-Merit-

The accomplishments...

“This is the voice of the education community. Today we’ll be talking with our public services librarian, Benedict Monk. He’s collected a number of style guides for citation.”

“Our next presenter spent six months studying a collaboration between public and academic libraries.”

“Specifically, this grant will address the concerns raised by Middle States.”

“Our faculty are better researchers for your sessions, and it follows that their students will be, too.”

“You retrieved how many overdue books?”

“This way, we’ll get both papers on time, and at a fraction of the cost.”

...and the reward!

“The president liked the staffing plan, but insisted that the new position not be created this fiscal year due to budget constraints. Sorry.”

-Not for me-

"Ben's Back!"

-I hate it when people call me that-

"Beeeeennnnn!"

-Ah yes, yes, back, and not for long. This is why I didn't come direct from work even though I could have. This is why I read in the park for almost an hour instead of hopping right into my place in the food bank volunteer assembly line, so well staffed in my absence by juvenile delinquents doing court-mandated community service.-

"Are you here to stay, or just leaving after dropping off?"

-Oh, right, the box of canned goods under my arms, the reason I had to show up at all, rather than blow off the whole thing in favor of a three-DVD set of Fawlty Towers reruns. John Cleese shares writing credit with then-wife Connie Booth, who plays the hotel chambermaid. On screen, Cleese's Basil Fawlty is paired with the more age-appropriate and comic Prunella Scales. Which made me think of the difference between A Fish Called Wanda, and Fierce Creatures, its erstwhile sequel. Many of the bit players in the earlier film returned for different roles, notably Archies' wife and daughter from A Fish Called Wanda becoming an older associate and peer, respectfully, in Fierce Creatures. Are women angry about this sort of thing? Maybe they should be.-

"Mr. Monk, I've got something to ask you."

-Oh, lord. Here it is.
The come on. All of the men working for the food bank that I've met so far who are over the age of twenty have been homosexual, just like all of the women working here over the age of fifteen are inevitably over the age of 50 and Baptist. It's enough to make you feel like you've just wandered into the wrong parish casting call.
Most of the men, I should point out, are subtle. Too-short fluorescent pink running pants no one notices until he gets up from sorting groceries over here. Or over there, the one that steps out of the racks of cast-off clothing to ogle a 17 year old juvenile delinquent's hindquarters.
Like I said, subtle.
And now the muscular grande dame of them all, he that sings my name instead of saying it, who makes no less than five Baptist faces wince and peek fearfully to see if the juvies understand; he has something to tell me. To ask me. Oh, I can't wait, and I can't easily make eye contact, either. Can't keep a straight face if he asks me out. Have to.-

"Are you seeing anyone?"

-Holy Christ, he's really going for broke, isn't he, and right in front of his boss and coworkers. I think my mouth just said 'no.' How did my mouth just say 'no?' Disgusted? Casual? Hesitant?-

"Let's step outside for a minute."

-Come to think of it, it might have said 'nope.'-

"Now, I see you coming in here, and I think, that's a good-looking guy..."
Thank you.
"..And I don't even know if you're straight!"

-I think my mouth just said 'straight.' I don't know, the rest of my face is trying too hard to be.-

"Great! Not for me, though. How would you like to meet my daughter?"

-Come again?-

-Pipe Music-

(Best if used after -The Birds- Monday, April 18, 2005)

Amy:

Every time a sweet merciful god works on my best friend, Tyra, nobodies with cheese faces, all grating lines and stale angles; muster their scant winnings, and stack glass walls and smoke rings to block door, will, and senses.

Tyra:

My best friend amy is always there except when a sweet merciful god she’s not.

-The other Benedict-

If there was any way I could evade an army of Swiss guardsmen and sneak into the new pope's office, I'd have a wonderful opener:

"So, from one Benedict to another, how about we start correcting some of those persistent problems?"

A recurring fantasy I have, separating entrenched world leaders from underlings, cronies, and sycophants, to deliver a realistic world view. It always drives them first to tears, and then to their windows, where they instruct a street urchin to run to the butcher and fetch a roast goose for Bob Cratchett.

-The Birds-

And the bees, as well, though the birds only arrived after my neighbor sowed the bird seed. The bees have been shooting precariously close to our faces ever since the flowering trees on our street bloomed last week.

I wasn't here for the sowing. For the first time in ages, I wasn't working on the weekend and was available to attend a semiannual jazz festival on the Jersey shore. Not surprising, perhaps, that my contemporaries did not show in record numbers, but the average attendee was a contemporary of Ray Charles, whom the festival honored.

Never mind. It's all about the music, right? Ah, but what is jazz about?

The first few acts hewed close to the "authentic Ray" style, although I noticed that they never strayed far from the popular Ray canon, either. If you've only heard "Georgia" and a few other billboard hits, you wouldn't have been surprised on Friday night.

Eschewing the trolleys and buses that carried less ambulatory fans from venue to venue, I hoofed it to the top of the tallest hotel, where a desultory waitstaff - pop-country fans all, reckon - charged me $4.50 for a beer brewed a few miles from my home. The singer hear clocked in at twenty-three, and was the oldest in the quartet. Pretty voice, pretty face, but at my age, one gets a bit turned off by a glamour-shot promotional photo and incessant name-dropping in the lyrics.

It's all about the music, right?

Later she took the stool next to me at the bar and asked the tin-eared waiter for a desert menu. No slice. I was about to tell her where she might be able to get some fudge at 11 PM, but froze when I felt her turn to regard me.

Funny, She was probably thinking. He doesn't look sixty.
the twenty-one year old pup piano player must have been thinking the same thing, because slalomed four tables of seniors to get between us.

Ah, I was thinking. But what is jazz about?

Fortified and counting the space between meals in pints, I grazed two blocks down to the drum-led trio at a bar known, at least in the peak season, to host young people. It absolutely is - I found my only two contemporaries in town, and was quite pleased to take them out for post-jazz midnight coffee.

-Mercury-

Before the week was over, my letter appeared in The Mercury:

It is only the pleasure of an angry reader, and the shortage of anti-anxiety medication that prompts me to write to this Pulitzer prize winning newspaper. Charley Reese had the misfortune of appearing in these pages March 30, a day I had the leisure of time and energy to become sufficiently outraged by another pithy talking head who hasn’t the eloquence or sex appeal to garner guest spots on the tube. If I unfairly single him out, remember that

a) he started it, and
b) you should have seen the adjacent column. That guy thinks Joe McCarthy had a pretty neat idea.

For those of you who missed “school shooters” March 30, 2005. Here is an outline of Reese’s comments:
Don’t blame guns
Don’t blame poverty
“Why are young people so unhappy?”
Blame feminism
Blame television/Hollywood
Blame school girls wearing short skirts
Blame advertising

Oversimplification, or a party line primer? The amazing thing about all this is not that Reese is indistinguishable from his shallow colleagues. Actually, he comes close to identifying the big question despite himself.

“If you take away the poverty and guns, then you are left with the person and the person’s mind.” Well, no, you can’t separate those any more than you could separate the human mind from advertising, television, feminism, or the short skirts that entice and worry you so much. But to acknowledge that all human actions originate in the human mind, that’s something we can talk about. And we’d better, because government wonks and their media retainers are only talking from the outline above, or from the slightly different one the other party uses.

Their small minds are intractable. We won’t make that mistake. We’re regular guys and girls who read (or don’t) who vote (or don’t), who feel guilt when we sin, (or feel guilt without accepting one theological or moral definition of sin.) And we regulars accept as a matter of course that the efforts of a few thousand irregular committee members nationwide can never reduce every human mind to the same frequency, and they will never hear them all, no matter how fast the technology. The few homicidal wavelengths hiding among our millions can only be identified by dumb luck. Indeed, the luck of regular people listening to their surroundings is the only thing that has ever worked to prevent horrible human actions.

That is the only reason to be happy or unhappy.

-Never saw that time before-

I saw a red-lit 2:15 on the alarm clock last night, and a perfect 5:12 on the glass surface below.

I'm very certain that I've never seen the reverse.

-Stealing office supplies to build a better life-

It began with salad dressing. So much salad dressing was wasted anyway, donated by schools and offices all the time, but especially in the spring when the fraternities at the nearest college needed to make their service quota.

So it was quite natural for the sorting staff to dip into the food bank's cardboard boxes at the end of each week, and to distribute odd bottles of the last and unfilled case to the volunteers and hires alike. Full cases of salad dressing were taking over the shelves anyway, and the removal of the final case, (more air than oil!) didn't warrant a tacit or written reprimand on the subject.

The next item intended for the needy and commandeered by the helpers wasn't food. Every week someone donates a tacky lamp, usually with the bulb included. This is quickly unscrewed from the lamp no one wanted or will want and secreted in purses and book bags.

Toliet paper and paper towels are monitored closely, but that's a simple matter of dropping them and declaring the item "damaged."

They fell fast, and far. They began taking the foodstuffs the poor most desperately required.

Canned soup. Loaves of bread. Salad mix. Milk.

Meat.

Small items here and there, purloined casually and casually justified. Unaware that each of their fellows also lifted staple groceries in trace amounts.

The bookkeeper knows. She watches the ledgers with concern. She spies on the others to keep their thievery within reasonable limits. She does not confront the problem directly, because she too, is a food bank burgler. She does not feel remorse, only the responsibility to account for discrepancies in the stock. Her bosses will spot great irregularities, so she must see to it that all irregularities are small and easily explained.

She declares whole crates "damaged." Some bosses truly listen to their employees.

-What is the midnight jolt, anyway?-

One can eat smart and exercise, or lounge on a roman triclinium while guiding sweatmeats and high confection pudding into their gullets with pudgy fingers. Either way, there are those rare moments when the body ignores the paltry (or excessive) supply of food you provided, and floods the place with all the energy the vessel can handle. And when it happens, you'll know. Your steps quicken, your smile becomes a maniacal grin. Your rods and cones quail as their vista widens as never before.

This bulging-eyed dynamo you've just become changes on the outside, but that is nothing compared to the vivid alteration of your brain. And the only way you'll know it is when the four or more BIG ideas get caught trying to get out at the same time.

My jolts usually take place around midnight.

-Midnight Jolt: Ear Poison-

High levels of concentration are temporary. Take advantage of them.

MidnightJolt
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

[Bad music has a way of remembering for us.]


Remember how Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father? Poison applied to the ear canal. Poor bastard woke up and figured he had the ear wig from hell, Had his doctor shine a light into his ear and wait with tweezers. But nothing came out, and the effluvium seeped into his brain and killed him. I wonder if he or the doctor checked their timepieces near the end and said, ‘you know, I saw this play about Gonzago the other day – not that it’s relevant or anything.’

Not that it’s relevant or anything, but in his big book of bad songs, Dave Barry described musical selections that compelled him to punch the radio buttons hard enough to gouge holes in his car, so visceral was his hatred for certain songs.

Certain songs are ear poison for me. They don’t have to be bad songs. They only have to be connected to bad memories. If I’m standing in an elevator and hear the instrumental refrain to “You don’t have to say you love me [just because you can]” I go to pieces inside.

I go to pieces inside when I hear just about anything by Fiona Apple. Meredith Brooks, and Catfight (not that the latter comes up very often). “Hoping, Waiting, Longing,” by Agents of Good Roots. Billy Joel’s “That’s not her style.” And many, many more.

More important than the song itself is the degree to which this ear poison affects me. Tripping stomach acid in an elevator is only partly due to ear poison. We could also attribute the trouble to paint fumes from the twenty-first floor or to the commissary on the Mezzanine.

The Mezzanine – that reminds me, I’ve got to return a Nicholson Baker novella. Not that it’s relevant or anything.

Not that it’s relevant or anything.. Who am I trying to hustle here? Ear poison is my Achilles heel no matter where I am. Why? Because it’s the primary way I learn. Maybe a visual person’s sphincter up and throttles them every time they see the same shade of blue as a scarf his lover wore as she boarded a train in Dresden’s central Bahnoff in the spring of 2000, because he’d resolved to chase after her if she came to the window with anything approaching sentimentality, regret, or love. But I’m the auditory type, so there is a piece of unidentified German techno for me instead.