Blips From The Blur

The week that was: a blur of work, road trip, movies, and general busy-ness. All that remains is a series of moments.

The road trip (to Detroit, to see Bruce Springsteen with a Bruce-fanatic good old friend [B-FGOF]) started off witnessing, not two miles from home, a car with an Ohio license plate--CA N8VE. Now let alone my disdain for vanity plates (which could fill up a week's worth of regular blogging; though my favorite is still my Classics Ph.D friend's fantasy plate--UBI SUM, which is Latin for "Where Am I?"), what's the point of giving the government extra money to flaunt your California native status in, of all places, Ohio? According to wakipedia, the phrase, "who gives a rat's ass?" was actually coined by a fella from the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland when, in a smoky bar back in the 1960s, he heard someone down the bar start some kind of argument with another patron with the introductory clause, "Well, being a native of California, I ... " Know thy place, man. I didn't invade the State Up North (i.e. Michigan) bedecked in BrownsBuckeyeTribe gear, because I respect geography; so don't make left hand turns in front of me without signalling first on my native Cleveland streets when you're allegedly boasting (fail) to me that you're originally from California. If I had better auto insurance, I would have rammed the car.

Used to be road trips called for unwieldy unfold-'em-one-time-and-never-fold-'em-back-properly road maps. Times have changed, I guess. We had barely merged onto our first highway to Detroit when B-FGOF turns to me in all seriousness, as he hands me some gadget that looked like a long-forgotten transistor radio I treasured, and says, "Do you know how to use a SmartPhone?" Good God how times have changed. Wasn't it just yesterday that the macho test of road trip readiness was when the driver handed his passenger a "fuzz buster" and asked him if he knew how to operate it? Do you know how to use a SmartPhone? Like I might be dumber than a phone? Like I'm grandpa who hasn't yet heard of the telegraph? Granted, B-FGOF is younger than I, but only by two years, so this wasn't some kind of inter-generational technology tutorial. It was intra- I tell you, strictly intra-! Suffice it to say that by the time we hit the outskirts of Toledo (a mere 90 minutes) and had to start worrying about merging onto another highway Up North, I had a good grip on the not so SmartPhone and we made it to The Promised Land of Auburn Hills, MI with little difficulty. Up yours, Mr. Steve Jobs, may you rest in peace, and get a decent shave.

Bruce was amazing, despite the six hours out of seven I spent standing in confined spaces. If you've got a little excess of cynicism in your life, pay the money and go see the Boss--he'll flush your system. He might not do it night after night year after year, but I think with James Brown six feet under for a few years now, we can officially crown Bruce the new Hardest Working Man In Show Business. And I must say, I've never been around a more polite crowd of people at a concert than I was at the Bruce show. I know that statement--even the fact that I noticed such a thing--should immediately bar me from attending any more rock concerts in this life, but it's true.

Taxes. I think the reason they make filling out the forms so complicated, convoluted, and confusing, is that by the time you've finally finished them with some modicum of confidence that you did so properly, you're so happy with yourself (show me a SmartPhone that can handle Schedule D, and I'll be duly impressed) that the fact that you owe as much as you do doesn't seem to matter at all. Besides, I like peanut butter.

Work. Some boy around eight years old comes up to me looking for books on hamsters the other day. I take him to the kids' "pets" shelf and start combing through the skinny books, looking for one or two on hamsters. Who knew so many different animals qualify as pets these days? I start naming all the animals that have books about them, sensing that there might be no hamster books here and hoping the kid will forget about those rodents and be instantly excited about iguanas or ferrets. "I don't know," I tell the kid as I near the end of a shelf with no hamster books to be had, "we've got books about every animal on the Ark here except hamsters. They must be hiding from us." The kid, ever hopeful and ever literal as all eight-year-olds are, exclaims, "Trust me! Every time my two hamsters get loose they go right underneath the stove!" Made my day.

Scribbles. Every once in a while I take part in a writing workshop with some homeless men. Yesterday was great. Some of my doodles from the afternoon: "Yes, I said 'no.'" "I know how you is." "Incessantly incestuous." "A musical comedy version of Deliverance." "The part of Cadillac will be played tonight by Datsun."

Fantasy. I watched two old Bogart-Bacall movies this past week, The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Priceless. Forget the great whistle line--when Bacall shimmied out the bar over to Bogie at the end of Have Not, I almost had to call the ER to have my jaw re-set. Then last night I saw We Need To Talk About Kevin. Wonderful, disturbing movie. But Tilda Swinton. My God, what a masterpiece.

Fantasy baseball. Two weeks into the season, and just this morning I figured out how the points work. Maybe now I'll be able to massage my lineup to move up in the standings from the seventh to tenth place (out of ten teams) ghetto it's been languishing in. Who knew my life would come to obsessing about how someone named Omar Infante does wielding a wooden stick night after night.

Time to cut the lawn and get back to an unblurred life.

No Dull On This Boy



Boy's a Gemini; what do you expect, I guess. Jack, most people call him. He's some kinda combination of nephew/cousin of mine--whenever they try to explain it to me I get lost round about the third removal stage. Kin nonetheless. Favoring the Rayburn side, I'd say. Unfortunate, that. Boy's got two minds and they run on wildly, willfully divergent tracks, only intersecting on some kind of a random whim. Teachers, I suspect, cower a bit when they see his name on their rolls.

Certain the boy's got some kind of a conscience, buried somewhere under layers of grime, branch mud, pockets of gadget parts'n'pieces, firecracker soot, boy thoughts, and whatever Good Book brimstone Calloway the Younger's able to batter him with whenever the boy sets still for five minutes, which is probably about as often as an equinox. He ain't devilish, just three days' walk from angelic. Strangest belly button I ever seen, though. One of them lads always lifting his shirt up to rub a stomach that ain't got no heft to it. Pig's ear like. The navel, that is.

Anyways, we's all come together last week for DaddyBlue's 95th, which means nothing but Ned's Drive-Thru's Budweiser stock gets depleted and it's time for DaddyBlue to find a new wife. He's run through and put in the ground one every decade since he's fifteen. No long-sufferin' wife, any of them. Ten years the shelf life on 'em. Expiration date. One of the Aunt Saundra's (we got three in this family) showed up with some parlor game asking all sorts of bunk questions for you to ponder; none of yourn business, was my standard reply. Eventually she pull out a card asking the best piece of advice you ever heard. Don't answer fool questions in public, naturally I said. The particular Aunt Saundra shot me roller pins through those itty bitty glasses she wears. Well, the boy happened to be there on the veranda that minute, catching wind for another half day's devilment, I suspect, and he blurted out, "All play and no work make Jack a dull boy." Chortle chortle on that one. "Ain't that the truth," shot that grizzly mistake of a man with the state flag tattooed on his shoulder, which who just might be the boy's father, come to think of it. "You ain't worked a lick in your life and you duller than a parson's penknife." The boy didn't like that. "No I ain't," which taking the boy's age and disposition and usual activity was about ninety percent of all that came outta his mouth. He slouched off with me thinking maybe under all that twisted tomfoolery the boy's got half a whit of something wise. "Never a borrower or a lender be," said Aunt Calpurnia, the parsimonious spinster who never gives me a smile, let alone a quarter to flip to see if it's gonna be Bud or Bud Light this time. "Get that yard cut sometime this year, boy," shouted the state flag tattooed man, but by then that boy was scattered.

Of course later we all had to adjourn inside for another of the Aunt Saundra's (the third's mute, praise the Lord) card readings (inside always, the sun and air disturb her medium powers' equilibrium is why), which for the thirty-second at least time running revealed that soon I'll meet the woman of my destiny, which if ever true, tar and feather me today, draw and quarter me tomorrow, all the money's in the hollowed out Joy of Cooking book behind the cistern. So when that voodoo was all through I repair back to the veranda and hear it first then see it: that boy blasting by riding high on DaddyBlue's four-wheeler with the Rayburn heirloom Toro rigged up on the back of it all and sure enough it was getting the aforementioned yard cut very rapidly and somewhat straight-lined. Ain't ever seen a boy reveling in boyishness more than that one swooping about the yard. Soon enough he come up close to the veranda to get around the shrubbery and paused long enough to shout over the din at all of us there, or none of us, more than likely, "I ain't dull nohow." 

Gumption. I might have to sidle up to that boy more. One of these urchins round here's gonna have to see me through my dotage.