Tag: people

Ones I have known, if even tangentially.

False Economy

SO THERE I WAS, PEEPING through the window of the Eureka, California post office, waiting for my elusive boss to enter her across-the-street cafe.

The year was 1988 – a time of great personal upheaval, both good and bad. Through a combination of circumstances, my then-new girlfriend and I were trying to make a go of it in that sleepy, downbeat North Coast city. Jobs were hard to come by, at least for a journeyman printer like me, and when I saw a newspaper ad promising to train someone as a coffeehouse clerk I sprang into delighted and determined action.

At first, things were pleasant. The cafe’s owner, who I’ll call Simone, was friendly and easygoing, as were the customers, and once I had figured out the espresso machine and sandwich-making regimens I felt reasonably financially secure (and competently useful) for the first time in weeks.

Then “Dave” walked in, an itinerant handyman who lived in a big blue van well-stocked with tools of every description.

“You’re new here, huh?” he said as I handed him a double espresso and a roast beef on rye. “Simone paid you yet?”

“I’ve only been here a couple days,” I replied. “Payday’s Friday.”

“Yeah? Right. Good luck.”

Friday arrived, and at closing time, I asked Simone for my wages.

“I’m a little short right now,” she said wistfully, “and I have to move some things around at the bank. Can you wait until tomorrow?”

“Well …. I suppose so.”

Tomorrow became today, and Simone appeared late that afternoon as I was building a turkey croissant.

“I’m SO sorry,” “she said wistfully. “I just missed the bank’s hours. Can I pay you Monday?”

“I don’t know, Simone…”

“I promise. Monday morning, as soon as the bank opens.”

Monday’s dawn broke, typically foggy and grey, with me outside the cafe waiting for Simone to arrive.

She didn’t.

Neither did she on Tuesday.

Nor Wednesday.

Meanwhile, my daily phone messages went unanswered, both at the cafe and at the number purporting to be Simone’s home.

Hence, my Thursday-morning stakeout.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, I thought with one of many impatient sighs. Who am I, James Bond? But I also can’t believe I’m not going to make rent or buy groceries this week.

Suddenly, Simone’s red Gremlin pulled up across the street. As she exited her car, I exited the post office.

“Simone!” I called, breaking into a fast trot. “Hey! Simone!”

Her beseeching eyes reflected helpless and apologetic dread, but before she could say anything, I spoke with uncharacteristic bluntness.

“Look here, Simone,” I said. “I like you, and I like working here, but I need to get paid – like right now!”

Tears came to her eyes. “You don’t understand!” she sobbed. “I can’t afford to pay you. All I have is this cafe and what’s in it. I owe so many people so much money; my life is in shambles, and I’m just as much a victim as you are…”

“I don’t mean to sound harsh, Simone, but frankly, that’s not my concern. I’m not going to leave this place without your paying me.”

And that was how, and why, my girlfriend and I feasted that week on thick sandwiches of roast beef and turkey breast. Victory is indeed sweet – and sometimes, savory.

“Room 101 Amusement Park”

RELAXING IN PUBLIC CAN SOMETIMES bring unexpected consequences.

Seated in the Walnut Creek BART station in the spring of 1980, I was reading my well-thumbed copy of 1984. So engrossed was I in Orwell’s pessimistic prose that I didn’t hear the man approach.

“You’re only reading this NOW!?” he demanded in an outraged bellow.

His intensity belied his nonchalant appearance: mid-30s, cleanshaven, plaid shirt, blue jeans, loafers. Although he seemed a normal human (for some values of the words “normal” and “human”), it also seemed best not to provoke him.

“No,” I replied with calm sincerity. “I’ve read it a couple of times.”

His blue eyes speared mine with an emphatic glare.

“Good!” he declared, and stalked off toward the escalator.

I guess it pays to be polite.

Audiomobile

“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…”

So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent on “fringe.”)

My initiation into this three-part sonic conspiracy – which included “Mr. Bird” and “Zoro X.R. Troll” – came about on receiving from Zoro a postage-stamped 60-minute cassette tape with no explanatory note save “PLAY ME” written on its label. Curious, I popped it into my boombox and pressed “Play.” My ears were happily assaulted (in machine-gun succession and no particular order) by excerpts from: Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, The Grateful Dead, Firesign Theater, a straitlaced radio preacher, Mr. Bird’s paranoid brother, Tom Robbins, Zoro’s favorite inspirational readings, The Beatles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and various other audial offerings now hazed by time and headspace, as well as Zoro’s drawled invitation to add to, subtract from, or otherwise mess with “this here tape” before sending it either back to him or on to Mr. Bird.

The process was simple:

1- Wire up two cassette recorder/players from output to input (this also works just as well, if not better, if you have one two-bay cassette player/recorder).
2- Load output player with whatever you like: music, spoken narrative or poetry, movie/tv soundtrack, sound effects, live microphone, &c., as limited only by imagination and source material.
3- Load a cassette into the input recorder, press “Record,” and engage the Pause button.
4- Play a section of the output tape.
5- Disengage input ‘s Pause button to record as much output as you want, then re-engage.
6- Switch output sources, the more incongruous and/or thematic the better.
7- Repeat process until you lose interest. (WARNING! It’s addictive.)

To simple, mad minds like ours, the results were vastly entertaining, and inadequately depicted in writing: “output1 (click) OUTPUT2! (click) OuTpUt3? (click) oUtPuT4…” ad infinitum.

After it was exchanged for a while, the tape had mutated into something very odd and layered indeed. One surrealistic iteration included dialog between myself and elements of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Another had Mr. Bird and Zoro calling out each others’ names in weird voices and at unexpected intervals. Yet a third featured Jim Morrison repeating the lyric “learn to forget” over and over and over.

For whatever reasons, we three eventually drifted away from this collaborative creation. Yet I still have a copy of the original tape kicking around here somewhere, plus one which I slowly built up over a period of nearly 20 years, always meaning to send it on to my colleagues.

Perhaps, one day, I will.

The Zine Scene

A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement.

In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually (but not always) photocopied by the dozen at the local 24-hour Kinko’s. Zine subjects were limited only by the interests and imaginations of their creators: politics, music (mainly punk rock), personal essays, communality, underground comix, satire, movies, TV shows, media criticism in general, religion, cassette culture, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, history, science fiction, fantasy, sexuality – the list goes on.

At the hub of this textual universe stood Factsheet Five, the quarterly “zine of zines” stuffed with hundreds of brief reviews and publisher contacts. Each issue opened up entire worlds of conceptual adventure, and she and I would take turns devouring it and highlighting the publications we wanted to receive. Per-issue costs could be anywhere between a few stamps, a few bucks, or trade for “something interesting” — including one’s own zine.

We were both well-supplied to swap: she with her women’s spirituality “perzine” (personal zine) Sacred Wilderness and me with my elsewhere-described Far Corner, a UFO/paranormal satire journal. For those small but intense investments – thinking, writing, copying, and postage – we netted a substantial return from independent publishers all over the planet.

Factsheet Five has passed into the What-Was, having ceased production in 1998. Blogging, vlogging, Substack, YouTube content, and social media in general now fill the creativity gap once occupied by zines; they’re cheaper, have a potentially longer reach, and can be published and accessed with greater immediacy. As a result, the weekly post-box trip has become more prosaic and less exciting. But the memories remain, of a secret world populated by anyone who could afford to get their personal word out and connect with likeminded others. I like to think that, though the medium may have dwindled, the spirit hasn’t. Long live the revolution!

First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio

PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.

Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.

That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)

Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:

In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.

Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise

– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
– Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.”
– Punctuality.
– Creative segues.
– Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another.
– That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation marks.
– One-sentence ledes.
– Snappy ledes. (“If you can do that, you’ll never be out of a job,” quoth a mentor.)
– Keeping an open mind, especially when it’s difficult.
– Never speaking in absolutes. (Present list excluded.)
– Crediting my sources.
– Communicating as accurately as I can. (Challenging, but aspirational.)
– Pushing through my shyness. (Also aspirationally challenging.)
– Being kind to cashiers, sales clerks, waiters, and tradesfolk.
– Saying “Take your time” whenever necessary.
– Waving at passing cars.
– Not speculating.
– “Killing my darlings” (per Wm. Faulkner, via Stephen King).
– Making an effort to pet stray cats.
– Greeting passersby with (at least) a smile.
– Concisifying.

(And yours?)

Shock Absorber

THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 6, 2024 gave me the biggest and most horrific shock of my sixty-two years.

I won’t go into why, because half the country already knows why, and those processing the same emotions could use fewer words rather than more.

And yet, I do have something to say.
Continue reading “Shock Absorber”

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