-Gray Mouse-

Fantastic.
I’ve gotten so good at observing unobserved, that it’s getting difficult to interact. Take tonight. It started with me sharing a lamp with a woman, the two of us working independent of each other for the better part of an hour. After a time, she put her sketchpad down, and I lowered my book a few minutes later.

It seemed silly and rude not to say anything, so I began a conversation that quickly evolved into me pulling teeth, and that was that. She left with the air of someone who has been affronted.

By itself, this is a small thing. Running into an acquaintance who asked me my name for the nth time still didn’t faze me, although some discussion of his forgetfulness did seem in order. He apologized, of course, as he does every time, and attempted to guess, never coming close. When finally I told him, he said he comes up with nicknames for people that stick even when their true names do not. He said the nickname for me would not be flattering, but I said, oh, let’s hear it anyway.

Gray Mouse.

In retrospect, I should have at least let him squirm over an explanation of the nickname’s meaning. But I offered a suggestion at first, which probably confirms the truth of it. Do I scurry about? Do I blend in? Seem small and insignificant? Yes, yes, and yes. It’s all about attitude, and mine belongs to a mouse.

As David Rakoff explains in ‘Fraud,’ the seat wasn’t taken. Not really.

I’m grateful for this knowledge. This is something that must be changed as soon as possible.

-If you liked this, you'll love-

"The mahogany panels of the boardroom could scarcely contain the stir when Benedict Monk, looking much like a young Gregory Peck, rose to his feet and delivered an oration on current ideas and trends in business."

This is the best way to solidify the externally-imposed adbanner that takes a taste of the weblog's content and determines the logical extension of the viewer's tastes. At the moment of this post, that would be A penny for... and Gregory Peck Films, courtesy of Amazon. Some copious browser refreshing, and we'll see Classic Western Films on sale, Gene Hackman Films, and Movable Type Ads.

Since I often use IMDB, the cinema links don't surprise me. But is last Sunday's crude table enough to render me a financial wizard? I can accept accolades for solving a rather difficult problem without a blackboard or calculator (10 - 2 - 5 = 3) but I fear for my employees if I should be thrust into the leadership chair at a large corporation.

It could be worse, I suppose. Benedict Becomes Clairvoyant only grants adspace devoted to Porch Swings.

Try it. Refresh. Refresh again. Nothing but porch swings.

Addendum: Instead of featuring advertisements for Kablog, the powers that be at present are including "See you next week" under a search for "poop." At the risk of driving myself crazy over the classification method used by these bots, I do wonder if I've just been judged yet again.

-Completely Spent-

$10.00	Total
$2.00	for a bottomless cup of coffee.
$5.00	for the three performers.
Which leaves
$3.00	for everything else.

Today a restaurant hostess eagerly lifted the cover of the book of readings required for my "leadership and teams" class. "Are you in the Business school?" she breathes eagerly.
"No, Library Science. I'm taking this course for--"
"Oh." She said, and walked away as the cartoon hearts and dollar signs above her head popped one by one.

-Before the Memory Mine's played out-

Some of our readers have asked about the missing period of time between posts. These individuals want to know how I was occupying my time between the months of March and July.

The answer, I'm afraid, is that I do not know. Before the July resurgence, when it became habit to post (at least) weekly, the site was far more primitive in design, and contained less featured links.

Even the color scheme was inappropriate.

While all of that may have played a part in my lack of interest back then, I sense foul play. Might my memory have been tampered with as part of some anti-Monk activity? Fearing the loss of other memories, I have opened up the shaker armoir with all of the used sheets of foolscap paper.

Determining which passages belong in the March-June sabbatical will require more judicious use of a finding aid, but I'm pleased to say the effort had an unexpected bonus: I've found some scribblings from the Twin Cities years, almost forgotten beneath yellowed news articles and contact sheets. Some are worth sharing, and I hope to add a special Twin Cities library to the sidebar soon.

In the meantime, I hope this unedited letter pleases all of you as much as it did me.

==>Nero's playing second fiddle while Rome burns

I don't know if I ever mentioned my technique in attracting women, although I believe I alluded to it in some of our past conversations. Very succinctly:
Since I am not into the trendy clothes, trendy odors, or of the broad shoulders set, (Judy Garland had broad shoulders, look where it got her) I aim for the look of the disinterested, anti-social academic. Pens and notebooks are much cheaper than chasing seasonal fashions and bartering my soul to the demons of good taste. However, I will admit that a notebook in a bar can be dangerous, since the place takes on an eerie, Orwellian antipathy for the appearance of intelligentsia. Uttering that last sentence aloud in most bars alone would be grounds for a shotglass-fueled stoning.

Rest assured, I take some writing materials in every time. I'm ready for martyrdom, just like those academic fools on both sides of the line in the holy land. Unlike them, I have a good and noble cause: Bringing wit to the land of watered-down beer.

Most amusing, I confess, is the angry looks I get from dates/co-workers/bartenders/designated drivers and the like when a curious female briefly abandons her party to ask me: "What the F@#% are you writing?"

My heart swells, for I know with those sweet words that I have found a lighthearted nymph who is interested in exploring the cadences of her mother-tongue, this beautiful, bastard language English that has brought me so much fortune all my life.

But of course, I can't SAY this to her, she's still hiding behind the trappings of modern social etiquette, which demands that she display verbal sparring techniques commonly associated with a K-mart flyswatter. But I look in those red-rimmed, unfocused orbs and see...
A hunger for knowledge.
So I respond by cupping my hands over my mouth and shouting, just over the din:
"What?"
She lurches forward, knocking over my beer in a cunningly executed parody of inebriation, catching my shoulder with one small hand, and the tap spigot with the other. Her locks shoot skyward as she lurches forward, and her forehead drives into my nose. She giggles into my adam's apple and pulls back a micron - eye for bleary eye, wit for wit, we face each other. We're close, close enough for a sweet embrace, a cosmic event among the bacardi whispers and cigarettes dots.
She speaks!
"I wanted… to know… what you were… writing."

Literary angels whisper in my ear: Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Dorothy Parker, etc. The journalist contingent is the loudest, and I'm more than a little bit worried. Newshounds aren't slick with women, it's far better to use the poets. Unfortunately, the moody H.L. Mencken seized the reins. The worst ghost on the lot gleefully steered my chariot into the ground.

"It's a news story about this bar. We want to know why the patrons are all pissing blue. If you can give me a good quote, I'll buy you a beer."

Lord Byron would have been smoother.

-Rainlight-

There was a rainbow over Pittsburgh this morning. From where I was standing, it looked as if the iridescent illumination ended out of sight somewhere west on Forbes avenue, probably downtown. I gestured wildly at two guys in an office at Forbes and Halket to come outside and see it, but the glass was tinted and they didn't understand me.

-Knife in the Shelves-

Last night found me photocopying portions from late 30's issues of American Magazine. This project turned me in a completely new direction when I pulled the box of issues from the shelves, lifted out the scraps of paper inside -- and discovered a partially-retracted box-cutter.

The image of a box-cutter probably leaves more than a few people with a cold sensation these days. In this case, it was more poignant as evidence of a crime than as a tool of intimidation. Thankfully, most of the issues I came in contact with or required for this project were untouched.

Other articles (who knows how many?) were completely missing; like a professional bank robber, the perpetrator had taken the loot and left the incriminating tools behind.

I took the box to the desk and alerted them to the problem, knowing full well the staff is already aware of it. It's a large enough facility, so it's easy to cut and pocket pages.

Only the smallest triangle of the blade was exposed -- I tried to force it back in, but it wouldn't budge either way.

-See you real soon, perhaps next week-

SEE I'm teaming up with Kingmob to produce a site intended for short quips.
YOU Interested parties may request entry by emailing either or both of the administrators.
NEXT The link can be found in the right sidebar menu at the very bottom.
WEEK Here's a sample of what goes on. Read up.

-Headlines will roll-

My zip-disk just gave up its ghost.
I can open it. I can open the files contained therein.
There's just no way to change the files, or save new ones. Viewing only. Call it zip-ROM.

This particular zip -- an iomega 100 -- was liberated from work three years ago. Before you leave this place in search of another moral exemplar, let me assure you that this organization had taken more than one zip-disk (among other things) from me. It was that kind of place.

In any case, I felt the need to reflect on its contents before I performed the final rites and move onto another storage square. Most of the contents were unremarkable, save the folder known only as "Letters," which contained exactly six text files, titled thus:

Diner waitresses know how to serve you
Panhandler Peddlers [content seen here]
Some Points
Erodynamics
Rappin' a little off the front
Steel town update [content seen here]

Any journalistically-inclined readers who have not worked on college newspapers in recent times can tell you that headline writing is an art. Hopefully they will not tell you that, because anyone who uses the term "---- is an art" is a sanctimonious ass. All of the titles above, in traditional Monk fashion, double as headlines within. All of the headlines made a greater impression on me, in retrospect, than the content did.

"Some Points" is admittedly utilitarian, as is "Steel Town Update." The latter is improved markedly when changed to "Steel City Loafs." "Rappin' a little off the front" probably seems nonsensical, until you read the content about Anthony Rapp playing the title role in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." No doubt "Panhandler Peddlers" sounds like simple alliteration, until you think about their method of garnering income, their place of work, and their relationship with fixed businesses and public officials, which is pretty much the same on all counts. "Diner waitresses know how to serve you" is more than punchy and raunchy, it's a proven fact.

"Erodynamics" is empty.

I'd intended to write something, even tossed a few themes around, but something momentous occurred. As a result, I removed everything except the headline, in anticipation of filling it later.

It's time to fill it.

Confidential to those who would steal my thunder:
I know how to find you, thunder-thieves -- don't ask how -- and I will not hesitate to make you suffer, should you snatch "erodynamics" with your oily, evil talons.

-Two Sacagawea Dollar Coins-



Since there was not a dollar bill to be found among the receipts in my wallet, I found myself paying a $1.50 library fine (for James B. Twitchell's Lead us into Temptation) with two coins bearing the image of the Shoshone interpreter.

It made me wonder briefly about the historical Sacagawea, elevated into the history books for being one of the two native women with the historical good fortune to aid the most famous European explorers on the American continent.

Like Pocahantas, Sacagawea's name is familiar, even if we spell it different ways. Unlike Pocahantas, who lived on the east coast two centuries before Sacagawea made the northwest journey with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, we know very little of her life after the brush with the great explorers. Most texts offer several possible accounts of the remaining life of Sacagawea, but she never had a portrait done in Europe, never married a famous Tobacconist.

I would challenge a representative sample of this nation to name her husband (French Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau) and the child (Jean Baptiste Charbonneau) born to them on the expedition, I wonder how many would be surprised to discover her immediate family's existance in the first place.

Even worse than the revisionist who empowers her, are the revisionists who cruelly sexualize Sacagawea. Pocahantas suffered similar treatment, I understand. She became John Smith's willing concubine in popular imagination, saving him from her father's wrath out of love. Similarly, in some non-scholarly expedition lore, Sacagawea's helpful nature is derived from an unorthodox connection to one or both of the leaders.

This lore is entirely unsubstantiated, of course. Call it plantation-mentality, to take the exotic object and charm it away from its family. "It" becomes "she" only when she settles into Anglo-Christian domesticity. Or marries into the precursor to Big Tobacco. Until then, it's a way for the heroes to show their prowess without society's censure.

Fortune forbid Sacagawea's memory suffer the fate of every famous woman in histroy. Every woman, that is, with the posible exception of Mary, Mother of Christ. Bear in mind that a growing number of revisionist artists have petulantly sexualized her in recent years, in a hypocritical and violent denunciation of their avowed principles. We have much to learn, still.

In the library, I reluctantly pass over the gilded coins bearing the Shoshone woman with the Mona Lisa smile. The library staffer asks me if I would like to keep them, and pay the fine later. It's not a hotdog I'm buying, and even if this view ascribes too much power to objects... I'd rather have this relic of Sacagawea in a library register than that of a supermarket. The staffer turns to her co-worker as she places them in with more care than she offers dimes, pennies, nickels, and quarters.

Look, she says. Sacagawea.

Two coins bearing George Washington's visage are thrust into my palms in return, but of course there is no magic in the gout-ridden general's disks. We know everything about him. We know when, where, and how he died. If he stands above the others framers we love, know, and whose signifigance we largely ignore, it is because he was first.

Objects can be signifigant. Sacagawea dollars seize me, the most cynical of historians, because I want to believe she glowed as brightly as her coin.



Addenedum: This Library of Congress exhibit does not mention Sacagawea. Not even once.