to spend a month with Steph in New Port Richey. The heat here in Columbus has been oppressive for much of the past week--I'm sure it makes Washington, D.C. in August feel like a walk-in freezer. But Susie is not fleeing the heat by going to the Gulf Coast of Florida. If anything, it'll be just as bad, if not worse.

Last night, I slept very badly. Part of it was feeling down about not seeing Susie for a month, but part of it was worry about if (or how) I would drop the ball in the pre-flight and -boarding logistics in getting Susie aboard her plane this morning. I have not flown since December 1983, when I was still living in Boston. This is partly because I wholeheartedly agree with a line in Cervantes' Don Quixote: "The road is always better than the inn." I don't really feel like I'm traveling when I get into a sealed aluminum tube and overlook clouds, little houses, and golf courses, and then disembark at my destination.

The other reason is financial. Greyhound is cheaper than flying, usually, and the experience of moving from one town to another is much more exciting and fulfilling to me.

Susie's trip through customs and onto the plane was flawless. My co-worker Janice and her husband Steve picked us up just before 7:30 this morning and drove us to Port Columbus, and Susie and I came prepared. She had her new state-issued ID in hand, with a backup document (a notarized copy of her birth certificate). It was smooth sailing from the Southwestern Airlines check-in counter to the boarding area. I had to show my ID to get an "escort's pass," so I could stay with her until she was airborne, and we had to put our shoes and our pocket contents into little plastic buckets to pass through the metal detector and fluoroscope machine. (This was nothing new to me. You often have to jump through these identical hoops to go to the post office across the street from where I work. This has been in effect at a heightened level since 9/11, although shades of it began to appear after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.) Susie didn't carry any bottles of liquid. Her laptop was the only item she had to remove from her backpack and put through the scanner. I had deliberately left my keys behind, because I was afraid that my ring knife--that constant souvenir of my job at the Cincinnati post office--would raise some red flags.

Susie's flight left on time, at 8:55. While she waited, she drank a big cup from Starbucks, and sat on the floor writing in her journal. I stayed in the boarding area until I saw her plane actually lift off. (I texted Steph at 8:56 a.m.: Susie's plane is taxiing down the runway. Departing on time!) Steph texted me at 11:04: We have her. By the time that text arrived, I was back home trying to nap, since I had slept so badly last night.

Susie and I did get some respite from the heat, with a little help from our friends. The air conditioning in our half-double is the Calvin Coolidge variety: It does not choose to run. So, we spent Thursday and Friday evenings at Pat and Tanya's, and I surprised everybody at Olympic Swim and Racquet by not only getting into the pool, but by immersing myself completely underwater for about 45 seconds. The water was not cold at all around 6:30 or 6:45, since the sun was shining directly down onto the pool. (Pat made comments about "the Great White Whale" as he saw me in the water. No doubt he was alluding to the title of this blog, which honors the creator of said Great White Whale. He, of course, resembles Michelangelo's David.) We were all so exhausted that once we got to Pat and Tanya's house, everyone--adults and kids--were fast asleep by 10:30. On Friday, I worked the sound system at Trinity United Methodist Church in Marble Cliff, for the 10th annual dinner of the Mid-Ohio Workers' Association. After the meal ended, I had planned to meet everyone at Olympic for the 9 p.m. showing of The Karate Kid, but Pat texted me a little before 8 to let me know the pool was closed and the movie postponed. (Susie enjoys the nighttime swimming more than the movies. She would have gone even if the movie had been Marmaduke, just for a chance to swim in the pool under the lights at night.)

Pat and I ate lunch at the Columbus Jazz and Rib Fest on Friday. It was on the site of the old Ohio penitentiary, which played host to O. Henry and Confederate General John Hunt Morgan, and was the site of a horrific fire (322 inmates dead, 150 injured) in April 1930. The combo, led by Brian Olsheski, playing on the AEP stage was quite impressive.

I am typing this at the OSU Library. According to my cell phone, it is 5:52 in the afternoon. I had considered going up to Olympic and immersing myself for awhile, since it is just as miserable out as before, but I have seen several people coming inside the library with wet umbrellas, and there is a sound I keep hearing. I cannot decide whether it's thunder and wind, or someone pushing a book cart. Either way, it looks like no pool for me tonight.

I changed my iGoogle page slightly to reflect Susie's journey to see her mom. On the opening page, I display Columbus weather. It says the current weather here is 88 degrees, with thunderstorms. (That answers the question I asked in the previous paragraph, doesn't it?) Until Susie returns, I have New Port Richey's forecast in the display as well. Currently, it's cloudy and 93 degrees there, but the forecast says there will be thunderstorms for the next several consecutive days. I feel for Susie, because I know she had visions of relaxing on the beach during her visit, and that won't be happening for the next few days.

No doubt about it--that's thunder I'm hearing.

This table appeared in The Columbus Dispatch's Website. The mercury has been climbing quite a bit these past weeks!

Nothing But the Dead and Dying Back in My Little Town...

2011-07-18T22:06:00.003-04:00

My friend Rich is visiting Columbus from Rhode Island, and it's been a fine visit. He last saw us in 2007, and at that time Susie hadn't quite turned 10, Steph only had one heart surgery behind her, and Steph and I were still married. Besides reconnecting and bringing each other up to date on our lives, jobs, and situations, yesterday he drove Susie and me to Southeastern Ohio.

The title of this post is, of course, from the refrain of the Simon and Garfunkel song "My Little Town" (1975). The dead and dying were the reason for our trip to Marietta (and Caldwell) this time. During the time that I lived in Marietta, until I was 19 years of age, I was "twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun" to get out. I periodically have to visit Marietta to realize why I left and why I never seriously entertain notions of returning.

Rich, Susie, and I paid our respects at one of the crash sites of the Navy's rigid airship Shenandoah (ZR-1), which crashed in Ava, Ohio in 1925. (I say "one of the crash sites" because debris fell over a 12-mile stretch between Ava and Sharon.) Finding the crash site was an ordeal, and Rich's car's suspension suffered a bit as we bumped, spun, and climbed over the pothole-ridden and rock-strewn road off State Route 821 that led to the flagpole and stone that marked where the bulk of the wreckage fell to earth.

Crash site 1 of the USS Shenandoah, in the thrill-a-minute metropolis of Ava, Ohio.

After lunch, our next stop was Olive Cemetery, final resting place of six generations of McKees (my mother's side of the family), from 1815 (death of David McKee, a founding pioneer of Noble County) to my mother, who died in 2008. There was the usual mad scramble to find McKees' graves, because the Noble County recorder's office had never returned my email about specific burial plot numbers. I visited my grandmother's grave quite a few times when I was growing up, but the visits to Noble County ceased once my dad and mother divorced. Rich and I took Susie there when she was about two.

Now, at 13, she was appalled by the gallows humor Rich and I exchanged about our various reprobate family members, especially the classification idiotcousin he wants to put on his genealogical charts, and all the bad jokes he and I exchanged about the suicide of my great grandfather, Aaron McKee. (Aaron took his own life in March 1906 by cutting his throat with a straight razor.)

Whatever is the linear opposite of ancestor worship, here I am engaging in it.

Aaron's suicide was grisly enough, but my grandmother, Lucie McKee, lied about it and made it even more gruesome when she told her children (including my mother) how it happened. She told the kids (and this was the version I grew up hearing) that Aaron, three years a widower, hanged himself in the barn one night so that my grandfather, Lester McKee, would find his body when he came out in the morning to do his chores.

We never knew the truth about it until Rich found his obituary in the Caldwell Republican Journal. The exact opposite circumstance was true. Aaron arranged to meet one of his neighbors in an outbuilding on his farm one morning. The neighbor came at the agreed-upon time and found that Aaron had cut his throat with a straight razor. Quite the polar opposite of Lucie's version: Aaron had arranged his suicide to specifically eliminate the possibility of his children finding his body.

Typescript of the diary of Fulton Caldwell, a prominent Noble County banker. The entry for Saturday, March 3 describes the suicide of my great-grandfather.

This was the first time I had visited my mother's grave. Her death year remains blank on the tombstone, and I made a mental note to contact the funeral home to see how much it costs to fill in the death year. On Facebook, one of my friends said I should fill it in, so her classmates won't think she faked her death.

We reached Marietta by mid-afternoon under a hot sun, and made our way to Mound Cemetery, where my dad lies buried among at least 24 Revolutionary War soldiers. I was appalled at the lack of maintenance around the graves. Marietta prides itself so much (rightfully, he wrote, grudgingly) on its heritage and history, and yet tombstones flush to the ground are overgrown with weeds, older tombstones are crumbling, and there were several graves of family friends I would not have found if I hadn't been there before.

In addition to my father and stepmother's grave, we paid our respects at the burial spot of Rufus Putnam (1738-1824), one of the founders of Marietta, and climbed Conus, the ceremonial mound in the center. I amused Susie by showing her a tombstone a classmate had always told me about. This classmate was the son of a funeral director, and he swore to me, on a stack of Playboys, that they used a bizarre burial method with this particular monument. (In my pre-adolescent days, swearing on a stack of Playboys was as serious as it got. Anyone could swear on a stack of Bibles, but a stack of Playboys was the big leagues.)

My classmate insisted that they removed the top of the monument, stuffed the body inside, and then replaced the top. I was skeptical, but did try at one point to push the top off to peek inside.

My friend Tom took us to the 28th Annual Broughton's Ice Cream for America Social at the Washington County Fairgrounds, and with the mercury climbing well into the 90s, this required very little persuasion. I am not as big a lover of ice cream as Susie is, but I did partake of sherbet, ice cream, and punch. Here is a story from today's Marietta Times describing the event itself. The red-letter event at the social was meeting a Facebook friend in person for the first time. She recognized me first, from my Facebook picture. I am not good at facial recognition to start with, and she usually puts pictures of her kids or cartoon characters as her profile picture, so I was happy when she called out my name. She graduated from Marietta High School several years after I did, and is a graphic artist in Williamstown, W.Va., just across the Ohio.

Susie was intrigued by the tour of Marietta's west side, especially the fact that a working train track runs down the middle of Harmar Street. The west side was a neighborhood I almost always avoided--it was "the wrong side of the tracks," or, in Marietta's case, of the Muskingum River. Since I was a bit of a behavior problem in elementary school, I bounced around most of the public schools in Marietta between kindergarten and sixth grade. I ended sixth grade at Harmar School. How was my experience there? Let's just say that if Ted Kaczynski had mailed one of his parcels there, I would be generously adding to his commissary fund whenever I could.

Harmar Street on Marietta's west side, complete with a train track running down the center. Planking here can be a dangerous pastime!

As much as I hated Harmar School, I have pleasant memories of its end-of-the-year school picnic. They held the picnic at Civitan Park, the playground adjacent to the Washington County Fairgrounds, site of yesterday's ice cream social. Rather than ferry all the sixth grade kids to the park, they walked, all the way from Fort Square up Front Street to the park. This was just under two miles, and it was one of the first long walks I undertook, even though I didn't walk the entire length. (I lived on the east side of the Muskingum, so I met everyone on the Front Street side of the Putnam Street Bridge and joined the walk in progress.) I may have caught the walking bug at that point. The walk was definitely not anything like the hike William Styron described in The Long March, although I have thought of chronicling it that way.

Reduced Moonlighting, But No Spike in My Energy

2011-07-10T23:31:00.001-04:00

From now until after Labor Day, I'll only be working Saturday mornings (9 a.m.-noon) at the Discovery Exchange. I happily greeted this news, but with the reduction in my moonlighting responsibilities has not come a jump in my energy level, or any motivation or desire to put any effort into the activities that I yearn to do whenever my time is occupied with work. In The Journals of John Cheever, he frequently describes "cafard" as his current state of mind, and that matches mine. So far I can truthfully write that I haven't followed his lead and tried to dull or reverse the cafard by a return to drinking.

A case in point is the fact that I didn't make it to church this morning. (During the fall, I am pretty conscientious about attending services, but this slacks off in the summertime, when the services are almost all lay-led. Many Unitarian congregations discontinue services altogether in the summertime. The flip explanation for this is "What other denomination could God trust out of His sight for three months?" The truth is that 19th-century Unitarian ministers were anxious to get out of Boston during the summer. Boston in the summer makes Washington, D.C. in August seem like a deep freeze.) This summer would be when I'd make one of my rare appearances, because the erstwhile president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, John Buehrens, was speaking. I was so exhausted and/or unmotivated that I didn't even bother to set my alarm before going to bed last night, and by the time I finally summoned enough energy to get to bed, there was no way I could get showered, dressed, and out of the house in time to make it to the 10 a.m. service.

Thanks to Susie, I was able to perk up a bit during the afternoon. We spent the day in Clintonville, eating lunch at the Golden Arches, and then she had a hair trim at Lucky 13. I posted on Facebook later in the afternoon that we exhibited mutual respect. I was bored while Susie's stylist shampooed and trimmed her hair, but the time would be too short to really concentrate on the book I had with me, or to take out my ballpoint and write in my diary, and none of the magazines in the rack interested me. I knew Susie wanted a hair trim, so I stayed there and waited, and she looked great when she stepped from the chair.

We walked up to the Whetstone Library, but I was distracted on the way by a cluttered antique store we passed a block or so from Lucky 13. The very petite Corona portable typewriter in the front window called to me, but I didn't feel like paying $30 for it. Nonetheless, I ignored Susie as she ostentatiously tugged at my wrist and tried to pull me away from the store, and we went in. She and I had just spent 20 minutes or so in Wholly Craft, an offbeat craft store she loves, which sells everything from jewelry to journals to clothes, all of it hand- and locally made. I indulged her browsing, and she was gracious enough to indulge mine. I looked at several typewriters (still searching in vain for a Simplex toy typewriter, circa 1925, which was the first machine for my friend, novelist Robert Lowry), and a $20 Teac reel-to-reel recorder briefly tempted me. I was not tempted to buy them, but a suitcase full of Edison phonograph cylinders selling at $3 apiece held my attention for quite awhile. (As I write this, I'm typing with Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" blaring from my laptop speakers. Juxtapositions, anyone?)

Probably just as well there was no phonograph for sale. That would have made buying the cylinders all the more tempting.

Susie and I went to a "poolnic" this afternoon at Olympic Swim and Racquet. (In case you haven't figured it out, this word is a portmanteau of "pool" and "picnic.") Susie and I made a quickly-in-quickly-out trip to Kroger and bought two pies, and she was in the water more than she was poolside with the food. (Although I brought my suit, I never did get in the water... although I kept meaning to.) The other people from the poolnic brought much good food--macaroni and cheese, beans, watermelon, assorted vegetables, so Susie came home quite sated.)

Yesterday afternoon, after the bookstore, Susie and I went to a joint birthday party/graduation celebration near the Walhalla Ravine. The college graduate was a young woman who was Susie's first babysitter, and this woman's daughter just turned a year old. (I still remember the mother, age eight or nine, carrying infant Susie around the church and proudly announcing, "This is my baby!") One of the other guests graduated from Parkersburg High School, 12 miles from my hometown of Marietta, Ohio--although he graduated in 1994 and I in 1981. (When two intellectually inclined people from the Mid-Ohio Valley leave the area and meet each other years later, you'd swear you're listening to two former POWs comparing their Hanoi Hilton experiences.)

I found myself admitting that the people of Marietta High School weren't as provincial and bigoted as I have described them previously--either in one-on-one conversations or in this blog. Maybe I was in a charitable mood because my 30th-year high school reunion was last night in Marietta, and I wasn't attending. But I told this person that my classmates were tolerant of my always reading books, or always holding a pen, or announcing at an early age that I wanted to be a poet--instead of a race car driver or a Marine. The attitude was pretty much like, "Don't make fun of Billy. He can't help that he was born blind."

Susie Debuts at a Poetry Slam

2011-07-09T01:06:00.001-04:00

Without a doubt, Susie was the youngest reader at last Wednesday's poetry slam at Kafé Kerouac, but she stole the show. (I've always avoided slams and poetry groups. The reason is because hearing them go on about their poetry is like listening to teenage boys talking about sex: The ones who are talking about it the most are doing it the least.)

Susie made quite a hit with "My Poetry: The Musical!", where she states that her (autobiographical) poetry would make quite a good musical--why should Dr. Seuss and Seussical the Musical have the monopoly on it, after all?

I mean, picture this:
a musical about
a bisexual girl
who writes poems
about suicide and how annoying her life is.
And somehow, fairies work their way in.

The emcee of the event led everyone in an a Capella rendition of "The Greatest Love of All" after Susie came down from the microphone and the small dais in the front of the room.

(Caveat lector: When I loaded this video to Facebook, I was able to successfully rotate it so that you would not have to turn your head sideways to view it. I did not have the same success when loading this to Blogspot. I will tell you, however, that Susie's poetry debut is worth the sore neck. 07/10/2011)

I had to do a little on-the-scene adjusting of the lens and the settings on my DXG digital camera, so I apologize for the picture quality of the first 30-45 of the video. Fortunately I was sitting close to a speaker, so the audio is pretty crisp. (The microphone on this camera is not all that sensitive.)

The Kafé Kerouac poetry slam imposes a draconian penalty when a person does not put a cell phone on "vibrate." Whenever mine has gone off during a meeting or a church service, usually I feel like there's a big red neon arrow pointing straight at me, and that's usually punishment enough. However, in this forum, everyone suffers as a result. The emcee pulled out his well thumbed copy of a novel, Daddy Long Stroke, written by Cairo, had an audience member choose a page at random, and read a two- or three-page passage from it. Daddy Long Stroke seems to be the literary equivalent of a blaxploitation movie. I remember how awed I was when I ordered a Grove Press paperback copy of My Secret Life, the anonymous memoirs of a well-to-do Victorian man named Walter who lived for nothing but sex. I was disappointed about how boring it was after the first few chapters--so repetitious.

Just in case you plan to defy the cell-phone-on-vibrate taboo, here is a video of the reading from Daddy Long Stroke:

We have definitely come a long way from when Walt Whitman lost his Interior Department paper-pushing job in the 1860s because of Leaves of Grass, or when Charles Bukowski's poetry and writing constantly jeopardized his job as a third-shift mail sorter at the Los Angeles post office!

The first edition title page of Leaves of Grass.

Now that her first-time anxiety is behind her, Susie is looking for more places to read her poetry. The next place may be the Rumba Café on Summit Ave. (I saw a small notice about it in this week's The Other Paper, and am trying to remember to clip it out to show her.)

At some point, I'm going to play Susie the compact disk of Allen Ginsberg reading his epic poem "Kaddish to Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956," the long poem he wrote in memory of his insane mother Naomi, who died in a Long Island asylum. I have a boxed set of Ginsberg's readings, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993, and it includes his emotionally wrenching 1964 Brandeis University reading of "Kaddish," which I first heard on an LP in Adam Bradley's Stinchcomb Ave. apartment one night as both of us stayed up until dawn, making quick work of a 24-pack of Olympia. "Kaddish" is a bare-bones presentation of poetry as autobiography and lament.

At the Doo Dah Parade, I Expanded My Horizons and Learned a New Word

2011-07-05T00:06:00.001-04:00

Am I the only person out here who was ignorant of planking before today? The Doo Dah Parade began 45 minutes late this afternoon, which meant many bored and restless parade-goers lining both sides of N. High St. in the Short North. (Correction--Susie and I stationed ourselves at the tail end of the parade, and we were out on High St. awaiting it at the time it was stepping off from another point in the Short North. 07/05/2011) There was a sign on the façade of the Short North Tavern proclaiming a 1 p.m. stepping-off time, but they were nowhere near ready to go. Children kicked and chased beach balls back and forth across High St., and then Susie saw some of the alleged adults trying out planking. This means lying down in the street face down, arms at your sides, long enough for one of your cohorts to snap a picture. Said picture will most likely be on the Internet within hours. Susie heard about it when one of her Facebook friends posted about it, and then ran pictures of her and her sister doing it.

So she tried it today, lying parallel to the center line on North High Street.

Susie demonstrates her new interest, planking.

Since the Doo Dah Parade "organizers" posted a schedule on their Website's home page, I thought that the 1 p.m. starting time was pretty firm. Susie and I hurried through lunch at Mac's Café, since we arrived there at about 12:15. We both ate well, and decided to skip dessert because we were worried about missing the start of the parade.

July 4 tardiness seems to be a time-honored tradition. When I was 11, Dad and I went up to Lookout Point on Harmar Hill in Marietta to see the fireworks (which were shot from the Washington County Fairgrounds). They were supposed to start at 10 p.m. sharp, but it was about 11:20 before the first rocket screamed into the air. In the meantime, there were many restless, tired, bored, and hot kids being eaten alive by mosquitoes, and their parents' patience was fraying by the second. I remember hearing three girls entertaining themselves by pinching one another, chanting, "Pinch! Pinch! Pinchy-pinch!" (That night, I wrote in my diary about "three giddy girls" who "were age nine, looked seven, and acted four." This from my mountain of years!) Dad and I didn't get home until past midnight, and my mother--in a rare moment of genuine righteous anger--was angry about the late start, and talked about writing a letter to the editor complaining about the progressive lateness of the fireworks display.

In an earlier entry this week, I wrote about the 50th anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway (which was July 2). While looking for something else, I found my tattered Lancer Paperback of Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man, by Alfred Aronowitz and Pete Hamill. It appeared in 1961, very shortly after Hemingway's suicide, and I bought it because of the description on the back cover, which describes Papa's life as one anyone would envy:

He lived his life as he chose.
He went wherever he wanted to go, he fished whenever he wanted to fish, he hunted whenever he wanted to hunt, he loved whenever he wanted to love.
He lived a life of truth: the only worthwhile endeavor for a man.
His life and writings touched and changed millions of others; the legacy of genius he left will never be forgotten.
He died as he chose...

The Doo Dah Parade featured the usual suspects, especially the Marching Fidels--a retinue of Fidel Castro lookalikes, complete with beard, olive-drab army jackets, and cigars. The Fishnet Mafia, sponsors of the monthly Rocky Horror Picture Show at Studio 35, were out in force, doing the Time Warp again (and again!) all the way down High St. Some of the marching acts were beyond description or theme, such as this one:

The work day beckons at 8 a.m., but luckily I only have a half day. I just "happened" to schedule an appointment for the afternoon after the return from a long weekend, and when 5 p.m. comes, I'll have to overcome the hard-wired urge to head toward Cleveland Ave. and the Columbus State bookstore. I won't be working there until next Saturday morning, so Susie and I will be at poolside tomorrow evening. (Christ, I sound like a character from The Stories of John Cheever!) The weather looks like it will cooperate; the high is supposed to be 89 degrees and cloudless. I may even go in the water myself! (During the '70s, I used to shudder when I watched the "Take the Nestea plunge!" commercials on TV. They would still have to pay me a five-digit sum to act in one of those!)

How To Make Up For Neglect of Blog--Two Entries in Four Hours

2011-07-04T05:55:00.000-04:00

It's after 3 a.m., and I'm still awake. Maybe because of the surplus of sleep, maybe because I've drunk half of a three-liter bottle of Stars & Stripes diet cola, or a combination of the two. But here I am, in front of a keyboard, instead of nestled all snug in my bed.

Not much newsworthy has occurred since I posted before. This has been a false cause for hope in the past, but this evening I actually made an attempt at writing. I made a sincere effort to minimize the clutter on my work table in the living room (not 100% successfully yet; watch this space for pictures once that happens!), and I cleared enough of the surface that I can put the laptop and my beloved (and quite underused, lately) Royal Royalite manual typewriter side by side.

The typewriter indicted me by how many stuck keys it had. After a little more digging, I found the plastic squeeze bottle of Liquid Wrench and applied it where needed. After typing a page or two of random lines here and there, and staining the typing paper with excess Liquid Wrench, I put in a blank page, rolled it to about one third of the way down the page, and hit the shift lock.

CHAPTER ONE

I remember sitting in the chair and looking at that for quite some time. For the page to sit there in the carriage for days, with only that heading, would be mocking. I felt like I had committed myself to something, but when I typed those words, I didn't have the slightest idea what fiction project I had in mind. Did I type that just so I could hear the sound of the keys striking paper once again?

Turning away from the typewriter, I reached over to one of my milk-crate bookcases. I pulled out my navy blue 1983 New Yorker diary, in which I've jotted ideas for various projects, written plot outlines, named characters and written little dossiers about their background and character traits (siblings, jobs, favorite flavor of ice cream, alma mater), and even sunrise and sunset times for the specific day on which a story takes place (courtesy of the U.S. Naval Observatory's site). I looked over some notes I wrote when I first bought the volume (I bought it online last year--it has not languished in my possession since 1983), and then scooted back over to the almost empty page in the roller and ended up producing six paragraphs. The writing process was not easy, and it wasn't because I had to gear down my typing speed to accommodate this aging machine.

And yet I almost did not share this bit of news with my "14 readers out there in the darkness," because I've often jinxed myself by my own hubris. Look! I produced just over one page--the dry spell is over, I'll have the 21st-century equivalent of Ulysses stacked up on this desk in three short months.

I reread my last entry, where I described my asinine neighbor and his barrage of firecrackers and bottle rockets. (The police never did come.) Rereading the entry reminded me of one that I posted when LiveJournal hosted this blog. In this entry, which you can find here, I described how I miraculously escaped injury when someone dropped a cherry bomb or an M-80 into a wine bottle. I was standing about an inch away, wearing sandals, and to this day don't know how I escaped injury.

I'm not sure if my email will appear in Notebook Stories or not. As I wrote before, two of the planners that I brought home from the Really, Really Free Market last week were from Greek organizations. I am getting a genuine kick out of reading the information printed in these books before the calendar pages begin, about the histories of the organizations, the codes of conduct, the mythical zero-tolerance policies on substance abuse and hazing (Phi Delta Theta calls it "Don't Tarnish the Badge"), and how to flourish as a member.

One of the people in my small group in Philosophy 101 was a Sigma Chi pledge, and the reason I remember that was because he constantly carried his copy of The Norman Shield with him, and he hung onto it like it was some kind of Bible. I was a devout Gamma Delta Iota (goddamn independent), and could barely afford textbooks and drinking, let alone the dues that many of the fraternities charged on a quarterly basis.

The most amusing thing I found in the Phi Delta Theta planner was that their national headquarters is in Oxford, Ohio. This does not amuse me because I went to Ohio University, and Miami is the closest thing we have to a rival. (And it never reached the insane levels that the Ohio State-University of Michigan rivalry have achieved.) I chuckled because of an event last year at Miami University, when the behavior of Pi Phi sorority members and their dates at a party (read about it here) led to a one-year suspension.

The only significant way Susie and I are going to mark the Independence Day holiday (and it is right now the Glorious Fourth) is with a trip to the Short North to see the Doo Dah Parade, which steps off at 1 p.m. A parade that marks the birth of the United States and doesn't take itself seriously... priceless.

Susie (at far right) at last year's Doo Dah Parade, part of a vain attempt for a mass jump-roping.

Trying to Rise Above the Torpor of Summer

2011-07-03T22:57:00.000-04:00

My neglect of this blog (and any other type of writing, other than emails) is Exhibit A of my current lack of emotional, physical, and spiritual energy of late. I'm beginning to think I may have the polar opposite of seasonal affective disorder--I become more sluggish and unproductive in the summer months, whereas most people with SAD completely shut down in the wintertime. Columbus has been tropical this summer, and the relative humidity saps my energy. I am sure that the months of 13-hour workdays has not helped, either.

We shall soon see. At 4 p.m. yesterday, the summer quarter rush at Columbus State Community College ended, and with it my evening hours at the bookstore. From now until fall, I will only be working 9 a.m. until 12 noon on Saturday mornings. Susie is especially happy at this news, because it means I will be home with her more evenings, and we'll be able to go to the pool, and we can eat dinner earlier. (It's been so damn hot that neither of us wants to cook, so we've eaten out most evenings.)

Susie worked as a Comfest volunteer for the first time this year. She enjoyed the work, especially getting a free T-shirt and a pink Comfest mug, but she hated having to pick up so many cigarette butts. She made quite liberal use of the hand sanitizers strategically located by the Porta-Potties.

I went to Comfest both Friday night and Saturday afternoon-evening. I worked at the bookstore, during its extended rush hours, on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. I know I'll be grateful for it once they hand me the paycheck in Human Resources, but I still had a being-kept-after-school feeling during the entire work day.

Comfest negatively affected me in only one way. Susie and I waited on W. 5th Ave. and High St. for the 5 bus to Grandview for the monthly Return of Nite Owl Theater at the Grandview. (The movie was The Terror, with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson.) The exodus from Goodale Park snarled up traffic so much that the 5 never arrived. It's been my practice to walk to the theater on Fritz nights, but between the proliferation of drunks and the humidity, I told Susie this month we'd take the bus. (The movie at the end of July will be Teenagers from Outer Space, which will go along wonderfully with Pulpfest '11 at the Ramada Plaza.)

I did quite well at the Really, Really Free Market on the last Sunday in June. Earlier tonight, I sent an email to the Webmaster of Notebook Stories bragging of my achievement. Susie came away with some clothes, and I came away with five spiral-bound planners. (Their dates range from 2006 to 2008, but if I ignore the pre-printed dates, they will be quite useful.) Two were from Greek-letter organizations (Phi Delta Theta fraternity and Chi Omega sorority), and the other three were from St. Bonaventure University (where Thomas Merton taught English from 1940 until he resigned to join the Trappist monastery in Kentucky), Southern Methodist University (which houses George W. Bush's Presidential library--I wonder if all the pictures have been colored in the books), and Seattle Pacific University. (I found something amusing in the St. Bonaventure planner--under Saturday, February 2, 2008, one of the events in the schedule is 4:00 p.m. Pre-Super Bowl Mass and Reception.)

My cache of new notebooks, courtesy of the Really, Really Free Market on June 26.

There was absolutely no way Susie or I were going anywhere near downtown on Friday night, when Red White and Boom was happening. I am lukewarm at best about patriotic celebrations. I think they--and the people who participate in them--are the (very!) secular equivalents of the ostentatiously pious folks that Jesus lambasted in the Sermon on the Mount. (When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; they love to say their prayers standing up in synagogue and at the street-corners, for everyone to see them. I tell you this: they have their reward already. Matthew 6:5, New English Bible.)

Susie and I went to First Friday, a potluck held at church on--when else?--the first Friday of every month. The attendance was pretty sparse, between Red White and Boom and the congregation being scattered to the four winds for vacation. We found some friends of ours. Susie spent most of the time ~~conspiring with~~ talking to a kid who will be her lab partner for science classes at The Graham School come September.

I took her to Kafé Kerouac after we left First Friday, and this turned out to be quite the stroke of good timing. She learned about their Wednesday night poetry slams, and she plans to go and read some of her poetry. (I've always avoided poetry and writing groups, because listening to them discussing their poetry and their projects reminds me of teenage boys bragging about sex: The ones who are talking about it the most, are doing it the least. I have never publicly read or participated in a slam because my voice is almost totally without affect--an Asperger's ~~symptom~~ characteristic--and performance counts as much, if not more, than content.

While I was typing, my idiot neighbor has set off a string of fireworks and firecrackers. There is a momentary lull at present, but I'm waiting for the noise to start up again, so I can call the police, and the dispatcher can hear the noise in the background. (I have had minimal personal experience with shooting off fireworks and recreational explosives. Since most of the jobs I've held in my 29 years in the workforce have involved typing, I realized that having hands is a good idea. The only body parts I no longer have are my tonsils and gallbladder. That's enough.)

I never really how truly exhausted and sleep-deprived I was until yesterday. After I left the bookstore, Susie and I took the bus to Graceland Shopping Center to pay the electric bill at Kroger, pick up dinner, and go to the hardware store. She and I went to China Garden, a smorgasbord she and I both enjoy. She and I both ate until we could barely move, and we were walking in major slow motion across the parking lot to Sears Hardware.

Once we got home, I told Susie I was going to take a brief nap before I did anything else. I remember my bedside digital clock saying 8:20 when I lay down. I didn't even get undressed, not even my shoes. When I felt rested enough to get out of bed and get on with the day, it was 8:30, as in a.m. It was Sunday morning coming down.

Update: I called the police about the pyrotechnics next door. I learned to use 911 for any time I call the Columbus Police Department, unless I'm in the mood to wade through their voice mail prompts and spend four minutes on hold. The entire block smells like sulfur, and I hear the whistle of bottle rockets every few minutes, and no sign of the police. If I had it to do over again, I would have called and reported gunshots. (Hey, I'm no expert in ballistics--gunshots and firecrackers do sound alike to the untrained ear, don't they?)

After breakfast this morning, Susie and I went to a yard sale on Medary Ave. She bought a file folder, and I bought a pristine copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition, a 1987 Book-of-the-Month Club edition. It'll reside on my shelf between my 1938 Modern Library edition of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and Carlos Baker's exhaustive biography.

It was "altogether fitting and proper," as Lincoln would say, that I should buy this book. (Susie brought it to my attention, and I happily ponied up the $.50 for it.) Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, by his own hand, in Ketchum, Idaho. I haven't read the obituaries that appeared, and I am sure it was front-page news all over the world. However, through the many connections I've made in the old-time radio world, I found Harry Reasoner's radio obituary, broadcast on CBS radio, where he tried--with iffy success--to emulate Hemingway's prose style.

The Doo Dah Parade beckons tomorrow afternoon. Neither Susie nor I are setting alarms, although after my megasleep yesterday into this morning, I am now quite wide awake. Nonetheless, we'll be awake in plenty of time to make it to the Short North for the parade.

My Dinner with Susie; The Easiest $20 I Ever Earned

2011-06-19T23:44:00.000-04:00

Unlikely I'll limit myself to those two subjects once the fingers really get going across this keyboard. Imagine how much longer and rambling these blog entries would be if I used all my fingers to type, instead of just the two index fingers (and those at 80+ words per minute!)

Susie and I made our first trip in ages to our beloved Blue Danube Restaurant on North High Street Wednesday night. I've loved the place since 1986, when the late Adam Bradley took me there--the food is quite affordable, it has a very eclectic jukebox, the service is good, and the clientele is like having a front row seat at the circus. I never took Susie there until they banned smoking. (In the days when they still allowed smoking, Steph told me to toss my clothes into the laundry basket and head immediately for the shower whenever I returned from there.)

The Blue Danube, 2439 N. High St.

Susie and I both ate quite well, one of those meals where we roll and stagger out of the restaurant. The total bill came to $26, including tip. We had just missed a southbound High St. bus when we left, so we walked back to Weinland Park, all two miles of it. Both of us still felt stuffed when we came home, despite our having burned off at least half the calories we consumed.

Gay Pride Weekend just ended in Columbus. Susie and I went to a potluck at church Friday night, and she helped make signs for the march, while other people helped bake. Susie worked with an entire cookie tin full of crayons and colored markers, and produced her own sign. Someone else stapled it to a stick for her, which was a good thing. The staple gun at church is capable of inflicting Passion of the Christ-type wounds in the hands of inexperienced people (double meaning there, both of them would work). After we came home from the potluck, I went out to Goodale Park, where the LGBT community had set up booths, food stands, and music equipment. It had rained earlier in the evening, and I think that kept some people away, but the sky was clear by the time I reached the park. The ground was muddier than I would have liked, but the sidewalks were dry.

I walked home in an alley parallel to High Street, and out of the blue a guy offered me $20 if I would stay with his very drunk boyfriend. How drunk was the boyfriend? He was so drunk, he was unconscious on the concrete under a fire escape. I would earn the $20 to stay with the drunk while the sober half of the couple went to get their car. I agreed, and the sober boyfriend left. A lesbian couple came up the alley, took one look at the guy prostrate on the ground, and one of them said, "Party on!" I refrained from making any snide comments about him. Although I haven't touched anything stronger than Diet Pepsi since 1998, I have been too drunk to make it home under my own steam more times than I care to admit.

The sober guy came back, and the two of us loaded the inebriated one into the car. As I tried to get him to his feet, I marveled at how somebody has finally invented a boneless person. The guy was almost completely dead weight, but the boyfriend and I finally managed to get him in a sitting position in the passenger seat of the car and put on his seat belt. (I even found myself saying, "Hold on, Baba Looey!" while I was trying to get the guy into position. No idea where that came from--I haven't seen Quick Draw McGraw, even on Boomerang, since I was about six.) The sober guy, true to his word, handed me a $20 bill before he got behind the wheel and they drove off into the night. I was pleasantly surprised to get the money, although I would have chalked it up as a mitzvah performed had he not paid me.

It's almost 11 p.m. right now, and the neighbors right now are going full blast--so I'm playing Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells to drown them out. If their decibel level is still off the charts later on, I will really crank the volume on this laptop (I have my Tweakers plugged in as well) when Oldfield plays "Sailor's Hornpipe" in increasingly high volumes and manic tempos at the end of the second movement.

Bookstore work yesterday made me feel like I was being kept after school. Susie went to the Pride march, and she proudly displayed her self-made sign for all to see, and participated in the post-march festivities in Goodale Park until mid-afternoon. Fortunately, people were there to take pictures and post them on Facebook. It wasn't as good as being there, but I re-posted pictures of Susie on my Wall.

A very color-coordinated Susie during the Pride March yesterday. (City Hall is in the background.) She chose the colors of her clothes and her leis quite deliberately. Many thanks to Linda McNabb for the photo.

I arrived in Goodale Park after the work day ended at 2 p.m. I made my leisurely way up toward Goodale Park, stopping for lunch at the Golden Arches and then waiting for the bus. The wait at the bus stop took longer than usual, because of all the Pride events downtown and the Short North. One of the first things I remember when I arrived at the park was hearing the Capital University Pride Band playing mainstays from the early 1980s. (This is the 30th anniversary of Pride in Columbus, so I'm guessing that's why all the '80s music kept coming up.) It was the first time I've ever heard "867-5309/Jenny" played by a brass band. I have always pitied anyone who had that number, or Pennsylvania 6-5000.

There were many slogans supporting gay marriage, and I support it from a small-L libertarian standpoint. Lately, though, I have been seeing it through the very jaundiced eye of my recent experience on the marital front. I recently told a gay friend of mine that whenever I hear about gays and lesbians wanting to marry, I think of an incident during John Kennedy's Presidency. During either the Bay of Pigs debacle or the Cuban Missile Crisis, Barry Goldwater was in the Oval Office with an increasingly sleep-deprived and edgy JFK. After receiving some worrisome news on the phone, JFK turned to Goldwater and said, in complete exasperation, "And you actually want this fucking job?!" That's pretty much my take, from where I sit at the moment.

Susie and I celebrated Fathers' Day in culinary delight this morning, making our first visit in eons to Hometown Buffet in Consumer Square. I can't remember the last time we ventured toward the west side of Columbus, out toward my erstwhile employer Medco Health, and the 40 Motel. (The latter has been much less interesting since the owner stopped posting witty comments on the marquee outside. One of my favorites was NEVER PLAY LEAPFROG WITH A UNICORN.) Susie and I both ate well--I highly recommend Hometown's meatloaf, by the way. I went up to the buffet three or four times, but in an effort to be abstemious, refrained from having dessert. It's like people I see who order mountains of food and then wash it down with Tab because they're watching their weight.) But we atoned for it by shopping at Kroger afterwards. Getting all the groceries home in two backpacks on the bus was a Sisyphean project.

I'm going in to work late tomorrow. I have a few errands to run in the morning, so I have the luxury of not setting the alarm when I finally do hit the sack. My work week consists of the Industrial Commission and the Discovery Exchange this week, although Saturday will be jam-packed from the moment my feet hit the floor that morning. The bookstore will be in the morning, Comfest will take up much of the day, and then around 11 p.m. Susie and I will be headed to Grandview to the latest Return of Nite Owl Theater. (Fritz the Nite Owl will be showing The Terror (1963) with Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff. When I heard those names, I was hoping the movie would be The Raven.)

This has been the weekend, but I sure don't feel all that rested!

Moonlighting at the End of the Tunnel

2011-06-14T23:27:00.000-04:00

One of the syrupy mantras I've heard repeatedly over the past few years is, "No one ever said, on his deathbed, 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'" I know that I am not saying it now, even though the many extra hours I've worked these past few weeks have been necessary and--dare I say it?--fun.

Usually, I'll just work the beginning-of-quarter rushes at the Columbus State bookstore. That was why it was such a surprise (a very pleasant one!) when my supervisor emailed me out of the blue and asked if I'd be interested in working nights this spring. (A manager is leaving Columbus, and I'm pretty much doing his job until they hire a full-time replacement.)

The drawback has been the timing. I'm still green at the single-parent thing, and now that school is out, Susie has been depressed and bored for much of the day. She has found some work, a few hours here and there working as a mother's helper for a year-old little girl (the daughter of her first babysitter), and yesterday she and the Youth Group from church went down to the Feed My Sheep food pantry in Athens County which I've described in previous entries. That's why it was such good news to see that Susie will be working as a Volunteen at the library this summer. The deadline for applying had come and gone, but some kids had dropped out of the program, so she applied. I was all too happy to sign the permission form after she and I came home from dinner at Wendy's tonight.

But there is an end in sight for the moonlighting. The Discovery Exchange will be closing at 6 p.m. for the rest of the summer as of the first week in July, once the summer quarter is in full swing. Since my work day at the Industrial Commission ends at 5, and it takes me 15-20 minutes to walk over to the corner of Cleveland and Mount Vernon Avenues, there is really no point in my working there for half an hour. So, July 3 will be my last hurrah until the fall book rush. I will miss the extra cash, but will be glad to be home in the evenings for Susie.

Susie and I have made two or three appearances at the Olympic Swim and Racquet Club since it opened. This week, neither of us have gone--mainly because of my work schedule, but also because the temperature has only reached the mid-70s for most of the week. It's no fun to go swimming and then have to stand around digging slush out of your ears.

Fathers' Day is next weekend. Susie and I are going to celebrate by going to see The Wizard of Oz at the Ohio Theater. Susie has seen it numerous times, and can recite most of the dialogue and songs from memory. Until she was born, I was rather lukewarm about it. I never even saw it on a big screen until Susie was a toddler, when I took her to a showing of it at Crosswoods Cinema in Worthington. And I am sure it's pure coincidence that The Wizard of Oz is showing during Pride Weekend.

I've learned this month how much disruption in familiar physical objects or surroundings can totally disorient me. The weekend before last, while Susie was at the pool, I walked a block or two north to a little hole-in-the-wall dollar store and replaced my wallet, which was falling apart and barely holding together. I paid about $2 for a blue tri-fold, and sat at poolside transferring the thick plethora of cards--insurance, business, shopping, etc.--and bus pass from one to the other, along with the few dollars I happened to have in there. Even though many gift cards and debit cards were expired, I was loath to toss them in the trash barrel by the kids' pool. I haven't carried pictures in my wallet since high school, so I didn't have to sort through them to see who to keep and who to discard. (I'd look like Steven Hill--or Peter Graves--going through the dossiers on Mission: Impossible, even though they would always pick the same agents.)

When my dad died, my stepmother sent a huge box to me UPS, which contained his clothes, the flag from his coffin, and his wallet, among other things. When I went through the wallet, I was surprised to find a small color drawing of Andrew Jackson in with the high school graduation picture of me. Kellogg's Pop-Tarts printed trading cards of U.S. Presidents when I was about 11 or 12, which I collected avidly. Dad always liked Andrew Jackson--safe bet I'm not part Cherokee--because he was the first truly proletarian President, so I let him have the Jackson picture. (He said his interest in Jackson began when he read Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson in college.)

On a larger scale, there's been disruption in my physical setting at work. I work on the 10th floor of the William Green Building, and in May I moved to a temporary pod in another section, while workers tore down the old pod walls and set up new ones. This involved the usual logistical nightmares with cabling phone and data lines, etc. I didn't even unpack once I arrived at the temporary pod, since I knew I'd move back as soon as the new area was ready.

We moved to the new area. It occupies the same section of the 10th floor, but the layout is different. I have four section-mates, all very good people. However, my pod is a bit removed from theirs. Since I do virtually all of the Industrial Commission's medical transcribing, I have higher walls and am separated from all the noise. (I love my co-workers dearly, but they can get boisterous.) I spent Friday and part of Monday moving and finally trying to settle in, and I'm still getting my bearings, and getting disconcerted when things aren't where they were previously.

I am bringing this entry to a close, because morning comes way too early. Tomorrow will be a jam-packed day. I have an appointment with a podiatrist in the morning, going to Columbus State to get my paycheck immediately after that, then I'm working at the I.C.--transcribing the doctor who dictates at an auctioneer's pace. The bookstore beckons afterwards, and to end the evening on a festive note, I'm taking Susie to dinner at my (our) beloved Blue Danube Restaurant on High Street.

Couldn't stand the show, but it's an appropriate graphic for my work life this spring.

Gotta Post Today

2011-05-31T04:41:00.000-04:00

For those of you who conscientiously follow my blog (kind of like Fritz the Nite Owl's "14 viewers out there in the darkness," you know May 31 is kind of a holy day of obligation for me. On this day in 1669, Samuel Pepys wrote the final entry in the diary he began New Year's Day 1660. According to my computer clock, it is almost four hours into May 31. Since it is impossible for me to sleep right now, I'm here at the keyboard blogging.

Pepys' diary, describing the Great Fire of London in September 1666.

The temperature right now is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, the coolest it's been in the past 36 hours or so. The current relative humidity is 84%, and the air conditioner is not working right now. That's one of the reasons I'm not sleeping right now.

Another is that I napped for much of the afternoon. Susie and I share a Sprint 4G wireless card (much more cost-effective than a cable router), and in the afternoon, she came home from the playground vowing not to go out again the rest of the day, because of the heat. So, while she was online, I went up to my bedroom and stretched out on the bed to read. The next thing I knew, it was late afternoon, and Susie was knocking on the door to announce she had just made a pot of spaghetti. (I was not going to ask her to, because of the heat.)

Possibly the fact that I drank about half of a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi tonight may have something to do with my current wakefulness. That is doubtful, and I don't say that facetiously. My caffeine consumption is so heavy that I've built up quite a bit of tolerance to its effects.

So, that is why I'm sitting here in the front room in my shorts, with the laptop screen lit before me, my two fingers tappety-tapping across the keyboard, and the Alan Parsons Project's "You Don't Believe" sounding from my speakers. (I am keeping the volume low, since Susie has taken over the master bedroom, directly above this room.)

Today was a good day to make only occasional visits to Facebook and the 'Net anyway. Most (but not all) recycled the same Memorial Day pictures and treacle ad nauseam. (John Fugelsang was correct when he posted, "The best way to honor veterans is to stop creating new ones.") Plus, many people are up in arms about Jim Tressel's resignation as Ohio State's head football coach. I was told to "GO TO HELL!!" by one Marietta High School classmate because I wondered if Tressel needed to resign so he could write another book about integrity and faith in God to live one's life. (Even the most die-hard fan has to get a chuckle out of the title of Tressel's book Life Promises for Success: Promises from God on Achieving Your Best.)

Later in the evening, I felt that I had to remind my Facebook friends that Monday was the day Jim Tressel resigned. The calendar does not say December 7, 1941; it does not say November 22, 1963; it most certainly does not say September 11, 2001.

And how do I feel about Tressel's resignation? I remember a December 1986 editorial in The New Republic about the Iran-Contra scandal, when it looked like bad times were ahead for the Reagan Administration. The author of "TRB in Washington" summed up my feelings about Reagan, and I echo them now regarding Jim Tressel:

Dear me. Am I really the only one here who's having a good time? Dry those tears and repeat after me: Ha. Ha. Ha.

I managed just one walk tonight, and it was more out of necessity than a desire to exercise. I walked to the Giant Eagle on Neil Avenue (about 1.7 miles) just before dark. There is a Kroger less than 10 minutes away (on foot), but it is becoming a ghost town. The new store, on the same site, is close to completion, and so, as they run out of items, nobody is restocking the shelves. It's been known as Kro-ghetto for quite some time in the neighborhood, and a friend of mine has been mugged at least twice in the parking lot. So, apparently the solution is to let everything run out, and then close the store at the end of this week, and reopen it in the new building come July. The new building is starting to look like something finally, and the current building will be razed so they'll have more parking space.

I just question the wisdom of building a high-end store (with a butcher shop, fresh fish area, delicatessen, wine section, etc.) in this neighborhood. Who patronizes this Kroger currently? Mostly students, people on food stamps, pensioners, and immigrants who come to this Kroger because it's within walking distance of campus, Weinland Park, and Harrison West. Many of these folks aren't all that rich. (I use my Kroger Plus card with each visit, but that's often a waste, because I accumulate beaucoup fuel perks, but, being a non-driver, I have no occasion to redeem them.)

It's now about an hour from sunrise. I walk Susie to the bus stop at 6:30 (a guarantee that the bully I mentioned in a previous entry leaves her alone), which means I set my alarm for 6. I'm not really tired, although I'm sure I expended some energy here at the keyboard. Wondering if lying down, even for a little while, is a waste.

The Night We Called It a Day

2011-05-30T04:26:00.001-04:00

I've done enough organizing and tidying up around my worktable that I can get to my turntable without obstruction for the first time in weeks. I celebrated this event by putting on a Dave Brubeck Quartet LP from the mid-1960s, Angel Eyes. One of the songs on this album is "The Night We Called It a Day." It's not my favorite song on this particular album (that would have to be "Diamonds for Your Furs"), but it is truly appropriate to my current life situation.

(Even now, by the way, I'm still on a vinyl Brubeck jag. Currently spinning is Anything Goes! The Dave Brubeck Quartet Plays Cole Porter, and I'm listening to "Love for Sale" as I type.)

Steph is now in Florida, on the eve of beginning a new job, and already beginning a new life. Susie and I saw her off at the Greyhound station downtown early Friday morning, and she left at 7:30 a.m. for a 26-hour bus ride to Titusville, via Cincinnati, Nashville, Atlanta, and Orlando. Since Susie had to be at school to audition for a speech, we didn't stay with Steph until she boarded, but left her as the line was moving toward the gate and onto the bus. This was the point where the driver was announcing "Tickets out of the envelopes, please!" (Steph had ordered her tickets online beforehand, and they had arrived in the mail earlier in the month.) Steph teared up hugging Susie goodbye, and I gave Steph a very cursory farewell hug, and went out with Susie to East Main Street so she could catch her bus to school and I could head home.

(I had planned to just arrive late for work, in the interests of returning to normal as soon as possible after Steph's departure for Florida. However, earlier in the week Human Resources sent me an email saying that I had one cost-savings day left, and it had to be used very soon. Not remembering it was the day Steph was leaving, I asked for May 27, more because it would make my Memorial Day weekend longer.)

Susie and I are bearing up quite well. Despite this entry's title, there was no night (or day) Steph and I decided to stop being together. It's been a gradual process, and even going through nearly 16 years of memories (my own memory supplemented, of course, by reams of diaries and shoe boxes full of breast-pocket notebooks), I can't pinpoint one point where it started to go bad. So in the end, there is little sadness on my part. There is, instead, much relief. I feel that the limbo has lifted, and the way is clear for me to look at the next phase of my life. And last Friday is as much of a milestone in my own history as 1066, 1492, 1215, 1776, and 9/11 are in world history.

The record has now gone to "What is This Thing Called Love," and the best answer I can give right now comes from the computer in WarGames (1983) describing thermonuclear war: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." This is not universal, by the way. It's just the way I think I have to live in order to preserve my own sanity.

I was proud of Susie Friday night, when she performed in the Cabaret Night at Dominion Middle School. The attendance was sparse, and many of the kids scheduled to appear were no-shows, but Susie and her friends were on hand to perform two brief skits from The Wizard of Oz. Susie played the Wicked Witch of the West in one scene, and the Scarecrow in another. (There may have been better attendance if it hadn't been Memorial Day weekend and if the baseball team wasn't away at a championship game.) Several of the acts listed in the program didn't happen, because cast members were absent, and the drama teacher, Emily Foster, had to fill in for some of the roles, but I was proud that Susie was front and center. Despite the fact that she said goodbye to her mother 12 hours earlier, and that she may not see her mother again for weeks, or maybe months, she gave her all once she was onstage. That makes the no-shows' excuses rather lame, methinks.

Dominion Middle School, where Susie will be a student until the end of this week.

Saturday night, Susie and I walked the three miles to Grandview for the monthly Return of Nite Owl Theater. The movie last night was Dementia 13, the first commercially successful film of Francis Ford Coppola. Susie thought she'd doze off during it, especially after the long walk, but she was riveted to her seat. I even found myself warming up to the latest installment of Aidan 5 (a detective, circa 2070, tries to solve the mass murder of his clones), which had left me a little cold when I had seen it in March before Carnival of Souls. I dismissed it then as a cheap Sin City wannabe, but now I want to go to the site and watch the episodes from the beginning.

First Unitarian Universalist Church went to one service per Sunday as of this morning, and Susie and I marked the event by sleeping late. (Smaller UU churches shut down for the entire summer. The stock answer when non-Unitarians ask about this is, "What other denomination could God trust out of His sight for an entire summer?") We went to the Really, Really Free Market in the afternoon, and the pickings were slim this month--there is no way to predict it. I knew, however, that Susie would not go away empty-handed. Next door to the Sporeprint Infoshop is the Third Hand Bicycle Cooperative, and last week a generous soul donated eight or 10 children's bicycles. Most of them were for kids of kindergarten age and a little older. My friend Randall told me this last Monday, and he set aside a 15-speed Huffy Mont Clare for Susie--the only one that might have been big enough for her. Between Monday night and Sunday afternoon, he filled the front tire and adjusted the handlebars and the saddle, and now Susie has a bike. She has had limited success in learning to ride them in the past, so I'm worried that it may gather dust, but I'm hoping to encourage her to take it to Weinland Park this summer and give it a whirl. (It's in our dining room right now, because we don't have a bike chain and lock. Even with one, I'm not sure if keeping it outdoors is a good idea. I can see someone in this neighborhood owning the tools to snap a thick U-lock in half like a twig, and Susie had a bike stolen when we lived in Franklinton and kept it out front.)

Susie and I went to an excellent Memorial Day cookout in Clintonville, at the home of our friends Steve and Kittie. The undisputed star of the show was their granddaughter, who will turn a year old in July. I picked up the little girl, and she did the exact thing Susie did when she was an infant: she made a grab for my glasses, which instantly skittered to the deck. I had completely forgotten how fascinated babies are by glasses, and how they'll make a grab for them when given the chance. (Susie also loved tugging at my beard, or pulling things out of my breast pocket, when she was a baby and I was holding her. It made me very briefly consider shaving off my beard until she was older--and this from a guy who considers it a deal-breaker if a romantic partner asked me to get rid of my beard!)

Since I was (am) so proud of Susie for stepping up to the plate and performing so well on such an emotional day, I am posting this video from Friday night's Cabaret at Dominion. (Susie is in the blue T-shirt, portraying the Wicked Witch of the West--riding a push broom!--and the Scarecrow.)

The Weekend--An Imminent Departure, New (Old) A/V Equipment, Riot Averted, and a Marvelous Spring Concert

2011-05-23T02:22:00.002-04:00

What better time for a three-day weekend, especially when I'll have two in a row? Susie and I are going to be touring her new high school, The Graham School, at 11 a.m. Monday (this) morning, so I took the occasion to take the day off from work, and Susie will be taking the day off from school. After her recent bullying incident, and her middle school's unwillingness and/or ineffectiveness in dealing with it, I decided that The Graham School, with its much lower teacher-student ratio, and the fact that everyone in its student body seems to be an oddball in one way or another, would be a much better place for her than Whetstone High School.

Steph leaves for Florida, this time for good, on Friday morning. She took another step toward making this happen on Saturday morning. She already has her Greyhound ticket in hand, and on Saturday she shipped several boxes of clothing to Florida via UPS. When I came home from a long overdue haircut and beard trim Friday, she was sitting in the living room with a Sharpie in her hand, addressing these boxes.

The thought that stayed in my mind was a poem by Mary Oliver. I've heard it many times, but hadn't given it much consideration until recently. One night I jotted it in my pocket notebook, and I glance at it almost daily lately, much the way a 12-Stepper contemplates the Serenity Prayer.

The passage is from "In Blackwater Woods" and reads:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

I spent Saturday morning in Westerville with Steve and Kittie at the monthly Builders of the Adytum meeting at the Blendon Masonic Lodge. After lunch, there was a longer meeting, but I walked to Cleveland Ave., so I could catch a 1 bus back into Columbus. I happened by a yard sale, and the only item that interested me was a Symphonic combination VCR/DVD player/recorder, on sale for $5. The Magnavox model that became mine when my mother died is about shot, so I was happy to buy this. (Symphonic was the model of the first VCR I bought new. I bought it at Golden Bear in 1988. Golden Bear was Jack Nicklaus' short-lived chain of electronic appliance stores.)

I bought the VCR/DVD by the Otterbein campus, and had to eat at Dairy Queen beforehand to break a $20 bill. While eating there, I found the tray liner amusing. They definitely need to change or update the tray liners. It featured the Presidents of the United States, from George Washington to George W. Bush. It was also printed before 2004, because there was no death date listed for Ronald Reagan. (It made me think of a calendar hanging on the wall of a carryout in Marietta when I was in grade school. The calendar featured pictures of all the Presidents--Washington to Nixon at the time. Someone had taken a ballpoint pen and doodled a glowing halo above JFK's head, and drawn a forelock and square mustache on Nixon.)

After the (former) owner and I walked to his apartment to get the remote control, I had a good workout, hiking from N. West St. to W. County Line Rd. to Cleveland Ave., so I could catch the 1 bus back to Columbus. I was totally exhausted when I made it home.

During the night, I was curious about whether the planned block party on Chittenden Ave., ChittShow, would careen out of control. The party was in the 100 block of Chittenden, about a 15-minute walk from my place. It was also a week after a block party on E. Woodruff Ave. that resulted in three arrests, many airborne beer bottles and cans, and police using tear gas and pepper spray. I wanted to record images for posterity on Saturday night.

And when I got to Chittenden, yes there were partiers clogging the sidewalks and standing shoulder-to-shoulder on every porch and every lawn. There were also many Columbus police officers, many on foot, some on horseback, making sure the street stayed clear. I overheard many people complaining about why all the police presence, what made them think there'd be trouble? (Search me. Lots of alcohol, lots of people drinking it--many of them underage, all of them living in an area whose population density is comparable to Calcutta or Tokyo, of course they'll all act like civilized human beings.) People wandered from party to party, and many of them were sensible enough to travel in groups. The yards were littered with plastic cups and beer cans before 11:30, but I didn't see anyone throwing bottles. (Of course, I went to O.U., where the parties make ChittShow look like a church picnic.) When the clock struck 2, the crowds in the block began thinning out, although they did need some prodding from the police, but without the use of billy clubs or tear gas.

I'm glad there was no riot, but for the wrong reason. Once I was in the thick of Chittenden Ave., I reached into my pants pocket for my cell phone, so I could use its camera if anything happened, and found I hadn't brought the phone. The bulge in my pocket was my microcassette recorder. Despite all the beer available, and all the offers I declined, all I drank Saturday night was Sun Drop, which a woman in a parking lot was giving away free from a small cart. (I had never had it before. It's a Dr. Pepper product, best described as a cross between 7-Up and Mountain Dew.)

Buckeye Real Estate, one of the major landlords on Chittenden Ave. decided to head off any trouble before it started. They taped this notice on their tenants' doors. I took one with me to scan here into the blog. It was the only one I could find that wasn't totally wet or covered with footprints:

The combined choirs at church performed the Spring Concert, "Make Love, Not War" this evening. Susie sang as part of Rising Voices. The whole performance was fantastic, and I noticed a light rain was falling at the same time as the sun was starting to drop into the western sky. I guess I would have seen a rainbow if I had gone outside, but I wanted to hear every single note of the concert.

To compensate for this entry, which I realize has strayed all over the map, I will share with you a video of the Rising Voices (Susie is visible on the risers, on the left) singing with the Spirit of Life choir (the 9:15 a.m. service choir) and the Chalice Choir (the 11 a.m. choir). They're singing "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" from Hair.

Blogger... Testing, One, Two, Three...

2011-05-14T01:28:00.000-04:00

I was relieved to read a Huffington Post story today which says that Blogger is once again up and running, after about 24 hours of downtime. The timing was bad for me, because on and off last night, I tried to log in here and post something. I alternated between frustration at not being able to post, and worry that what I've posted here previously had gone up in smoke. I briefly flirted with the idea that this was no accident, some minimum-wage computer jockey hitting the wrong key. A character in David Byrne's True Stories said it best:

The Trilateral Commission and The Council on Foreign Relations. Ever hear of them? Well, neither did I until I noticed the Chain of Coincidence... Do you run out of Kleenex, paper towels, and toilet paper at the same time? You know it's true!

I will be more convinced of conspiracy if Blogger crashes on May 31, the holy day of obligation for diarists, both Internet and pen-and-paper. (On that day, in 1669, Samuel Pepys discontinued his famous journal, out of the mistaken fear he was going blind.)

I shudder at how the late Robert Shields would have reacted if he had used Blogger. After all, he recorded every aspect of every moment of every day, spending hours per day at his IBM Wheelwriter.

This page from April 1994 represents one of the more fascinating days in the life of Robert Shields, former United Church of Christ minister, educator, poet, and compulsive diarist.

One of the things I wanted to write about was directly experiencing the less desirable side of this neighborhood. Sunday afternoon, after church, I walked to the main library, a walk of about 2½ miles. For some reason, the walk didn't invigorate me or give me its usual second wind, so I took the bus home. As I was walking up E. 7th Ave. toward the alley behind my house, I noticed about six or seven kids, both boys and girls, ranging in age from six to about 11, standing around talking, playing with a basketball, sitting on their bikes, etc. Since the weather has warmed, this is not at all uncommon in this neighborhood, so I barely noticed it.

That changed when one of the littler boys, who I think was about seven, broke away from the pack and began following me up the alley. I wasn't sure what he wanted, but he kept drawing closer and closer to me as I walked. (If we had been playing shadow tag, he would have tagged me several times over.) Before I could ask what he was doing, he stepped up, balled his fist, and struck me on the thigh. It didn't hurt; and I would barely have noticed it if I hadn't been looking at him. Giggling, he turned around and ran like mad back to his friends.

My guess is that he was doing it on a dare. He escaped too quickly, and I was in a bit of a hurry to get home because I needed to get to a bathroom, but I've played over possible reactions in my head endlessly since late Sunday afternoon. I even posted a question about it on Yahoo! Answers. The responses varied from "kick the kid up the shitter--he'll respect you after that" to chasing after him. Two possibilities tied for first with me. I envisioned sitting him down and saying, "Now why did you do that? Do you know me? Have I ever hurt you or done anything bad to you?" The other possibility was picking him up by the arms and legs and wordlessly dropping him in the nearest trash barrel and then going on my way.

Tuesday night, there was a fire--probably set--a block and a half away from our house. I was finishing up dinner a little before 9:30. (Steph and Susie ate earlier; I was at the Discovery Exchange until it closed at 8, and then came back to Weinland Park by bus. Susie had choir rehearsal, but a fellow chorister's dad drove her to and from practice.) I was in the kitchen putting my dirty dishes in the sink when I began hearing one siren after another, in very rapid succession. I looked out the window and saw that fire trucks were going by. Not only were they going by, they were parking, all their lights flashing and revolving. I stepped out onto the back porch and saw a thick black column of smoke coming from very nearby.

I put on my shoes and went out to see what was happening. At first, there were thin clouds of smoke drifting through the alley, but the wind was blowing them away. I wasn't coughing or choking, but it was causing my eyes to water.

All I had to do was follow the sounds and the crowds, and the fire was in a vacant frame duplex at the corner of N. 5th St. and E. 7th Ave. (Numbered streets in Columbus are the exact opposite of streets in Manhattan. In Columbus, the streets are north-south and the avenues are east-west.) Yet another fire on N. 5th St. When I was first scouting out the neighborhood for rentals, I noticed there were several burned-out houses and properties in a two- or three-block length, all of them on 5th. I went through the Ohio Web Library's online newspaper index, and saw that the Columbus Fire Department suspected arson in almost every case. This blog features pictures of several recent fires in the area, some of which I completely missed.

There are arsonists, and there are arsonists. In the case of these properties, my prime suspects are always owners burning down their properties for the insurance once they started hemorrhaging money--which has not been unusual since the sub-prime mortgage crisis began in 2007. (I wonder how one goes about hiring a professional arsonist. My guess is that they don't advertise on Craigslist.) This type of arsonist is despicable, but I see him as more of an annoyance, until the houses around mine start going up in flames.

The type of arsonist that truly scares me is the bona fide pyromaniac. This is the kind of person who gets a true psychological and/or sexual rush from setting or seeing fires. If it's flammable (inflammable--the two words mean the same thing), they'll try to burn it. Once the fire is going, they'll sit back and watch it, like a teenager sneaking looks at online porn or hentai. This is the type of arsonist who thinks with his glands. He (statistically, they are almost all male) will set a fire, consequences be damned. (The only literary portrayal of such a person that immediately comes to mind is the Trashcan Man in Stephen King's The Stand.)

It is past 1 a.m. right now, and my next-door neighbors are going full blast. To try and block out all the noise they're making with the shouting back and forth (usually to people who are sitting/standing within millimeters of one another), I've put on my music. Currently I'm playing "And He Shall Purify the Sons of Levi," from Handel's Messiah. It reminds me of another hot night, during the summer of 1986. My good friend, the late Adam Bradley, and I had been to a few bars and decided to enlighten and illuminate some of the people on the street.

We took our "mission" to some of the seedier parts of nocturnal Columbus. As we drove past places like the New James Café (on S. High St., an all-night restaurant whose cheap but filling victuals I truly miss) or the now-departed (and unmissed) Earl's Bar, we put his car tape deck up to maximum and would blast sacred music, all of it joyous. We made one pass trailing Bach's Mass in B Minor, and came back around with Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," Vivaldi's Gloria, and the old standby, "Hallelujah" from The Messiah--I wasn't sure if they could ~~Handel~~ appreciate it.

The music on my laptop switched from "And He Shall Purify" to Parliament's "Give up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)," but I skipped to something else, feeling that hearing that will only make my neighbors rowdier. The next song that popped up was The Iguanas' "Boom Boom Boom," which I once cynically described as Weinland Park's national anthem.

Somewhere There is a Desk Under Here

2011-05-08T01:16:00.002-04:00

This is a mantra I constantly repeat to myself, both at work and at home. Felix Unger, of Odd Couple fame, wanted to shoot a documentary about his roommate Oscar Madison and title it Mondo Filth. Were someone to do this about my desk, Mondo Clutter would be the perfect title for it.

At work, this is less true than normal. I transcribed like a man possessed Friday, and was able to finish shortly before lunch. The doctor wasn't one of my favorites, but he's articulate enough that I usually have no trouble transcribing, once he finishes repeating himself and interrupting himself. That left the second half of the day without any specific jobs or responsibilities, so I cleaned up my pod somewhat. I was able to throw out a backlog of no-longer-relevant paperwork, file away some personal papers, and get the desk to the point where I was able to use a rag and a spray cleaner on the surface.

But that never lasts. "Out of sight, out of mind" is something you usually hear in connection with long-distance romance, but that is a truism when it comes to my trying to locate things. Unless it's all on the surface of my desk, no matter how far buried it is, I'm likely to lose track of a book, document, or disk.

My ideal desk is a Tingle table. I first saw one when I worked at the IRS' Regional Processing Center in Covington, Kentucky in 1995, before electronic filing became more the rule than the exception. (When you mailed your Federal income tax form to Cincinnati, Ohio 45999, this is where it would end up.) A Tingle table (named for its inventor; I thought that it had a rather kinky-sex sound to it at first) had numerous compartments, slots, and drawers to separate incoming documents and enclosures when people mailed in their tax returns. Failing that, I would love to own one of the 19th-century rolltop desks which featured dozens of small pigeonholes, much like the stations for letter-sorting by hand where I spent many a predawn hour. (I saw a multi-pigeonholed desk for sale when I lived in Franklinton. The $2000 asking price was all that prevented me from taking it home.)

This is a picture of a Tingle table that ran in The New York Times sometime in the late 1990s. I remember seeing them in the Service Center in Covington, but I was grateful that I never had to sit at one.

I have some incentives to straighten out the desk where I am now sitting. When Steph and Susie came home from running errands yesterday afternoon (including clothes-shopping and a haircut for Susie), Susie left something on my desk, along with the recent issues of The New Yorker and The Catholic Worker. She found it Scotch-taped to our front door. It was from our landlord, saying they're doing a property inspection next Tuesday afternoon. A messy desk isn't grounds for eviction or reprimand, but it's a good reason to try to make some headway into straightening this up. (The letter said, "It is not necessary that you be on the premises at the time of entry. The representative, after knocking, will use a passage key to gain entrance.")

Some other incentives: My pedometer and my keys are missing. I made it a point not to take my key ring to the Con in Cleveland last weekend (see last entry), because I was worried about losing my keys in Cleveland. (This ring has my house keys, the keys to my desk and cupboards at work, and the ring knife I "borrowed" from the Cincinnati post office when I worked there in 1994.) As part of a Live and Work Well campaign at work, Human Resources was handing out free pedometers at work, and I was quite conscientious about clipping it to my belt, and recording my daily number of steps in my diary every night, and now the pedometer is at large.

As I've made the first baby steps toward organizing this desk (more of a work table, really), I'm more grateful than ever that I don't smoke. I've never regretted for a nanosecond the fact that I've never smoked a cigarette (total disclosure here: I've never smoked tobacco), because I'm uncovering half-empty cans of cola and cups almost every time. Had these been cigarettes, I would have burned this place down long ago.

I have the same "out of sight, out of mind" problem when it comes to facial recognition, and because of this, I have--totally without meaning to--offended people when I draw a blank on who they are. Last Monday, when Susie and I took COTA to her school, we were walking from the stop on Indianola Ave. to her school (just under half a mile), when a father driving his daughter to school pulled over and offered us a ride. I was grateful for this, because it was raining. He called me by name, and wished me happy belated birthday (I turned 48 on the 29th), so I knew we are Facebook friends. Susie didn't know who he was, either, because she and his daughter aren't close friends. His name didn't click with me until tonight, when there was a notice on Facebook that he had changed his profile picture.

This is an extension of the shock you feel when you're a grade-schooler. All of us can look back and laugh at how bewildered we are as children the first time we see our teacher at the grocery store, or walking down the street, or at a restaurant. I will totally overlook someone if they are out of context. If I'm used to seeing you at work or church, there is a chance I may not click on who you are initially if I see you in a completely different setting.

Sometimes that extends to uniforms and clothing. There was a Muppet skit on Sesame Street a long time ago where a little boy is lost, and goes to a nearby police officer for help. Because of the badge and the uniform, he doesn't recognize that the officer is his uncle. One of my English professors at Ohio U. was a Catholic priest, but I only saw him "in uniform" once. He usually dressed like a stereotypical academic--tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, button-down shirts, necktie. The one time he came in wearing his "blacks"--i.e., black shirt with clerical collar, black slacks--was when he had performed a wedding shortly before class, and hadn't had time to run back to his apartment and change clothes. When he came into the classroom, it took me a second to realize who it was, although I knew from day one that he was a priest.

So when everything is right out on the desk, it's easier for me to remember its existence. Whether my keys and my pedometer are under here is still a mystery. (I am not exaggerating. This desk currently resembles an archaeological dig. I considered posting before-and-after pictures, but decided against it. I'm too mortified by its current condition.) In the course of typing this entry, I've already discovered a pair of laptop speakers I forgot that I owned.

Dusting Off the Blog and Writing

2011-05-03T23:51:00.000-04:00

Very early Saturday morning, I Twittered that I was far too exhausted to post a blog entry, but that I'd do my damnedest to do so that evening. At the time, I was sitting with my laptop in (where else?) my lap, in a hallway on the first floor of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Cleveland. That predawn in Shaker Heights found me "night angeling" at Jurasicon, the spring youth conference for the Ohio-Meadville District. Susie was there, part of the two carloads of us who came from Columbus. (A night angel is an adult and/or youth who walks through the church to make sure everyone is okay. Early Saturday morning it's an easy job, because all the kids are easy to find. At that hour they're all flying off the walls.)

You've probably figured out by now that blog entry never materialized. This was not--repeat, not--due to a lack of material to cover. Quite the opposite is true. On Friday, I turned 48, and being in Shaker Heights as a sponsor at a UU youth conference was the perfect way to celebrate. Susie has made a 180-degree turn from the barely social shrinking violet she was at the first conference she attended, last year in Pittsburgh. She gravitated straight toward the friends she met at previous conferences, and her feet barely touched the floor all weekend.

Susie (left) and two of her pals at Jurasicon, Shaker Heights, Ohio, April 29-May 1, 2011.

The conference ("con" in youth parlance) was a joyous event, but there were some bumps in the road. One of the youths I was sponsoring, and who rode up with me from Columbus, came down with strep throat on Saturday morning. My co-sponsor and I thought he was overreacting at first, since we couldn't see any white spots in his mouth or throat, and he seemed to perk up after a little while.

After a very little while, that is. By the end of the morning, he was lethargic, the throat felt worse, and the telltale white spots were there. I suggested that he bunk out in the sanctuary. It was a big enough space that people could stay away from him, and the only room that had little, if any traffic. Someone came up from Columbus and took him home, and the other sponsors related anecdotes about the "chickenpox con" from two years ago--which made me quite thankful Susie had been too young to attend (although she has had chickenpox and is now, presumably, immune.)

A young girl I was sponsoring broke her toe playing Ultimate in the field across from the church. ("No violence" is one of the standard non-bendable rules at youth cons, yet games of Kissy-Face and Ultimate are very popular, and the kids play them in a way that makes Rollerball look tame. I think it's the same as the way Quaker boarding schools' field hockey games are frightening to watch.) A paramedic sponsor splinted her toe with two spoons at first, and later with the more orthodox makeshift splint, a Popsicle stick.

Susie and her friend Cynthia performed an improvisational comedy act during the Talent Show, and after the Talent Show came the bridging ceremony, for high school seniors attending their final conference. By the time it was over, there was not a dry eye in the Fellowship Hall. I speak from personal experience when I say that many of the friends you make at these cons will be part of your life even 30+ years later.

I am sorry to have to report that Susie crashed very cruelly back to earth late Sunday afternoon, once we were back in Columbus. She spent the weekend in very loving surroundings, with friends on all sides, talking, laughing, and singing with her. Late in the afternoon, she went to the playground near our house, and soon came home in tears. A girl from her school (who lives in the neighborhood) harassed her, pulled her hair, and beat her in the face and head. Susie was neither bruised nor bleeding, but she was badly shaken up. We called the police, and when the officer came, he was talking to Susie when the girl who attacked her went by our house on her bike. The officer pulled her aside and talked to her, but did not arrest her. Apparently, unless they witness it directly, it's a she said-she said type of situation.

Yesterday morning, Susie and I spoke to the assistant principal of her school, and he said he would speak to the girl's parents that day. Despite his assurances that Susie is in his jurisdiction from the moment she steps out of our house en route to the bus stop until the moment she crosses our threshold again, both Steph and I doubt she's completely safe. The school handbook spills a lot of ink about its zero-tolerance policy about bullying, but it all boils down pretty much to, "Bullying is bad, mmm-kay?" (spoken like South Park's Mr. Mackey)

Last week brought a surprise to me--a much needed one at that. My supervisor at the Discovery Exchange (Columbus State's bookstore) emailed me to ask if I was available to work evenings this and next week. I replied within minutes of reading the email ("Yes! Yes! Yes!"), and have gone straight to the bookstore from the Industrial Commission last night and tonight. The pace is much slower than during rush, and I'm enjoying it. The last few days at the I.C. have been busy, trying to finish work before a computer upgrade, and the bookstore job has been the perfect place to decompress.

Take Back the Night '11 Rally and March Tonight

2011-04-28T23:26:00.000-04:00

I only passed the pre-Take Back the Night march activities, at the gateway to the Oval. A cold rain was falling, and I was slogging through the wet with only one destination in mind: Thompson Library. Many brave souls were organizing for the annual march to condemn violence and sexual assault against women, and they would not be deterred by the horrible weather and the nonexistent visibility.

Like them, I want to "take back the night." As a middle-aged male, I want the night--and the streets--to be as safe for me as women want them to be for them. I have always been a nocturnal person, and night was a passion I began to indulge full-time as a teenager, from sneaking out after midnight to wander the deserted streets of Marietta, to becoming a connoisseur of B movies because of watching old movies until dawn, and trying to find third-shift jobs when it was time for me to enter the workforce.

I was totally clueless about the negative connotations night carried. Born-again Christians' favorite pastime is trying to one-better one another with stories of how horrible they were pre-salvation, and calling oneself a "creature of the night" was always a way to enhance your secular rottenness bona fides. In high school, I bought a frayed Grove Press paperback of John Rechy's novel City of Night, attracted to the title. I lay propped up in bed until dawn reading his fascinating and tragic first-person novel of a lonely young man seeking love and acceptance while working as a male prostitute.

The radio was pleasant company for my on those late nights when I had to remain indoors. Despite my antipathy toward organized religion at the time, especially toward mass media religious expression, I faithfully listened to a program at 4:30 a.m. every Sunday morning, Nightsounds, hosted by the late Bill Pearce. Again, it was the title that drew me to listen, and soon I would lie in bed, lights off, listening to Pearce's gentle voice and thoughts. He and I weren't on the same page theologically, and I didn't pay close attention to the music he presented, but it was always a half hour well spent.

To me, nighttime was almost my own personal playground. During my years in the Unitarian Universalist youth groups, both at Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) and Ohio-Meadville District youth conferences, I was one of the people who stayed up almost until dawn, reading, talking, or writing. (The irony is that through most of high school I was such a Mormon about caffeine, yet I usually outlasted the people who never let their coffee mugs get more than half empty.)

Now that I'm older, I am more aware of the dangers of the nighttime, although I have never been mugged, pickpocketed, or assaulted. I would love to take this laptop with me when I leave the house in the evening, so I can write in a café or fast-food place. I don't because I doubt I would be safe in my neighborhood carrying a computer after dark. I am not wild about doing it during the daytime, but I do it anyway. Once the sun goes down, I feel apprehensive to hear footsteps behind me. I would be a waste of time for a mugger, since I'm usually close to broke, and my watch is a $20 off-brand digital from Target. (In my younger days, I was less apprehensive about walking around at night, even when I would cash my paycheck and carry two weeks' worth of wages around in my wallet.)

And I hope taking back the night means putting assumed guilt to rest. A faithful reader of this blog will notice that I write about nocturnal events, past and present, quite a bit. I never realized that being an habitué of a city after dark meant I was inherently a rapist. Nocturnal profiling is as wrong as racial profiling.

I never knew such a thing existed until I was living in Athens, Ohio. I was the assistant manager of a photocopy and typing service in the back of The Oasis, and early one morning a graduate student had dropped off a project that was at least 150 pages long, and had to be in her professor's hands at 9 a.m. the following morning.

So I spent the entire day wedded to the keyboard of the Apple Macintosh Plus, gulping endless cups of fountain Diet Pepsi and chomping down the occasional cheeseburger or candy bars, getting out of my chair only for trips to the bathroom. It was past 2:45 a.m. when the pages began coming out of the laser printer, and I went over each line to make sure it was typographically accurate.

I was staggering when I left The Oasis, just about 3:15. I lived less than a half mile away, but the distance seemed insurmountable. For a moment, I considered sneaking to the Church of the Good Shepherd, the Episcopal church next door to The Oasis, and sleeping on its porch until someone booted me out.

As I was nearing my house, I suddenly realized there was a young woman in front of me on the sidewalk. How did I know this? I learned of her existence only when she wheeled around and shrieked at me, "Why are you following me?"

Uhh... I live in this direction. I was so exhausted at that point I was barely aware of my surroundings, and was on a primitive GPS to get myself home. The most erotic thing I was envisioning was collapsing into bed and falling straight into dreamland. Even if this woman had taken off all her clothes, jumped into my arms, and said, "Ravage me!", I would not have been able to respond, emotionally or physically.

Yet since I was male and walking around in the predawn hours, ergo, my only purpose was sexual assault.

No woman asks for rape. To say that she "asked for it" because of wearing a miniskirt and a top that exposes plentiful cleavage is bullshit.

At the same time, no man asked to be pre-identified as a rapist merely because he enjoys walking the streets at night.

The night belongs to everyone.