-an HEIR to the HORNBOOK-

-The place where I am the technologist-

2006-06-17T14:10:00.000-04:00

When I joined the interview committee seeking someone who would do IT work but still work closely with us in the library, I figured I would not understand some of the very technical jargon the very technical other members of the committee would use. This turned out to be true, but to a greater extent than I realized.

Among the librarians here - and in most places, I would guess, I'm considered technically adept. Not here.

As the odd man out, I became very aware of an undercurrent of contempt for end users. ALL end users. And on my account they must have been holding back.

Maybe it's okay for IT folks to have their gripes. And of course, we knew about this, thanks to Scott Adams and other technologist-humorists, who snark about the ignorance of 'induhviduals.' But it made me wonder if I have been similarly uncharitable in the place where I am the reigning technologist.

-Good thing I got to the phone first-

2006-05-31T09:09:00.000-04:00

If one of your students calls your office to ask you out, it's always better if you're the one who takes the call. It's flattering, I suppose, but potentially flattening. It may have been my imagination, but I thought my coworkers' ears twitched as I politely declined. With any luck, my neutral language choices belied the student's inappropriate question, and my ego is *privately* boosted without consequences.

-Welcome back to the city, sucker-

2006-05-28T09:07:00.000-04:00

I've been in the country so long I've become a complete bumpkin. Last Monday I went to the city for a show, and paid a guy in a parking lot because he was standing in a parking lot the way parking attendants do. He asked me if I wanted a receipt and I said sure, buoyed by a promise of legitimacy. He gave me one from the central parking authority, too, than went to 'get change' in a bar down the street.

I'm not such a rube that I sat around waiting for him.

-Ascent-

2006-05-21T16:35:00.000-04:00

It is evaluation time at work. We all needed to answer a questionnaire, detailing our activities over the past academic/fiscal year. I had self-assessor's block until I got the bright idea of opening the sent mail folder in my work email application. It formed a chronological calendar of my own activities, useful or not, over the past year.

Snapping through all the work e-mails I'd sent since this time last year only took a few hours, and I'd garnered enough material to need extra space for the survey. That feels good, even though I suspect no one will read it but me. My coworker indignantly complained that she regularly performed all the duties in her job description. What more was there?

What more, indeed. I thought. Perhaps you should invent another fake title for yourself. (For some reason, she began calling herself an evening supervisor, even though she is all the staff there is in the PM)

My director dropped my survey in the file and told me that she planned to recommend me to "run" the department after she retired, and until a successor could be found by the search committee. I doubt whoever takes over will truly run the place, in light of the restructuring. But I felt buoyed and depressed by her confidence. It's nice to hear of a promotion, even with caveats. But I'm also hoping to leave soon, and really don't want to go much deeper.

Also, I doubt the other employees - who have been here longer, are older, and very set in their ways - would ever take orders from me. And it's probably not a good idea to try to force them.

-Tumbril-

2006-05-11T12:40:00.000-04:00

There is an evil comedian in my head.

Let me explain..

Everyone is dressed up today. Just now, a tenured professor extended his arm to my boss, which she took. They walked in a show of mock-courtliness to an appreciation luncheon. As they left, the evil comedian called after: "The tumbril awaits."

This is a line from the western film Stagecoach, referring to the French revolution and the guillotine.

Why did I find this funny enough to say it aloud?

-Watching the Phantom of the Opera-

2006-05-05T21:42:00.000-04:00

I may have to tear up my elitist card. I'm enduring the latest Phantom of the opera movie. I feel obliged to, really. It was lent to me by one of my college age fans, in return for some research assistance.

Just doing my job.

It is, I imagine, exactly what a college freshman might consider a spectacular film, it being, I can already tell from the opening sequence, a moulon rouge style spectacle, influencing budding female filmmaker for years to come.

I, on the other hand, will probably fast forward through most of this.

Have to watch it, though. She might ask pointed questions, and I don't lie very well.

So consider my real-time notes:
-
-
Okay, I understand why this movie appeals to her. She and the lead actress could use each other for shaving mirrors.
-
-
-
The Raoul character has Fabio hair and stands up to drive a carriage. I bet he sits down to pee.
-
-
-
Half-baked, and overdone at the same time.
-
-
-
So many unnecessary horses. Jesus.
-
-
-
Okay, some guy just did the robot.
-
-
-
Favorite suspension-of-disbelief-moment:

The Phantom comes out on stage in 'disguise,' but Christine's boyfriend, the gendarmes, and a theatre full of spectators and actors squirm until HE HAS HER IN HIS ARMS AND SHE TEARS OFF THE MASK. Surprise! Even though the character he replaced was fatter, shorter, had a beard and a completely different voice, they were surprised?
-
-
-
I know, Plot device. But ye gods.
-
-
-
That's it! No more flashbacks, boats, or equine fetishes, and.. wait.. Schumacher directed?

I need a drink.

-Warm Enough-

2006-05-01T00:21:00.000-04:00

It was warm enough yesterday to sun oneself in the courtyard like a lizard. And if you sit still long enough, the butterflies and the birds nearly light on you, and..

Just after I wrote that, a butterfly did.

Maybe I should move. These critters don't have enough respect for humans.

-Celery Season-

2006-04-25T08:06:00.000-04:00

Is it redundant to season celery with celery seeds?
It is?
How about celery salt?

-When I have a bad day, the last thing I need is Daniel Powter rubbing it in.-

2006-04-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

What sort of gumption is needed to kick oneself in the ass to accomplish one's goals?
Friday was not really a bad day, any badness being sins of omission discussed but not resolved over drinks with Set, who is on some kind of Lenten fast. By the time melancholia comes, the alcohol has worn off and cannot be blamed. Actually, I think it might be a delayed reaction from last weekend's melancholic visit with my cousin - bad moods can spread, after all.

I need to get the latest resumes and cover letters out there.
There is no good excuse. I find time to edit all of the writer's pieces every week, and contribute a new story of my own. There should be time enough to revamp a cover letter or two.
I need to watch my tongue around the writers.
Accidentally, I mentioned something about my cousin's process for reading scripts. When I finished, one writer got the pitch glow in his eyes. "So, what studio does your cousin work for?" I absolutely don't know, and I'm not sending him any scripts unless he asks. He's been working there for a month, tops, and he doesn't need unsolicited material weighing him down.
I need to get that bike.
Nothing fancy, just something serviceable. I've been meaning to acquire one for the better part of a year, to cut down on the gas I've been burning around town.

Instead of accomplishing all of these goals, I spent Sunday hiding Easter eggs.

-Quisling-

2006-04-13T00:40:00.000-04:00

I mentioned earlier that my cousin and I 'mostly' failed to connect with any of his friends and coworkers after we left his establishment. This is true; the two we did meet later were only coming in as we were leaving.

To be friendly, we stayed long enough for one more round.

The two female friends of my cousin hadn't come alone. They now had a drunk ex-marine in tow. I know he was a marine because he shouted that he was as he tried to crush my hand. Then he added with much pride that he was also an HVAC technician.

And, then, remarkably, all the tumbles in all the locks in my brain aligned. For the next half hour, I was loquacious and witty and uninhibited. The Red Bull helped, but I think it was just one of those miraculous moments you can't create with chemicals or training. I had the women laughing, and the marine confused. Soon, he was Semper Flea, pretending to laugh with us so we wouldn't think he wasn't getting the joke. Completely disarmed.

In victory, I desired a prize to commemorate the occasion, and also to push my brief social skills to the hilt. I asked for the one woman's e-mail address (not the woman hanging on the marine, I'm not suicidal) not because I really though we had anything in common. The contact info symbolized success, a wreath of laurels for taming the beast.

I got it. This may seem insignificant, but it was an incredible high. I wanted to share the story of the taming of the hoo-ah. (Army, not Marine, I know. Go with me on this.)

As we were leaving my cousin pulled me aside and told me not to contact that girl.
I think my face fell. Had I committed some horrible faux pas that I wasn't aware of?

Earlier, he told me, her friend had pulled him aside and warned him that this woman was flirting with his cousin.

You don't want to contact her, he said. Her friend tells me that she has two children by two different fathers, and that she has a stinky vag-

WHAAAA?

Apologies for that, everyone, but I kid you not, those were his words, which he claims are her words. Where do we begin to process everything wrong with that statement? Are these the kind of things friend are supposed to say about each other behind each other's backs?

I didn't email her, of course. Far better for both of us if we don't try even to be friends, with that awful sentence hanging over our heads. But what gets to me, what keeps me thinking about this scene over and over again, is the perfidy of the friend.

-Weekend Retreat-

2006-04-10T23:18:00.000-04:00

My heart to heart with my cousin this past weekend has me slightly worried about his state of mind. It is dark, and he is miserable about many things; work, his lack of a girlfriend, his housemates, the university education he is finishing at twenty-eight years of age.

Not so old, I maintain, to be single, in school, or working a non-career path restaurant job. But whether my rationalizations or consolations are worth anything isn't really the point. If a guy believes he has been saturated with failure, he may also believe failure is a visual stain detectable by anyone who hasn't.

Earlier in the evening, we drank our "first" beers at his restaurant. Perhaps that is a warning right off the bat - that our unstated goals are inebriation and beers are bullet points, but this is not about alcoholism.

As my cousin went about the elaborate preparations of closing the restaurant, I waited at the bar with four of his coworkers, non-career servers all, four women anxious to get out and party for the remainder of Saturday.

Plans were made to go out together, but already an outsider can see that would be impossible. Names of different bars are thrown out, servers complain about needing showers, no one listens the first time anything is said.

When my cousin and I left, we were alone, with the prospect of meeting the others later. He confessed that it was unlikely to happen, and he was mostly right. We did not meet up with his coworkers, despite his cell phone, which he checked incessantly for messages while we waited in a college bar. There he stewed, observing patrons whose attitude only seemed to embitter him, and we returned to his home with a six-pack and a deck of cards.

He won, but it didn't help.

-To The Lighthouse-

2006-04-01T17:39:00.000-05:00

We climbed the lighthouse.

An older woman waits just under the revolving lens - not the original fresnel - and answers questions that she herself asks. She is particularly proud of the wooden walls, which are original. Wood typically doesn't last this long in this climate, it is true, but wood typically is not separated from the elements with three feet of brick and mortar.

We climbed the lighthouse, and walked around the cupola. For one-third of it, the air is calm, if colder than on the ground, and warmer than in the tower. For the next two-thirds you are pushed by the wind this way, or that.

The wind pushed. Time passes.

-Rappelez-vous les années '80?-

2006-03-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

If my recent study of the French language through the Capretz total immersion system is any indication, the seeds of most recent and spectacular failure of Gallic-American diplomacy were planted in the early 1980s, when we infected their language instruction videos with clothing and hairstyles that many contemporaries of the period deny ever existed. You may have seen these people, guarding all photos and videos from the period as shameful relics that could at any moment bring the authorities down on their heads.

Of course, the series is still young. I have many more lessons to get through before I can roll this language up like a baguette and stow it on the back of my moped with my beret.

-SIGINT-

2006-03-25T15:58:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we hear more than we should. I've just read two books on signals intelligence, and seen the movie "The Conversation" with Gene Hackman, so I'm well aware that a body can misinterpret the meaning behind the simplest phrases. Watching lessons one and two of 'French in Action,' a film series featuring the Capretz method (total immersion, no translation) accurately conveys two major concepts; first, 80s styles are every bit as repellent in France as they were here, and second, each language reaches for its own ideas, not universal ones.

But linguistic trees shouldn't end with English, French, Cree, Togo, Phoenician. There is, for example, the peculiar tongue within English spoken only by corporate suck ups. Many thanks to Don Watson, author of 'Death Sentences' for bravely exploring the writings of those strange people. I have come to know them well; a small tribe has taken up residence in this area, even though the resources they usually require to thrive (i.e. actual authority and money) is sorely lacking. Truly, a resilient species.

And sometimes, we understand all too well.

I was in a good mood Friday. WE were in a good mood. Librarians, tutors, students. You could feel the Friday energy.

Then the library director's companion came in with a dishwater gray aura. "I talked with the Doctor..." He began.

I shouldn't be hearing this. I thought. I'll be going.

Too late; I heard two letters:

M

S

-I may have lost my wireless signal, but I haven't lost my pride-

2006-03-19T15:50:00.000-05:00

I have resisted the urge to piggyback on the neighbors' signals.
I have not used Burger King.
I have not blogged from work.

I did, however, discover an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere. You have to turn off an access road and sneak behind a nursery to get there, but it is an oasis in a desert of apathy.

-Looming job interview? Expect a tech fizzle-

2006-03-13T16:28:00.000-05:00

The last time I had a job interview, my phone crapped out the morning of the interview. It was a phone interview.

Tomorrow I have another interview. The cable modem crapped out. It isn't an online interview, but there are more than a few things I need to research, and e-mail messages to send.

This put me out on the street looking for an internet cafe. There aren't many here.

Try a Burger King, someone suggested.

I heard they were wiring Burger King restaurants, but for some reason my foot hit the accelerator when I saw the fast food joint. So this installment comes to you from the lesser evil of Barnes and Noble.

$3.95 for two hours.

I shudder to think what could happen if I'm interviewing down the street and don't require any technology whatsoever. Would I get hit by a cyclist on the sidewalk?

-Lost Writer-

2006-03-08T21:11:00.000-05:00

We just lost another one.

The writing group once boasted:

a creative writing professor (and moderator)
a environmental cleanup expert
a retired environmental cleanup expert
a poetry-spewing brace of merlot-drinking sisters
a very loquacious high school teacher
a landscaping English major
and me

Now it has:

a creative writing professor (and moderator)
a environmental cleanup expert
a retired environmental cleanup expert
a landscaping English major
and me

We will try to recruit more soon.

-Just can’t tell if this is going to work-

2006-03-02T11:13:00.000-05:00

She started as a blind date. We’ve been together twice since then, and I can’t tell if we’re going anywhere. Of course, it took a long time to get this far, thanks to extenuating circumstances; car accidents, illnesses, work obligations, and more.

Sometimes I think she’s completely bored, and then she’ll snap to life and I feel the barriers are coming down a bit. By the time we part, it is back to neutral, but we agree to see each other again.

I guess that’s fine, but when I describe this relationship to friends and family, I have so little to tell. They get this so-how-is-your-girlfriend-who-lives-in-Canada-that-we’ve-never-seen look in their eyes, and one of us (usually me) changes the subject.

Slow is good, right?

-Director Down-

2006-03-01T22:33:00.000-05:00

battlecreeksan
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

It was the calcium that did it. Too much calcium can knock a body down, especially if that body belongs to a post-menopausal woman with a laundry list of other health issues.

She called today to tell us she’d be coming back tomorrow, which is good news. The sharks from headquarters were already circling; they’d learned that something bad had happened to her.

That they didn’t find out what happened was a coup in our favor. We snuck her out of the office right under a visiting headquarters librarian’s upturned nose. In the maelstrom of stress and worry over the director’s health, I took some small joy in that.

-We're under attack!-

2006-02-25T17:14:00.000-05:00

This Friday would have been a good day to stay home.

Last weekend was an experiment in sleep deprivation, long distance driving, questionable food, and constant secondhand smoke. By this past Tuesday, I had symptoms of my first illness of the year. Congestion, high temperatures, headaches, etc. I misappropriated Pere Goriot and begged for a guillotine to remove the offending body part.

But go to work I did, and attended the opening for the new building on campus. State Senators and Board members and academic bureaucrats. I tried to stay out of the way of the hobnobbing and especially the table laden with cheeses, fruit, and bottles of water - common courtesy from the sick and possible contagious, though it should be noted that I was not alone in my condition. And no sooner had the speechifying ended, and I returned to the library to listen to my temples pound out Carmina Burana, then did word reach me of the school president's question and answer session. With free Pizza.

But somebody there responding to the bribe of pizza wasn't a student. He was the live-in companion of a coworker of mine, and he has too much time on his hands. I heard later that he told the president that the library was on the brink of collapse. He didn't mention any names, but he also described some of the workers negatively (not me) and spilled the beans on his companion's retirement plans.

He thought he was being funny, stunning the president like that. Sick as I was, I couldn't let that be the last thing the president heard. Her next move would be an interrogation of the absent director of the library, who would likely return from her vacation early to implement a furious staff restructuring.

So I went in, and stood between the president and her late lunch, and tried to assure her that we are thriving, really. Too bad her only questions for me were the only ones I couldn't answer. Only the director knows which staffing plan she'll propose.

Safe money is on the cheapest, of course.

-Negotiating a new ten (10) year contract-

2006-02-22T23:12:00.000-05:00

Business A (the incumbent) was a three (3) member delegation headed by a man who resembles those western sheriffs who grimly enforce the letter of the law in a town overrun by bandits. Not a coward, necessarily, but unable to do more than speechify after the unknown stranger massacres every evil henchmen and rides off into the sunset.

Come to think of it, this role is reprised as the sergeant in post 1960 cop movies. Clint Eastwood used the same actor, at any rate. Oh, digression; I only mean to imply that this delegation is on the defensive, incumbent providers with a ten year record ridden with bullets.

POW POP BANG BarAying!

The last is my interpretation of the fourth and longest note of a bullet sound, the supposed deflection of the slug off another object. Maybe it is a weakness of the human ear, but sound artists have been putting those four (4) sounds in the exact same order for nearly a century of talkies, and we never catch on.

POW POP BANG BarAying!

Business B (the challenger) is a slick corporate operation lead by a woman who resembles Anne Archer. It was our campus horndog who first pointed out the resemblance to me. My mistake for asking his opinion on the business matter of choosing a provider. His business, as I have repeatedly been warned and have repeatedly dismissed as gossip, is in his pants, and as he whispered what he would like to do to Anne Archer, I had to concede that he was every bit the walking lawsuit people said he was.

Damn. Up to this point, he was becoming one of my favorite people.

Anyway, Anne Archer and her team did an excellent job of implying extravagant things they could not possibly deliver in our space and within our budget, but never explicitly promised. Moreover, our college’s real growth bolstered those implications, and the two loudest, least competent faculty members built strawmen out of Business A’s tattered pieces. The loudest, least competent Business B flunky could not have failed to knock it down.

Sorry, sheriff. There is no unnamed stranger to save your dusty streets and two dimensional (2D) storefronts.

-Double-

2006-02-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

My friend Set and I are at the same stage of dating. Phone numbers swapped by friends, phone conversations that didn't kill anyone's enthusiasm, and first in-person dates that didn't spark, but didn't suck, either. So we've decided to join forces and double-date this Thursday.

We both took a shine to this plan immediately, but couldn't resist playing devil's advocate.

Set: What if they crush on each other?

Benedict: Very Anais Nin of them if they did, but worth the risk.
What if either one of us dislikes the other's date?

Set: [pause] I guess we talk about it later, in private.
What if either one of them dislikes one of us?

Benedict:

Set:

Benedict and Set: F@$% 'em.

-..and the doctor said, “I cannot operate on this patient, because he is my son.”-

2006-02-13T11:16:00.000-05:00

That is the end of a riddle designed to flush out male chauvinists. And I am here to tell you of new one I stepped into, on a recent date.

The woman told me she coached hockey and softball, and do you know what I said, a few minutes later?

“So, how is the field hockey team doing?”

At that moment, the entire region got blasted with cold weather. Coincidence?

Ice hockey, she answered flatly, and I thought of the sound Mia Farrow's Rosemary makes when she finally sees her baby.

Field hockey is played in the fall, she added.

Impeccable logic, I said, and tried to change the subject.

The father died in the crash, and the doctor is the boy's mother!

-Restraint-

2006-02-08T18:08:00.000-05:00

My monolithic coworker snapped at me yesterday over nothing. Publicly. I guess it had been building for some time.

They tell me she is envious of my easy acceptance into the college, but I don't believe I did anything extraordinary for that. Just don't be a jerk, and you're in.

Until now, I sensed her irritation and felt only mild amusement. But if there will scenes in the library like the one yesterday, it makes us both look bad. I still want another job, but I don't want to burn too many bridges before or after it happens.

At the time, and after, I considered calling her into my office to discuss the matter privately. I still think it might be a good idea. But as more time goes by, I think the power of the initial insult is waning too much to debate without seeming thinskinned, or silly.

'Course, getting steamrolled by jerks isn't my favorite sport either, so I need to manage this problem quickly.

-Callback-

2006-02-03T08:52:00.000-05:00

There was a note on my computer when I came in this morning.

"Please phone (xxx) xxx-xxxx
She is sick & not able to come in."

"She" in this case is my boss, and this is not unusual.

But when I called, someone on the other end picked up the phone and put it back on the receiver.

Now what?

-On the blink-

2006-02-01T10:47:00.000-05:00

The view screen on the phone winked at me once, then went blank. Thirty seconds later, it winked again, then went blank again. And so on, and so forth.

Funny, I thought. I’m supposed to do a phone interview in five hours.

It was a perfect day for electronic equipment to go haywire. The new ipod, about which I still harbor a great deal of class trepidation for merely owning, also needed repair. And I think one of the brake lights on my car might be going.

Phoneless, toneless, and brakelight-less, the confluence of electronic mishap left me scratching my head and thinking about popular culture, and how much of our attention it still demands. Is it only the loss of all these other distractions that has me seeking another distraction?

Don't answer that.

A leader of a Christian fellowship can rail against 'Book of Daniel' for an alleged anti-christian sentiment. But what gets my goat? Knowing so little about television these days, except for those informative tidbits that somehow cross the gator-filled moat and scale the walls, I did manage to come up with one show that fills with me with hate; not for its ideas, but its lazy style.

Put aside for the moment their voyeuristic and sleazy tapping of juvenile kidnappings and sex crimes. I recently saw the moronic police officers on a Law and Order clone (all of them are awful, it doesn't matter which one you see) did one of their preachy group-exposition pieces. They stand roughly in a circle, and pipe up one by one.

Hargitay: What about these children? My character is childless, but look at me as if I’m maternal, will you please?
Melloni: Yeah, what about all of those missing children’s fathers? And do I get to beat the crap out of their stepdads, or what?
Wong: It’s all psychological with these missing girls. They look for father figures, and the pimp takes advantage of that.

Suspect: um, are you actually going to ask me any questions?

Ice-T: Lotta broken homes, lotta pimps. This problem is all over the country.
Belzer: wouldn’t be so many pimps if there weren’t so many johns to pay for it.

Just once, I’d like to see the perp in the other room look from expository cop to expository cop, incredulity growing. When the police captain finally comes in to worry about jurisdiction – his only other job is to exhort them to “find the girl!” – the perp should slip off the cuffs he’s been working on, and walk out of the station shaking his head.

“Jesus,” he should say once he’s outside. “It’s almost as if it’s in all of their contracts to take turns recapping the social issue of the day.”

“The writers must really think we’re fucking stupid.”

:Roll Credits:

Are they right? Are all our brains on the blink?

Don't answer that.

-Stretching Social Fabric-

2006-01-30T15:13:00.000-05:00

A conversation on Friday with the youth leader of the Christian group I advise has left me feeling like the ideological version of Seymour, from Little Shop of Horrors. I’m helping an alien creature find *people food* even though I disagree with it and it seems to be growing out of its pot.

The other faculty members and I debated whether or not someone should represent a group like mine, a Christian group with members who fall all over the fervency scale when it comes to expressing their faith. We all agreed they deserved some representation, even if it comes from little ol’ lapsed me.

Maybe, we believed, I could moderate some of the excesses. Proselytizing is off the table, but I sense that the youth leader and some of the more active members are looking for the opportunity to circumvent the ban. They enjoy controversy as much as anyone, and it is unnerving to see their eyes glitter when someone (the school administration, the media, me) appears to be infringing on their first amendment rights.

It’s particularly unnerving, since Leaderboy used his first amendment argument to suppress someone else’s first amendment rights.

Maybe you heard, he said, that 'Book of Daniel' was taken off the air. I had, but his eyes had the constitutional glitter, so I didn’t say anything back. The plant in Little Shop of Horrors didn’t have eyes, just a killer whale maw.

So many Christians called in and complained, he continued with unmistakable glee. The networks knew better than to keep it on.

My fingers twitched at my side, out of sight. I hoped my own teeth weren’t showing. “Maybe the show just wasn’t that good.” I said. “That’s what I’ve been hearing.”

He shakes his head. “It was the Christian boycott. They wouldn’t let something so insulting stay on, if so many viewers objected.”

“Your source?” I asked incredulously. Say 700 club, I thought. I dare you.

He frowns. “A bunch of different websites I visit regularly.”

It is only years of library training that keep from scoffing.

Anyway, if “they” have the clout to determine what is or is not played on television – and there is some truth to his exaggerations (remember Sinclair Broadcasting?) – why can’t they use that power to smite some of the programming that deserves to be smote?

I could give them a list, even though I don’t have cable.

However, I tell the student leader that I’ve often become irritated by what I’ve seen on television or in movies. I tell him that every time I feel incensed enough to write in and complain, I always stop myself when I ask myself if it is worth the trouble when there are so many more important issues on which I should expending my energy.

He is undeterred. Yes, yes, he nods impatiently, but these things eat away the social fabric..

I feel like such a patsy for agreeing to advise this group. I’m not an NAACP lawyer representing a Klansman to insure due process. I’m just another foolish unsaved soul to be used while they gather to celebrate their elitist group. Worse yet, my support, slight as it is, seems to have enabled them to work against the things I cherish.

Or maybe I’m being overly dramatic.

-Two down-

2006-01-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

Two of the writers referenced in this earlier post quit the group.

Who are the first casualties?

the creative writing professor (and moderator)
the environmental cleanup expert
the retired environmental cleanup expert
poetry-spewing brace of merlot-drinking sisters
very loquacious high school teacher
landscaping English major
me

If you choose the poetry-spewing brace of merlot-drinking sisters, you're right.

-By now I should know better-

2006-01-24T09:11:00.000-05:00

I always get excited when I get my hands on a controversial new book with 50+ holds in the public library queue; most recently, Lynn Picknett’s the Secret History of Lucifer. The blurb on the jacket identifies Picknett as a writer and speaker on Christian heresies, but the author's accompanying photo suggests Clara Bow.

Picknett makes many bold statements about biblical inconsistencies, which are spot on, if fairly obvious. But before you invite her to your salon, be warned – she will probably overturn the pasta salad bowl and accuse the macaroni spirals of trying to impregnate her.

In short, she is one of those rare birds so obsessed with phalluses (and at the same time, terrified of the very concept) that this read feels uncomfortably like bobbing for apples in a bucket ballpark franks.

-Whenever eight writers meet-

2006-01-20T23:21:00.000-05:00

Whenever two writers meet and acknowledge one another, some unmistakably primitive contest for superiority has to occur. Like a pair of tomcats on neutral territory, they must freeze and match wills momentarily, even under friendly circumstances like a peer-review group meeting.

I joined one this week. We are a creative writing professor (the moderator), an environmental cleanup expert, a poetry-spewing brace of merlot-drinking sisters, a very loquacious high school teacher, who showed up late after programming her VCR to record "Lost," a retired environmental cleanup expert (weird, huh?) a landscaping English major (there but for the grace of god go I), and me.

I've joined several other such groups in the past. All of them imploded in less than six months, but I was generally pleased with all of the sessions, at least in the beginning. Even when I disagreed with the critics, or felt they missed the point entirely, that too, was a signal that I needed to get out of my own head and clarify. TOO ABSTRACT, one of my greatest professors regularly sliced into my essays in red ink. I think he still would - the fault is in my own mind, and is not easily dispelled.

Blame it on the Victorian literature I consumed like almond m&m's as a student. My mind's voice sounds like an anemic fop visiting the moors in unfashionable breeches. (Rest assured, in real life I get plenty of exercise, even if it took me an embarrassingly long time to saw apart firewood at my parent's place. And the axe might as well be a baseball bat that hasn't been sharpened since the Phillies won the World Series.)

I mention it now to demonstrate the gulf between my antiquated inner voice, and that of the moderator/creative writing professor, whose primary influence is Dave Eggers.

Jesus.

In another writing group, many years ago, I received great acclaim after several weeks of awkward silence. The reason? Someone misread my lyric tribute to tea as a homage to recreational drug use.

Most unseemly, but it gave me some mad respect from my bitchass classmates, for the rest of the term.

-Flayed and Plasticized-

2006-01-15T16:17:00.000-05:00

Combining elements of art and science, the Body Worlds exhibit currently touring the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia delivers slabs of human flesh infused with plastic. Some are sliced thinner than prosciutto, and are pressed under glass. Others are arrayed in their human form - sans skin - and posed for action.

It is part art, and part science, but anyone looking for a deeper understanding of either will be disappointed. Science text books peel back layers, as do many computer programs. Seeing this in 3D without attending gross anatomy may be of value, but if you remove the mess - not to mention the skin that puts a personal face on the deceased - the crowds are free to be as clinical as they were yesterday. No one became queasy there, not even the small children.

Which isn't to say the exhibit didn't confuse them. One figure, entitled "Teacher" gripped a piece of chalk. I heard the young child next to me call for his mother and say: "Why did they make this one a teacher if he's a man?"

Really, if we've learned anything here, it's that people are shallow enough to ignore the body donors when their beauty is more than skin deep. Although more than a few people seemed to enjoy smirking over the plasticized penises. Others complained that there were too many dudes among the dead.

Note: nearly all of the body donors had the blackened lungs of chronic smokers. Sexy, no?

Ultimately, I was glad I saw it, although I would like to have posted some of my own photos. Sadly, they've got crap to sell you and won't allow competition. The high point of this project? Probably the plastination process, which is incredibly advanced preservation craft.

The low point? Gunther Van Hagens also had the temerity to put a hat on one of the corpses in order to "further blur the line between life and death."

That was just stupid.

-Denial-

2006-01-14T11:18:00.000-05:00

It's so cute when someone tells you that their life ought to be filmed for television. It's even better when they play casting director.

She believed she could be played by Amy Poehler, but more it's far more likely to be Chris Parnell in drag.

-The Death’s head cane-

2006-01-13T12:25:00.000-05:00

What do you do when you are the witness to street bullying? What did you do on the playground as a kid?

Sociologists tell us that most witnesses just watch, and the odds of an individual witness helping the victim of public violence only decreases when the number of witnesses increases. It's what John Darley and Bibb Latane identified as the "diffusion of responsibility" When a mentally deranged and naked man attacked an English church with a sword, parishioners fought back immediately and were congratulated for bucking the trend.

And what do you do when the bullying is subtle, and the threat is implied, or depends on the witness's own prejudgment of the aggressor?

Say you've got a Chinese takeout window and no one in the vicinity to watch over two children - neither of them over the age of ten - except a skinny librarian ordering Pork Chow Mein. Who's got their back when a large bald man with prison tattoos and a shaved head, a man carrying a cane capped with a skull, bends down and tells two suddenly still children how much they've grown, then asks about their families, even though neither child says anything, and the one the librarian can see past his bulk seems to have gone pale.

Am I overreacting, being too judgmental? Come on, a cane! Not the kind anyone leans on. It's just under three feet in length, and he carries it like a club. It looks solid enough to do some damage.

Just listen, I told myself. This could be nothing.

But my mind jumped ahead. All the best scenarios ended with the cook whipping carbon-steel knives through the takeout window. The worst ended (and began, really) with me getting too close to the death's head cane. That thing was a mace, really, and I bet it was even bigger than it looked.

And then he was gone.

-Eleven-

2006-01-11T16:19:00.000-05:00

No one thought to pick up any cake or candles for our mildly autistic coworker's birthday, so I dashed out into the street at eleven A.M. in a desperate attempt to find some. It would really be a coup, I decided, if I could avoid putting the purchase on a card. But I only had two fives and a one in my wallet, so it wasn't looking good.

The first stop was Beverly’s pastries. Beverly hasn’t operated the Bakery in some time; she turned the reins over to the Kwan family in the early nineties. Luke Kwan was at the counter that day, his arm in a sling. Marjory Kwan was nowhere to be found.

My boss had suggested cupcakes. I thought that might be a good idea, too, since we’d have to use plastic cutlery on any dessert large enough for division. I’d also talked my boss down to eight cupcakes, since the college runs on a skeleton crew during the January intermission.

The only problem was that Luke didn’t have eight cupcakes. There were only four cupcakes under the glass, two chocolate, two vanilla, a jumble of danishes, and six brownies, half with crushed walnuts on top, and half without. Minus the danishes, I took two of everything.

For a total of $6.26.

But I wasn’t finished. I passed the pleading vagrants outside the free health clinic and picked up the sodas I wouldn’t be drinking. It was three liters in all, two of them Pepsi, one diet.

For a total of $4.74.

Odd, I thought, as I made the trip back to the office. Eleven dollars even.

Which is odd.

-Address Known-

2006-01-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

Kyria Abrahams has defected to Blogger, and we couldn't be happier. Hopefully she will save her Sateen Dura-Luxe past for the education of future generations.

-Christ's own coffeepot-

2006-01-08T01:04:00.000-05:00

It may be in between semesters at most colleges, but I had the urge to do some reconnaissance on a new job site.

It's another college, another academic library. Slightly better than the one I'm currently with, which isn't saying much. Climb the ladder, and all that.

Otherwise, this library is only set apart from the others I've seen by its commingled stacks and aquariums. One could research red-eyed Amazon tree frogs, and then move four feet to the left to study a live one.

I didn't marvel at this for long. An elderly woman stumped out of an antechamber, turned, and warbled back into technical service land that a student was here. Not really, but I decided not to reveal my true purpose unless she asked.

Are you a student? She asked.

I admitted my real reason for coming, which sounded less rational than it had in my head.

The woman nodded with such a lack of concern that I feared she would nod off. She was closing soon, she told me, but was willing to let me take a peek. The only other noteworthy part of this conversation was introductions. "I'm Benedict." I said. "Mrs. Roth" she replied with distaste.

Of course! The greatest generation doesn't cotton to exchanging Christian names with young strangers. I had to get out of there.

On the way back home, I pulled the car over when I saw a sign advertising two of my favorite things - coffee and books. But when I walk inside, my eyes adjust to the gloom to find a well-furnished, but empty establishment. It's dark, and cold, and the decor is pure Starbucks. Plush couches, Ansel Adams prints, and too-small-to-spread-a-newspaper two-foot circular tables.

Only $0.75 for a 12 oz cup of coffee? Magnificent!

The barista who comes out of the lattechamber is prim, in her fifties. She blinks at me as I make a move toward the connected bookstore. "Bibles are marked down." she says. Clearly, this is not Starbucks, nor Barnes and Noble.

The music.. I can't decipher the lyrics, but something about the sound pulls at me, begs to be classified.

Oh.. Christian rock. Now I get it.

Turns out the Church is in the innoculous looking storefront next door. The barista is a volunteer, and this shop is a non-profit enterprise. Hence the $0.75 cup of coffee.

My original plan was to find a quiet booth and jot down my impressions of the library I'd just cased. But I wasn't comfortable here, so I chatted her up about the area that might become my new town. She didn't talk faith or redemption, so everything was fine.

As I left I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. Gave her my first name.
She responded with her first and last.

Now, that's faith.

-Reading Coetzee-

2006-01-06T20:52:00.000-05:00

Reading J. M. Coetzee's latest felt like standing stiff as a board before an audibly yawning abyss, letting the weight of my head lead all the way down.

I mean that in the best possible way. It was fantastic.

-Poker Fiend-

2005-12-30T14:02:00.000-05:00

I've always been wary of card games, and fascinated, too. Ours was not a card playing family, though I'm certain we did on rare occasions.

Then came summer camp, and those giddy teenage hormones. Before we knew it, we're staying up late at night playing Asshole and Egyptian Rat Screw by flashlight, strip poker to follow.

In humiliation, cardplay goes underground until college peer pressure links the deck to drinking games. Disrobing is part of some hands at some parties, but generally, it's about making ourselves sick.

And then..

Poker championships are televised. Celebrities are brought in, especially James Woods.

Everyone wants to play Texas Hold'em.

Hey, me too.

The Christmas poker tournament pitted me against eight relatives, all but one succumbing to my dumb luck and honest play. I say "honest play" because I don't bluff, not really. With every hand I raise, I really believe I'm capable of taking it. My relatives are a pack of bluffers, and once I'd taken a few hands, they believed in my honesty. For telling the truth, I had a high reputation.

I won the next tournament handily.

And that worries me a bit - what if I start to enjoy it way too much? It's a heady thing, victory, even if my winnings are less than half a day's pay. If you want to extrapolate my fears, go to This American Life, and search for "Poker" or "Jim McManus." Then you'll understand.

-You have a problem-

2005-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Not you, and not me; we're talking about a third party friend of my brother who became the topic of conversation at the family dinner table.

Every family member wasn't present - sorry Yellocello, but you and A didn't miss much - so the four remaining people sat in a perfect square; parents on one side, sons on the other.

So when my brother told us his friend has a drinking problem, I was fascinated by the reactions.

Each corner of the square played its part - my brother described the problem, asked us if he should do something, then peppered the rest of the conversation with anecdotes meant to solicit what exactly? Sometimes shock at the depths to which his friend had sunk, and other times a spirited defense of his friend's redeemability?

My mother, who has been critical of this alcoholic friend in the past, who whispered her disapproval to us since she first heard of his problems on the mother network, now fretted for him. Isn't that a mother's way, when someone is in need, to do all in her power to assist? But here she qualified her generosity; insisted that her son get the help of many others before he tries to confront an alcoholic.

My father is in favor of gathering an intervention, but he is troubled by each new revelation of barely avoided bar room brawls, nips at lunchtime, surly intoxicant behavior. Why, he asked, is his son traveling with someone so impaired into these misadventures? He doesn't believe my brother can control the friend's excesses as well as he claims. He believes an alcoholic could easily bring about the destruction of sober people who clean up after them.

And me? For the most part I was silent, collecting information from articles in the past, and thinking about organizations I know still operate in the present. We know AA works best in combination with some private therapy and detox - what cocktail of treatments should be presented at the intervention, and which is appropriate to him? How should the intervention itself be structured?

The other points in the square weren't talking about logistics yet. They weren't ready to research the problem, much less act on a solution. They were talking about feelings, and I felt it wasn't my place to put much more emotion into the mix. When this dinner was over, the conversation would come up again in miniature, but no point in the square will do anything more then fret until another incident worsens the situation, or nullifies it.

That's a perfect, immobile square. That's human nature, to let a problems run their course, for good or for ill. Maybe if I send the information I compiled to the other square points, they will overpower their square inertia and act out their parts. And maybe I won't in time, because I'm human, too.

-That Christmas Conspiracy-

2005-12-23T20:45:00.000-05:00

“Look out!” I blurted, and Dad jammed the breaks. For the second time in minutes, another driver had come within a hairsbreadth of blowing our doors off from the inside.

Grumble, grumble, let-me-tell-you-why-they-cut-us-off..

It is December 23, after all, and road rage has spiked higher than Ty Cobb. This isn’t so bad when I’m driving alone, but I’m riding shotgun in my father’s car on the way to the nearest mall complex to assist him shopping for my mother – yes, he waited this long, and no, he has no idea what he should get her, and yes, he expects me to select something, and no, I have no idea either since I solved my own present problem with a lucky bit of re-gifting – riding with him is an exercise in active listening.

Blame National Review, or Fox, or anything but himself for becoming so paranoid about the world at large. All children may fear becoming their parents, and I’m no exception; I like my curmudgeon attitude right now, because when someone cuts me off or does me wrong, I still blame the individual, the he/she/it in the other vehicle. Not a larger leftist conspiracy that makes the individual ill-tempered, impatient or evil.

-Seasonal Affective Disorder: Sold-

2005-12-18T14:55:00.000-05:00

My town may as well be named Foreclosure.

After a mostly fruitless mall experience last weekend, I tried my own main street, expecting that the cold air between merchants might stimulate the buying impulses and finish off my list.

My god, I think half as many shops are open as there were when I moved here nine months ago.

Dizzy with pity, I sat on the base of the Civil War statue until some inspiration should strike me, or some bird droppings.

Santa passed by on a firetruck. He was on his way to a candy cane shed where he asks children what they want for Christmas, then charges their parents $10 for three 4x6 photos of the experience.

A crazy woman huffed out of the creative health clinic. Every time she encountered non-caucasian people she would spin on her heel and march in the opposite direction singing top forty hits (I think?) until she realized that two separate parties of minorities were converging from both directions. She fled back into the clinic, all the worse for wear.

I didn't need a third reason to shove off, so I took a peek inside a store closing that very day. It sold a variety of items for the home and garden, some practical, some merely decorative, all very cheap. With less than an hour of sales to go, the shop's remaining goods weren't very. My pity purchase - two birdfeeders for two dollars - probably backfired.

The owner recognized me, and knew what I do for a living. She wouldn't quit trying to sell me the crappy paperbacks in her dwindling possession until my resolve tightened enough to leave without buying any more detritus. My third reason had arrived.

The mood is considerably brighter in the record shop a few blocks away. They're doing well despite their small selection and lackluster signage, and they listen compassionately to my description of the desperate home and garden scene down the street.

We're still here, the matriarch said. And we have no plans to move.

-Hot Water-

2005-12-09T16:07:00.000-05:00

After seven months with no neighbors on either side of my apartment, I have been forced to adjust to new surroundings - two of them - on either side of suprisingly thin walls.

The noise doesn't really bother me; my landlord's lengthy screening process weeds out night people.

No, it is the water. In the past week, I've been taking military showers, if the military in question is defending Inuit territory.

There must be some time of day I can take a shower and find hot water. I think it was lukewarm for a minute at 6:30 AM once, but what good does that do me, the one night person to circumvent the screening process.

Today, a snowday; I showered at noon while one of the neighbors cleaned the car out front.

Still frigid.

But then I tried to wash my hands in the kitchen sink downstairs, and the water was scalding for several minutes.

Maybe the problem runs deeper than two new neighbors.

-The dim fluorescent lighting is punishment enough-

2005-12-06T16:47:00.000-05:00

It would make sense if I were to mail resumes after a particularly trying day at work. But that day was yesterday - today was fairly good, actually. Since another errand took me to an library organization with a job page, I opened that job page in a new window. My screen was bisected, and I was multitasking.

We've all heard the stories about employees screwing around on the net while they're on the clock, just as some of us have probably read The Naked Employee. Whether we are watched or not, the virtual panoptican hasn't cowed the average employee. I don't know a single employee here, management included, that doesn't make off with a few minutes for private surfing.*

And this is not entirely a bad thing. Try a few weeks of data entry with green type on a black screen, and you'll wake up each morning feeling like a cockroach. The Metamorphosis meets Groundhog's Day. Where cigarette breaks once broke up the work day, internet trips fill the void.

Nevertheless, I feel enough shame to invent elaborate excuses for each transgression. It was easy to wander through sites with library or technology news; the job is the justification. Public blogs are another matter, and I still avoid this one during working hours unless I'm feeling particularly cheeky.

I can't begin to imagine what your work environment is like, or how permissive the are (or appear to be) with employees using company time for personal business. It is possible that many of you think I'm overeacting with all this.

Duly noted.

But what larger betrayal is there of an organization than using their time and equipment to search for another job?

*As long as the private surfing doesn't include criminal activity involving minors. Somebody found out the hard way earlier this year.

-Malleficia-

2005-12-02T12:19:00.000-05:00

Is anything as soul-crushing as a desicated mall come Christmas time?

To me, the experience of mall browsing while listening to tinny versions of "Santa Claus is coming to town" is the same as having your teeth pulled by your editor while your dentist marks your story with a red pen.

At least in a large, profitable mall, I look like the only shopper who isn't enraptured by the season. In a bustling crowd, the excitement of spending too much on distant cousins' children only seen at grandparent funerals can be transformed into an event. Who's to say that Black Friday shoppers wouldn't have been equally at home rioting in a brazilian soccer stadium, or fighting bikers at a Stones Concert? Gather enough Christmas cheer in one place, and enthusiasm is bound to turn to frenzy.

But in this former steel town, extra elbow room has turned every shopper into an isolated pocket of gloom, most especially the one shopper buying a birthday gift for some advent nemontemi who made the mistake of being born this season.

After gliding through stacks of sweaters in one department, and Atlantic City glitz in another, I strolled out into the open promenade with the other downcast shoppers. I figured I might have hit paydirt with one of the unconquered-by-christmas craft stores, particularly when I noticed women the birthday girl's age eyeing the merchandise.

But as I made a circuit of the shelves, I tried to imagine facing the recipient on the birthday itself. How would I defend this gift? If the gift has to be defended at all, it must be the wrong choice.

The birthday girl and these women are not so similar, I decided. Since I have nothing else to show for the hours spent wandering and window shopping, this can only mean that I don't know what I'm doing, or who I'm shopping for.

At long last I found two suitable items in the mens' section of Boscov's. I didn't realize it was the mens' section until I saw the receipt, and I didn't realize until then that I was shopping for a tomboy.

Sorry, Mom.

-Restless in the family home at Thanksgiving; watching a parade of advertisements-

2005-11-25T02:31:00.000-05:00

Tonight I have been considering that great, overt misogyny of early Bond films, and the different, but not entirely subtle misogyny of the later ones. Just because the new Bond girls can shoot and fight doesn’t make it fair.

Those advertisements mentioned in the title are embedded within the Bond marathon on the Spike network, whose target audience must be actively engaged in first-person-shooter games 16 hours a day. Any less, and it wouldn’t justify the cost of airing so many commercials for virtual gun nuts.

Just after 1:00 AM, a new development: the network slips one army recruitment spot into the parade.

Odd.

Do they really believe the virtual shooter audience produces suitable soldiers in real life?

The question hangs there.

Why am I bothering to watch, you may ask? Well, my brother and father fell asleep watching the marathon AND a pot of turkey soup. Turning off the marathon would wake them up – so I suppose I’d better stay nearby to make sure the house doesn’t burn down.

It is a bother, but I’ve pondered worst.

-Catatonic-

2005-11-22T15:36:00.000-05:00

What should one do when a coworker - oh, hell, a BOSS - seems frighteningly indifferent about her health?

My feeling is that an employee can do very little about that, and until I find a better reason to intrude, that's my policy.

One can be accommodating, certainly, taking up some of the slack during sick days, half days, or late arrivals. But more often I've begun to feel split between covering for infirmities and resenting the fall out.

Lately, I've begun appreciate the times my boss is not here, partly because I get more work done in her absence, but mostly because I'm feeling uncomfortable (and guilty, yes, guilty!) watching her decline.

Some of the responsibility is mine, I freely admit. As anyone with two or more children in a family knows, when one child acts up, the other works harder to present a contrast; look at me, the good son. There are no superiors to judge us, my boss and I, but the parents live in my head. When she spends the morning reading movie reviews and cat cartoons, I rush to finish purchase orders. When she spends thirty minutes getting a cup of coffee and speaks of visiting the IT office to chat about computer issues, I've got IT on the phone while I'm answering reference questions on the side, all before she makes it out the door.

I relish overseeing daily operations, major and minor, and all the moreso when she puts her head down on the desk or takes an outdoor constitutional, both fruitless attempts to gather the necessary energy - to stay awake at work!

By degrees, I am usurping her job, and I hate it.
I also hate that she seems entirely willing to let me take it.

To a professional ten months from retirement, this job in an insignificant library far from any culture of arts, far from any research institution of note, may very well be the pasture.

But when I see so many tired and broken educators without hope, I'm chomping at the bit not only to get out of here, but to make this field something worthwhile.

-Only the good file young-

2005-11-16T17:41:00.000-05:00

I have heard many a retiree decide, after six unsuccessful pulls of a slot machine lever, to move to an adjacent unit that might be luckier. Other Blue-hairs who took the same bus into Atlantic City that morning have a diametrically opposed gambling policy; the type that refuse to budge, believing that the next successful pull could occur at any position, anytime, perhaps in the moment of seat shifting.

Of course, neither is fully right or wrong, but I imagine the happiest are the ones who believe they made the right decision.

No one is entirely certain what happened behind the closed door of the negotiation room, not even her closest friends with the company. What is certain is that her tenure with the College - six years - ended inside.

In true corporate fashion, the College whisked her out of the building before any of her friends knew what happened. She was able to send out a mass email later to several of her friends' college e-mail addresses, and it was interesting to peruse the recipient list and see who qualified as a ally, and who, by their absence, fell in the foe category.

I don't believe my boss qualified as a foe, but she wasn't listed, and I foolishly mentioned the e-mail before I had perused the list. I told her it appeared to have been assembled in a hurry; sometimes names and e-mail addresses were included, sometimes just the addresses, so the omission was most likely an oversight.

Not sure she bought it.

In any case, a card went around the office the next day, and I made sure I would be one of the last people signing it. Like the e-mail recipient list, there were some notable omissions. And from a few people who were not given the email, but also were not the reason for the girl's dismissal - like my boss - some rather tepid sentiments.

-The Astringent Sick Day-

2005-11-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

It was Sunday. Not a genuine sick day from work, but you'll grant me the same empathy given to a personal day.

The headaches, the sneezing, the coughing...
Immaterial.

They'd be gone before the first date with the Russian classmate later in the week, but the skin imperfections they'd leave in their wake could be fatal.

I could feel the bacteria clogging the pores. The sensation was so unpleasant and distracting that I contemplated at least three untenable means of running a government and a free press in conjunction with the entertainment industry.

These three excellent but ultimately flawed ideas gave me enough pause to stop pondering while staring at the ceiling beams, and begin gathering household astringents. In that respect, my narcism is the same as everyone else's.

Windex would do in a pinch.
But I don't have much in the way of windows in the carriage house, so that was a no-go.

Toothpaste could work, but unlike the liquid window cleaner, this substance retains its blue color on the skin. No deal.

In my search I disturbed a silverfish. It could move, scrabbling out of the bathroom and around the wall, then down the stair space ceiling. Despite its speed, I had plenty of time to admire it, reach the top of the stairs, and remove Yoko Ono's Breadfruit from the nearby shelf.

All those years in Library school have taught me a thing or two about throwing books. The Silverfish didn't have ten legs to stand on, and I wiped all of them off the dustcover with tissue paper.

Right next to the tissues I found an old tube of clearsil. Basic, but I think it'll work.

-Absurd-

2005-11-04T13:32:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention that I use the term "absurd" too often. If you catch me using that adjective in the future, call me on it.

Next Week - We find out if the Russian class I audited was really worthwhile.

-The Minor League of Pathology-

2005-10-28T09:21:00.000-04:00

Step 5
Originally uploaded by idalingi.

As a frequent donor, the routine of giving blood no longer fills me with trepidation. Because it is so routine - a middle finger is punctured to test iron, some personal fluids questions are asked, and the transmissable disease of the hour becomes required pamphlet reading.

Next, the chair, the iodine swab, the tapping of a vein, filling a bag and four tubes with enough of my A+ to help four patients.

Only trouble is, yesterday's medical assistants weren't major league material.

They missed the vein on the left arm. They missed the vein on the right arm, finally catching and starting a slow flow. So slow that blood began to clot inside the needle. The attendant's solution (aside from blaming my blood's slow flow on my diet and not drinking enough water; wrong on both counts) is to jiggle and turn the needle still in my arm to restart the flow.

Can you see me wincing over here?

After approximately 45 minutes had elapsed since the "good" needle stick, his manager disengaged the tubes and told me she thought the might have enough, even though the weight hadn't dropped on the scale. More likely, she sensed my rising ire, which I think was spilling into my features.

For the rest of the day and even now, I think of that moment every time I lift anything heavier than a pen and paper. The ache in both arms from the bad needle sticks is not overwhelming, just infuriating. In my twinges, a more confident and cinematic version of myself snatches the clamp out of the slack-jawed assistant's hands, kinks the tube and pulls the needle out while expertlypressing the cotton to the puncture at the same time. I rise up from the chair and raise my arm over my head, turn to the pathology team, their mouths agape, and say: "And that's enough of that." in a gravelly but somehow magnanimous growl. This tougher self favors them with a condecending smile, and walks out to a jangling guitar riff.

Of course, I would also be willing to settle for the blood bag weighing enough for all that blood to be used. I really hate the idea of all that trouble counting for nothing, and I'll never know what happened.

-Pillar-

2005-10-24T17:34:00.000-04:00

"Can you see them?"
-I think they may be behind that pillar.-

A wedding in Eastern Pennsylvania, and I'm sitting at the overflow table, a round table in the corner of the ballroom with capacity for eight bodies, currently seating six, bodies that rank just above the uninvited and those that didn't care to respond.

Jill knew the bride years ago, it seems, but no longer. She brought Jack, a young auditor, as her date. She keeps trying to drag him to the dance floor, and his face gets even ruddier if you ask him on which companies he plied his trade. Jack has never met the bride or the groom. Kathy and William are a married couple - they teach high school, although which is the full time teacher and which is the substitute is never made clear. They also knew the bride, once upon a time.

Finally, there are two friends of the groom, Ryan (since college) and myself (since high school). We are all that's left of the groom's friends from his education days.

Two empty seats confound the kitchen staff. They bring two extra helpings of every salad, entree, and flute of champagne, which sounds much cooler than it really is.

Whatever nasty turn of events put the six of us so far down in the pecking order, it is clear that our lifeboat will not float the cheeriest batch of shipmates. My early attempts to play cruise director gave way to overly solemn concentration on eating, drinking, and career recitation. Trapped between an auditor and an accountant, (Ryan's profession) our table fast became a statistic.

What I would give, I thought darkly between sips of beer and anecdotes about Big Business internships, for the wit of Gertrude, protagonist of Pictures from an Institution. Cutting as she was, she could dissect those who bored her with creativity, no matter how deep into her cups.

Even sober, I felt my wit thickening in the doldrums until two colorless businessmen could dominate the conversation.

-Baked goods-

2005-10-17T11:26:00.000-04:00

After a week of walking through the rain to work, I decided to infuse this downtrodden town with some of my disposable income. The bakery is just so economically pretty, with lace stretched along the inside the perimeter of the molding much the way a first-year teacher lines the classroom with ruffled paper.
Frilly but prolateriat cakes press against the glass with small town pride to acknowledge that big city cakes may rise higher, but here you can be certain to taste what you see.

Most of the time, anyway. The sign out front proclaimed fresh pumpkin pie, but the only pie in sight was the fourth quarter of a double header baked early that morning. If I intended to feed an office of 5-20 people, I couldn't begin with the last slice of pumpkin pie no one will eat to try to be polite or thin.

The apple cheese coffee cake traveled well, but the office was almost empty when I got there. It may have been a busy administrative day for those left behind, or maybe the need to kiss the asses of the visiting VIPs, but the first two people I offered the coffee cake nearly snarled.

Setting the box down for the eaters' tempers to cool did the trick. Within an hour, both of my bosses defied their physicians and sampled the cake. They were followed by the less alpha members of administration, once I had promised them that cake was bought, not made.

They have never tried my cooking, how do they know?

It doesn't matter.

Two bosses, two stomachs won. I should ask for a raise.

-Hunting and Phishing-

2005-10-11T16:02:00.000-04:00

So this web-savvy creature creates a mock up of a bank's web page, arranges for a plausible url, and finally mass-mails a security warning begging the recipient to follow the link and input their account information.

After putting in all that work mimicking the web page, why blow it on a horrifically misspelled and nearly incomprehensible e-mail?

Doesn't make sense. All of those underemployed humanities majors out there, and they can't afford a decent copywriter?

They're not alone, of course. A heavily degreed job-hunter presented me with a resume that wouldn't have passed the muster at the lowliest of temp agencies (and believe me, I've worked for the lowliest). Great qualifications, maddeningly vague message - as if MBA stood for Masters in Bureaucratic Areality.

If that really exists, I'd like to get one.

-Alpaca Stud-

2005-10-04T10:05:00.000-04:00

"He has an amazing lineage. His grandfather was Caligula."

Daily life for an Alpaca!
Originally uploaded by Enjoy Alpaca Photos.

Once we learned that Alpacas only make those quiet bleats when stressed, I regretted intruding on the farm. Set baby-talked to the bleating Alpacas near the gate, but the tall and silent one with the dark fleece never took his large eyes off me. Three-quarters of his top incisors popped from his overbite, and he stood impossibly still the entire time we were there.

It was my idea to continue up the drive, but I soon regretted that, too. The shop is open on weekends, but the shop is also a private home. We didn't have much money.

Still, the farmer answered my questions with the rehearsed delivery of a child reusing an older sibling's book report. Set baby-talked some more at the faun-like alpaca identified as less than a week of age. "Are there toy alpacas?" She asked.

The farmer's script sputtered and died. "Toys? You mean stuffed animals?"

"No, miniatures."

He seemed offended that she would even ask, and she would later purchase some $1.00 postcards as penance. The farmer rallied at the appearance of a largest member of the family Camelidae, a pure white quadriped behemoth turning the corner of the barn. Among these placid animals, he seemed powerful, boring baleful alpha-maleism into every object on which his roving eyes rested.

"That's our prize stud." The farmer said with sweaty admiration, taking off his hat and mopping his pate with a rag. "He has an amazing lineage. His grandfather was Caligula."

-Wet matchboxes don't burn up by themselves-

2005-09-29T00:23:00.000-04:00

My expansive study of Cape May, NJ history isn't expansive enough here, and there are so many other sources that are more worthy. And I don't entirely trust the below average student not to cite this page in their next term paper. Think I'm kidding? It has happened before.

doppler radar midwest segment
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

Two observations from the study are worth mentioning. First, the hotels. Stroll about their lobbies or gift alcoves, and you'll see a history of class-struggle, embezzlement, and fire. Fire most of all, I think, since construction ledgers indicate blocks of sulphur as a major building material, and butane as a varnish. Seriously, they might as well have made balustrades out of matchsticks, judging by the number of fires each and every building has endured since Queen Victoria.

Second, the renewed speculation about the shore-killing storm destined to annihilate the place. The last big storm ripped through a century ago, they say, so we are overdue. Without consulting my almanac - since the gulf stream certainly hasn't - I'll go out on a sunken pier and suggest that this speculation is founded in guilty empathy.

Specifically, the kind of guilty empathy you get from watching too many loops of the weather channel's latest meterological snuff film.

-Alpha-males, chatterboxes, and catch-and-release fishermen-

2005-09-22T13:36:00.000-04:00

Let's hear it for those taproom names with built-in excuses. The Library. Church. The Office. "Don't wait up, honey.. I'm working late at "The Office."

He lives alone, and so does she, but there the similarity ends.
They spoke at great length about marriage, but they were joking.

And now, even as the fake married couple hurls darts against another fake married couple - more fake, as it turns out, since neither fake single jests at marriage outside this connubial game of darts - this designated driver mulls over coming projects at work, future bills, necessary purchases made and later found half-price and twice-quality elsewhere.

Because these thoughts are the antithesis of fun, intended to crash against his sobriety and his luckless realization of a sober social ineptitude. Without spirits, he lacks confidence. Without confidence, he cannot get himself a wife, real or fake, for three months or two hours.

-Fetal Food-

2005-09-16T11:58:00.000-04:00

Your mother ate a particular food while you were in her belly. Now, whether you know it or not, it's your favorite.

What's yours?

-A stone's throw away-

2005-09-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

It was my intent to post the results of a snarky experiment, comparing "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" (Steven Soderbergh) with "Sex, Lies, and the Truth." (Focus on the Family) This intent was motivated by the titles alone; at the beginning of this week, I hadn't viewed either, and only knew of each film as VHS boxes checked out and returned by two very different groups of people.

Someone should watch both, I decided, and did so. Now that I have, I've cut the project's funding.

It might have been fun to lash the latter video's naivete, but I couldn't help but feel cruel setting a 30 minute abstinence video against an award-winning film written and shot by a young but unmistakably talented director. If Focus on the Family is to be faulted, it would be for usurping the name. And that usurpation was the reason for the experiment, wasn't it?

Surely, there are some thrills to be gained from 'Truth,' which seem to compare lust to assault by carneys. Like the scene with the unwed mother who tells her weepy tale over the nervous laughter of her friends. One could even excoriate the interviewed athletes, or the former family ties cast member who hosted, but I don't believe that would make the exercise worthwhile.

Mort Stahl criticizes media commentators for "using spitballs when they should be throwing rocks," which I take to be an argument against the feckless satire practiced by self-aggrandizing 'personalities.' If such persons spoke out against authority for the betterment of the masses, they have no need of covert, ego-feeding bullying. So I'll spare them the wet paper while I gather stones.

-No Question-

2005-09-02T12:08:00.000-04:00

So you have to answer any question they ask? Tittered another coworker.
-Within reason. We try to lead them to a source that answers the question, rather than tell the first thought that comes into our heads.-

This was followed by a flurry of questions. I think they were testing me. Or making fun of me.

1. What is Baobab?
-A kind of tree. (thank you, Kipling) I mean, I’ll look it up when I get a chance.-

2. Is there such a thing as an Allicroc?
-Excuse me?-
Can Alligators and Crocodiles mate?
-I don’t think – I’ll check on that.-

3. What is Rooibos, and how is it pronounced?
-(This must be derived from the same box of tea that prompted the Baobab question.) Okay, I’m writing this down.-

4. What is a miniature lop?
-A lop?-
You know, a bunny rabbit.
-(Sometimes I wish I could refuse to answer questions.) Anything else?-

5. What is the plural of mouse?
*Record skip. Crickets. Tumbleweed.*
I mean, the kind you use for a computer, not the rodent.
-I’ll get back to you.-

Five questions scrawled on a napkin. A quintet of Coworkers who probably don't much care whether I answer them or not.

I'll take up the gauntlet.

1. It is a tree found mainly in Africa and India, so wide around that the trunk diameter is surpassed only by the sequoia. Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.

2. No. Do I really have to explain? Okay. They are two different biological species, and with two different “reproductively isolated systems of breeding populations.” Dictionary of Genetics, Sixth Edition.

3. Rooibos (“Roi-bois”) literally means "Red Bush." An African word of Dutch extraction, it refers to an evergreen shrub used to make tea. Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition.

4. Lop’ - Short for lop-eared, wish she'd said so in the beginning. I think the pygmy rabbit qualifies, yes? Walker’s Mammals of the World, Sixth Edition.

5. Mice or mouses; either is acceptable. Wikipedia.

-Adequate-

2005-08-27T10:51:00.000-04:00

The second half was. Barely.

-Poignant-

2005-08-26T14:13:00.000-04:00

My God.. Jonathan Tropper's first book, (mentioned here) is so.. so..

And I've only read half.

-What rocks?-

2005-08-25T09:52:00.000-04:00

I just know this guy I've never met hasn't got stones.

But he does have the girl, even if the only rocks he has are the ones in his head.

Georgetown University's student paper is called the Hoya. The name is taken from the 'Hoya Saxa' cheer - a latin idiom - meaning, literally: "What rocks!"

How does it work out for those happy couples who find love even while their brains dwell on different floors?

Maybe all the smart ones love pet rocks.

-Reverse-chronological order-

2005-08-24T16:38:00.000-04:00

Today I acquired Jonathan Tropper's first book; I've already read the other two.

That happens often - I spot the author's latest on the new book shelves and find myself working my way back through his or her body of work. And I have to say, the author's third is usually my favorite. Case in point - Sabin Willett's 'Present Value.' His freshman and sophomore efforts read well, but simply didn't belong on the same shelf.

We could ponder why the third time is the charm, and bring to bear publishing statistics, writer psychology, market magic and chaos theory.

But why would we want to do that?

Curiosity?

-Checkpoint-

2005-08-19T14:09:00.000-04:00

DSC00481
Originally uploaded by nandish.

$35 to fill up was a personal best.

Never have I paid so much for roadwarrior juice. My tank was full, and my cheeks were flushed with anticipation. 'Cause if you get what you pay for, this rush hour journey would have to be one of the finest I'd taken.

The engine indicator light went off. This is good news, inspection is nigh. (No, the car isn't fixed, it just isn't as noticeably broken.
Don't try to upset my even keel with talk of the future.) I just crested that hill and didn't watch the pumps recede.

Country.

Until the mechanic's garage crops up. Followed by the body shop. And the detailer. That scenery fast became a strip mall for automobiles only.

Just before the drive-thru, every car stopped dead.

In place of a median, the closest drivers spot a pair of neon-vested middle-aged women too broad to squeeze between the lanes squeezing between the lanes, toting buckets of money. The drivers creep their eyes to the left to see preteen daughters sitting on the low wall with signs propped on their knees that read "support our cheerleading squad." These signs are supporting their preteen heads, and the cardboard prints deep into the flesh of their throats.

Say what you will about young people, but don't judge every child by the way they work a checkpoint. If these girls grew up in Liberia, they would never think of pressing their duties onto their elders. By now every last one would have learned how to haggle over bribes, to clean an automatic rifle, and to smoke just enough joints to keep the Commander's mandatory psychotic drugs at bay. (But not so many to forget the lines to his anthem - a torture-till-death offense.)

Glad you're here, yes?

-Invisible dog-

2005-08-15T09:12:00.000-04:00

When I returned to the house I’m sitting, I took in the large fenced-in back yard, the indeterminate number of worn tennis balls, and the metal baseball bat the color of redwoods.

These are the three ingredients for hours of dog entertainment.

Just one week ago on this very spot, a Labrador fetched fly balls until vermicelli strands of drool extended from her snout to her wattles. At the time, the exercise of cracking balls into the outfield for this animal’s pleasure seemed a chore. Today I pick up the bat and wonder if I should hit a few, even though I would have to do the shagging myself.

And even though this cat person can resist the urge to play with an invisible dog, canines would figure big in his future. On my way home, a golden retriever ran wide circles on a 45 mph stretch of highway. He – the dog was proudly, visibly male – lacked any semblance of car smarts.

Before man’s best friend could take second place to a bus, I and a few other nearby drivers engaged our emergency flashers, left our cars, and attempted to corral a dumb but fleet quadruped; proving, perhaps, that as foolish as our pets are, they usually get the last laugh.

Eventually, the dog stopped circling to gnaw on leftover chicken pieces slated for my cat. Unfair of me to reward bad behavior, but it kept the animal on the shoulder long enough for his owner to catch up.

This is the second time he did this, she tells us. “We just changed the batteries on his collar last week.” By now, we’d all noted the ineffective shock collar.
“Might be time for a real fence.” Said another driver, none too gently.

Angry and embarrassed retorts were sure to follow, so I proffered the remainder of chicken - here you go – which the owner took from my greasy, saliva coated fingers.

-Socially efficient-

2005-08-10T12:48:00.000-04:00

The next adventure hisses at me like teapot near boiling, and I’m just waiting to hear it scream. On Monday I took lunch with a coworker who is a ringer for an unrequited friend of mine from college; she’s kind like that one was, and giggles supportively even when I’m not trying to amuse.

Nice, but couldn't be any more annoying is she tried.

If history is any guide, she’ll makes passes for a while, then get angry and point out all the valid reasons why she should never have been interested in me from the beginning. After a year or so, she’ll marry a staid businessman, her experiments with neurotic men concluded, and my pink and black theory intact. I have resolved, however, not to let it reach that stage; I have all the data I need at present, thank you.

I’m getting socially efficient in my old age, aren’t I?

-Week begone-

2005-08-04T16:46:00.000-04:00

It's much harder to write about a vacation in this form than I thought it would be, provided one doesn't want the piece to sound like "How I spent my summer vacation", GED edition.

As of right now, I have seven days of posts saved, but not posted, because I'm not at all satisfied with the result. So I've decided to move on. I may canibalize the main ideas from the lost posts later, but only if it is relevant to do so.

-Lucky at cards..-

2005-07-24T23:01:00.000-04:00

Dinner was casual, they said, and your cousin's responsibility. Actually, my cousin was also responsible for introducing his girlfriend of a few months, so his plate was full.

In the meantime, my immediate family traveled to the one beach that permits dogs. This way, my brother's pet could run and swim until she puked. She did, thanks to a little girl who never got tired of seeing the animal chase a tennis ball over the waves and back. It was the first time I'd seen the dog actually give up on the game before the humans did.

After dinner, we sat down for cards. Too bad it wasn't real - I won the pot.
$10 from six relatives, minus my entry fee makes $50 that would become very important later.

Later the twenty-somethings would go out to bars and do what twenty-somethings do, I suppose. We would drink expensive shots and try to communicate in sign language and shouts to bartenders who refuse to sign or speak, since they communicate by three distinct facial tics (annoyance, disgust, and botulism).

I never used the fifty dollars. At least for tonight, I'm too cute to buy my own drinks.

On the way home, the same cousin who prepared the meal and introduced a girlfriend took a detour with said girlfriend. They jumped into a hotel pool with their clothes on. Newly single brother of mine - the same brother who had to have his cellular phone taken away at the bar, lest he call his ex-girlfriend - looked on with three facial tics I can only convey as (regret, loneliness, and constipation.) After he jumped in, all the facial tics were gone.

I wonder if someone should tell the hotel guests?

-Scenic route sans air conditioning. And toast.-

2005-07-23T23:00:00.000-04:00

My mistake.

I thought we might take the scenic route, but so did everyone else. Plus, the car’s air conditioner had broken.

Yikes.

Much later, about three hours after we’d reached our seaside destination, and twelve hours before I would blot out the specific memory of the automotive crawl, my siblings and I took our parents out for an anniversary dinner.

Much, much later, I would learn that my oenophile brother had ordered a ninety-dollar bottle of champagne for the toast.

Ah, the toast. We’d scrambled to coordinate our speeches before arriving at the restaurant, but our reservation time rushed our preparation. In haste, we settled on three variations to a theme: the effect they had on their parents, their children, and their friends and community. The order of speakers? Oldest to youngest. Which is good, because I needed a few extra moments to pull my phrases together. Our collective effort yielded happy tears.

Dinner was followed by cocktails and skee-ball.

-Extended Weekend-

2005-07-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

Coming soon: a longer break.

They have terminals where I'm going, but I can't make any promises. With any luck, however, I will soon regale you with stories of alpacas, cantinas, and the extraordinary voyage of Pytheas the Greek.

No more hints.

-The Instant Message Scuffle-

2005-07-13T22:12:00.000-04:00

washboard
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

Our virtual reference program goes live in less than two weeks. This morning I logged in and sent a salutary message to the reference desk at the main campus. Much later, the main campus reference desk deigned to respond.

I asked if the reference desk would like a trial question, and the response was "sure" followed by "!!!".

Stay tuned, I typed back, and logged into a second session as May_Tag_Man, an appliance repairman forced into early retirement. May_Tag_Man's dream was to start a small Laundromat. He had the skills to keep the machines running, but didn't have much of a head for business.

That was where we came in. He wanted to know if the library could point him toward some helpful "laundry management" resources - and did they have any trade magazines?

This is, I should mention, slow pitch softball,

And they blew it.

The main campus reference desk waited a long time between responses. Sometimes the program indicated that the other user was typing. Then it mentioned that the other user had added text. Then the other user typed again, and perhaps scratched his or her head while staring into space.

After I had made an up or down decision on two books and handled a minor reference question on my own, the main campus snapped to life. Another librarian may have taken control, I can't be sure. The desk jockey's input: a link to the government's census page, and then a cryptic response about "finding the correct NAICS number."

Now, I know, and you know how to work the census page. And if you haven't seen it, you could quickly figure out the system of industry classification numbers, which are linked to state and national statistics. But May_Tag_Man, who can take apart a Buick in an afternoon and drive it to his favorite watering hole the next day, could not. He is not web-saavy. He only made it this far because his eleven year-old grandson is guiding him from keystroke to mouse click. And grandson, who can illegally download music from bands that have been touring longer than he has been alive, has never earned a dime. He doesn't know anything about business or taxes, or NAICS, which is the North American Industry Classification System by the way - you didn't explain that either, did you, you incompetent sows?!

But I let that pass, because staying in character would have required May_Tag_Man to demand the librarian tell him his or her supervisor's Christian name. I asked a follow up question with the implicit "thank you for your time" on deck, prepared to end this charade and swallow my disappointment in my coworkers.

That's when the phone rang.

The librarian who always seems to be on the verge of a panic attack (I like to think that hers is a genuine concern that someone will figure out how useless her position really is) was on the line, with her oh-my-god inflections and hypervenilactation.
"Benedict! Are you May_Tag_Man?"
I exhale and remind myself that I am playing a role.
"Obviously."
"Oh! We didn't know! We thought you might be, but we thought it could be a real person."
My top and bottom teeth have found one another. "It is a real person. And it will be in less than two weeks." So you'd better be ready, I thought.
"Oh! Well, we're very busy down here, and we don't have time for these questions, if you want to talk using your profile that's okay, but we have to concentrate on the serious reference questions.
"You have to take all reference questions seriously." My voice was rising, and I just stopped myself from adding: and if you don't, you're in the wrong profession.

Self-righteous, I know. But true in spirit. And use my profile? What's the point of our trial if it isn't as true as possible, namely, that you'll know very little about the user beyond the clues they choose to give you?

I had to hang up the phone before I said something that would have our bosses filing extra paper, but not before the twit who'd botched the reference question, the experiment, and May_Tag_Man's performance, dared to condescend about how much work I was preventing her from doing.

When I did hang up, I closed my eyes and cursed aloud. Then I told myself that it was my imagination. Everyone I worked with is not incompetent. When I opened my eyes I decided that it was still true. Everyone I work with is not incompetent.

Even so, I'm mailing out cover letters tomorrow.

-They have pluck-

2005-07-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

Somewhere in a bar far from home, a pretty woman in a black-lit white dress approached me. She named my high school and my college, followed by a question mark.

Excuse me? I said.

Which do I know you from? She shouted over some 80s music.

Maybe both, I said. Puzzlement was giving way to recognition. We spoke for some time around the music. Her friend was somewhere else in the bar, but she was in no hurry to find her. After the obligatory SO WHAT DO YOU DOs and small talk, we made each other laugh.
Let’s go to the Boiler Room, she said, locals hang out there.
Good idea, I said.
A pair of twins with short blond hair took control of the dance floor. Mesmerizing.
Will you look at them? I said. They have spirit.
Well, enjoy the people watching, she said.
Smiled.
And plucked her friends arm.

Much later I reclined on a couch and reflected on the meeting, and tried to imagine how it might have gone differently. But as usual, I can’t bring myself to paint a bright mental picture.

Suppose she and her friend had come back home with me, and suppose her friend had consumed too many shots. Suppose we talked in hushed tones over her friend’s lolling head, and set the sloppy body in front of the television set, watching the movie of her choice while she, SHE, and I stand on the porch listening to the ocean. So far, so good.

But then my mind insists that the movie of her choice is Muriel’s Wedding. No substitutions, try as I might. And that means ABBA.

This is the worst ear poison I’ve encountered since the Olympic Air flight that only played bad Michelle Pfieffer movies.

-Live Eight at Quarter-of-six-

2005-07-03T11:29:00.000-04:00

The original plan called for a 10:00 departure the night before. The view from the garage changed my mind.

That same rain that nearly canceled the firework display brought its own light show. I suppose I could have driven through Philadelphia during an electrical storm, but why? Far easier to nap until it passed, and it passed through the region’s atmospheric kidney before 5 AM.

At fifteen minutes until six, young people with coolers and picnic blankets walked a crew race distance on the river, gathering in front of an art museum already swarming with activity. Even so, there is room enough to bypass the crowds and cops, and to slink onto the Vine expressway.

There is a momentary wrench when the road opens up and the event bringing so many people together passes farther and farther behind. But to stay even a little while is to make a full day of it.

At least the road is clear.

-Hope-

2005-07-01T13:07:00.000-04:00

“Elocution would be worth the trouble if it did nothing more than exterminate the rising inflection.. No sentence or sentiment is immune. Simple ones, like I was really pumped? Or She had a gun? And she blew his head off with it? More complex thoughts—My girlfriend thinks Russell Crowe’s a hunk? But I think he’s an asshole?—may be expressed as two queries in one…
Hopefully, a reflexive wave to personal humility and unknowable Fate, may have sprung from the same sources.”

Don Watson, Death Sentences p. 20-21.

Like Don Watson, I object to those who would begin a sentence with ‘hopefully’ to defer their opinions onto the listener. I also hate that I’m responsible for doing the same thing.

It slipped out earlier today.

“Hopefully, my boss will take the hint and write the recommendation now, since I’ve got less than a month left for consideration.”

If she doesn’t write it tomorrow, elocution is the least of my worries.

I mean, what do I say to her?

I’m really pumped about this job?
Or I’ve heard about this model employee who had a gun? And he blew off his manager’s head with it when she cost him a better job? More complex thoughts—My girlfriend thinks Russell Crowe’s a hunk? But I think he’s an asshole, so will you write the letter you promised?—may be expressed as two queries in one…

Hopefully, it won’t come to this, but I can’t make any promises. I’m almost out of inflections, so there nothing left to do but elocute* consequences.

*Verbed for your pleasure. If you don’t like it, you can Berryman off.

-Remainder-

2005-06-23T12:48:00.000-04:00

Eventually, every street, public school, post office and park will be renamed after Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan. When we run out of objects to rename, we will rename ourselves.

I don't know what will happen when we run out of people.

-Medusa-

2005-06-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

At my suggestion, we'd left the Unitarian Church basement after the first band said farewell, left behind over fifty sober and earnest young people wearing messenger bags and applachian-thrift store clothing. The plan - to find a bar and drink through most of the second band, and be back in time for the headline act.

We didn't have to go far. The Medusa Lounge was only two blocks away, and what a charming nook it was. Nine-thirty on a Wednesday, and no one in sight except a young couple and the substitute bartender, Pretty. Even so, the stool I tried to sit on was taken, they told me, and the only other stool on this side that was adjacent to my friend faced a pillar.

Just as I was suggesting a move to one of the many vacant tables, the stool occupier returned from the vomitorium. Brian was already deep into his cups, but not so deep to mistake my precarious seat as anything but a sign of weakness. Pretty gave me a look I interpreted as disgust, but I couldn't decide if it was for me or him.

We all exchanged obligatory SO WHAT DO YOU DOs. This is your first and best chance to fend off another suitor. I'd be telling my profession first, and I don't expect it to impress many people. I also refuse to exaggerate.

I'm a librarian, I said.
I think they paused half a beat before they moved on, but no longer.

A professional wolf would effortlessly switch his true profession (club promoter, aka gigolo) to something 'greater' than what I'd said, but would also exaggerate the importance and passion of what he does. Example: "I play bass for 'Vampire Syphilis.' VS is devoted to exploring cords A and B only, as all other cords are for wankers."

This said, he'll get her to talk about herself until he can twist her profession into the soulmate of his own. "Wow, you fire raku pottery, and every summer the other lifeguards and I build bonfires on the beach. We are both creatures of fire."

In this case, her field is dental hygiene.

Wow, said Pretty. Are you going to be a dentist? No? Still, very, very, important. Tell us about it?

Pretty, I thought, you're not helping.

Lucky for me, I suppose, Brian's efforts were clumsy. Trying to liken white teeth to the white belt of his gi isn't going to work on a smart girl. My stool stopped wobbling, and I relax a bit. No need to treat him like an enemy, now, and I can even applaud him silently for being honest about his rank.

He got sentimental in his defeat, and told us we make a great couple. Pretty and the other young couple agreed.

My friend smiled. Oh, she said, we're just friends.

Brian blinked one eye first, and then the other. Really? he said, you've never ever thought about it?

Just friends.

And you? he said to me.

Just friends.

My smile was intact, my face was cool. They were all fooled, except for Pretty, who watched me carefully. Bartenders, even substitutes, always know better.

-Which is the more prosaic explanation? If prosaic means dull, I want that one, cause I just know the other's gonna keep me awake-

2005-06-10T11:33:00.000-04:00

tombstones
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

Not just anyone would appreciate a walk-and-talk in a graveyard at sundown, but I knew Set (Formerly the Scientist) would, just I like I knew she wouldn’t think it very adolescent-goth of me to suggest it. Truly, it would be a public service, chasing away all of those adolescent Goths who might have gathered there. If our presence made the casual stoner uncomfortable, so be it.

As long as there is light enough to read the inscriptions, and stones sufficiently new bearing still readable raised type, we two could scamper between the markers and read quotes, ages and histories, row by row.

Infant graves demand a SIDS-level pause for reflection, but my prosaic inner-demons tell me the grave of a nine-year-old is worse. Set agrees.

All in good fun until we find the grave with a beachball-sized hole. It is one of a pair of gravestones with women’s first names, but no last name, and the same symbol, what appeared at first to be a dollar sign with a third vertical line between the other two.

On the right, we found two smaller stones without any names, last or first, but with the same symbol. These smaller markers were horizontal and half-buried in the grass.

This added enough to the mystery for our party to squint into the hole and try to see past clumps of sod and roots, peeking in vain for a glimpse of coffinwood or hungry undead anatomy.

No good. Too dark.

Later we would spy “IHS” on another stone, prompting Set to remark that our mystery symbol was those three letters occupying the same space. I could not disagree, but clung to my zombie theory a moment longer.

If I remember correctly, IHS means Christ, but that shouldn’t sink my imagination. The way I see it, this godfearing Christian woman with no last name clawed her way out of death and sauntered down the street to acquire more lime for herself, her sister, and the two unnamed dogs that once sprouted from their purses and now rest beside the women in matching subterranean carpetbags.

She’ll probably be back soon, so we’d best be on our way. If you see her, tell her it’s never ok to keep dogs in handbags, despite some evidence to the contrary. Replenishing the lime, on the other hand, is essential.

-The Natural Consequence of Looking Younger than You Are-

2005-06-03T12:03:00.000-04:00

You can infiltrate a gathering of young people until you out yourself with knowledge of the eighties.

Last night, it was early nineties knowledge that did it. Curmudgeons everywhere should worry more about short memories than short skirts. When an MC in the 25-35 age bracket addresses a crowd with "Does anyone remember 'The State'?" You would think several attendees, even those skewing toward a 18-25 bracket might remember something about the sketch comedy group.

The MC looked so alone up there.
"I remember!" I shout,
and he rejoins with
"Iwannadipmyballzinit!"

I've got to stop helping others.

-Rubber Match-

2005-05-27T07:44:00.000-04:00

We met at the local high school's tennis courts at midday, after church services had let out, but before the football game and the hometeam's inexorable loss. Defeat and mediocrity, not triumph and surprise victory had set the agenda.

The agenda had also been set by everyone but me; my father had proposed the match, my brother had suggested we finish before kick-off, and our high school classmate agreed to play only after he'd run around the high school track enough to get the windsprint monkey off his back.

I didn't want to play tennis that day, but didn't dare refuse. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy tennis, and I've got an odd combination of skills destined to keep an all-around athlete guessing for perhaps ten minutes before his or her natural abilities assert themselves and overcome my defenses. Actually, that's my modus operandi where most sports are concerned, and card games, too.

This may sound silly - but I didn't want to play tennis because I didn't want them to see the poor state of my shoes. The price of my financial independence includes my retention of footwear long after most people would throw them away, or in the very least, save them for gardening. Maybe they wouldn't see the rubber peeling off the bottom, maybe they would. I didn't want to take the chance, but also could not find any believable excuse.

While three of us waited for the runner to complete his regimen, we volleyed back and forth with three generations of tennis rackets. My father's was the newest, he had bought it in the past years. Graphite, high tension strings, the works. He refused to take the plastic off the grip, though, which gave us an advantage.

An advantage lost when you took account of the quirks of the other racquets. My brother used a metal-and-plastic racquet he'd received at the peak of his interest in tennis back in the early nineties. Mine was an oversized metal racquet from the late eighties that made a suspiciously low hum when struck. On the sideline, a pair of small, seventies (perhaps 60's?) era racquets covered the plastic tennis ball tube like an A-frame house to keep it from blowing away.

It didn't seem right to let the newcomer use the wooden racquets, so when he jogged in, I set down the metal racquet and was transported forty years into the past. All the while, I kept a suspicious eye on the widening gap between the rubber sole and the fabric, which used to meet at my toe.

The moment I took my eyes off my feet and scrambled for a wide shot in the alley (doubles meant the alleys were in play) I stumbled over what had to be the front half the sole yawning wide as an alligator. Did they notice? They didn't say anything, but I'd pushed things far enough. When I bent down to pick up the errant tennis ball, I tore the rubber appendage off and flicked it into the fence.

And came up smiling.

No extra passenger on my feet, a wooden racquet, and the ball was in my court. For the next ten minutes, my opponents wouldn't stand a chance.

-Bread Crumbs-

2005-05-25T12:56:00.000-04:00

I will feed the birds today.

-Small Quick Steps-

2005-05-23T15:01:00.000-04:00

Such a cad, lemme explain.

Got a call from the artist Sunday morning. She wanted to cancel our get-together on grounds of being sick. The nerve! Specifically, the one in her forehead tapping out messages of pain to the rest of her.

Not a problem, necessarily, if the scientist was nearby. I felt a bit cheeky doing so, but I invited her to the same event to which I'd intended to take the other woman. And at first, things were great. We talked, listened to live music, examined fine art, and stretched out on the riverbank like twenty-something crocodiles.

A few times, my companion darted away with little warning, to return a few minutes later after the passing clown or mime had moved away. Fear of clowns is fairly common, actually.

The last time it happened, the mime was nearly on top of us when the scientist bolted. I greeted the character, who looked questioningly after my friend, and then at me.

"I think you scared her away." I stated the obvious. "She's afraid of clowns." The mime mock-pouted and left to play with a group of mountain children as loud as she was not.

The scientist was back at my elbow in a flash. "What did you say?"

And then, "You told her that!?" She was so angry she put her headphones on and spoke seldom, but loud, until the fairgrounds closed a few minutes later. I could barely keep up with her on the way home. When we came to the point of separation, I watched her small, quick steps hammer out a longer-than-usual route home, so chosen because it served to separate her from me even faster.

Perhaps that was the time for me to shout back.

"It's not as if she's going to tell anyone!
She's a mime."

-You wanted inspiration so bad, here now, take it-

2005-05-19T02:45:00.000-04:00

I was struggling to find something to write about tonight. Just before I called it quits for the day, I jotted down a few notes about a forthcoming Volleyball game at work, with the intent of expanding the piece by as much as I would be able to expand the team tomorrow.

As I shifted on a cheap mattress and tried to get more comfortable, I lamented the lackluster idea, stuck in limbo with the stories about the peeling tennis shoes and the new employee from Florida. But all contain some promise, so it should be said that I drifted off feeling more or less satisfied with the day’s events.

Too bad my dreaming brain was ready to lay a real bitch of a story on me.

This is the [Present Tense] My ex-girlfriend (the one I loved) is welcoming me back after four years of silence, (and, I confess, two years or more after I stopped thinking about here regularly.) She’s beckoning me through the entryway of a dim house, and her face is more joyful than ever in life. The detritus of a party covers the floor, but all the guests are leaving. Last to go is a forgettable, nameless guy wearing a baseball cap backwards; he is sharing a toast of champagne with us, and trundles off into the den to sleep on the couch. She is leading me into the bedroom, and setting me down on the mattress.
Now it’s [Past Tense] She gets up and goes into the bathroom, the anticipation was lovely. She emerged wearing a simple dressing gown, and joined me on the bed, but not under the covers. Our eyes adjusted to each other’s love.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said.
“I know,” she replied. “So, will you be alright here for tonight?”
“Sorry?”
And now for [Present Tense] She’s getting out of bed, She’s telling me she’s got to go to the den tonight, I take her arms.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, not for him or me.” I am referring to her history of abuse. She’s smiling sweetly as she touches my cheek, and my hands fall to my sides like dumb mallets.
“I have to,” she says, “He expects it.” She closes the door, leaving a blaze of light at the bottom of the jamb.
“Why am I here?” I squeak, getting out of the bed to pitch a condom into the trash. A high-pitched whine and rhythmic thumping begins. The blaze of light dims, and I see a tape transcriber on the bureau. The ribbons are a terrible mess, and the mechanism incorrectly set. I put my hand on it, and the source of the sound and the sound itself stops.

Now I’m awake at 2:45 AM, ready to go back to sleep, having discharged all of this in the past half hour. Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

For an encore, why don’t you cobble together a “falling while immolated” dream, you evil, wretched psyche.

-Monolith-

2005-05-16T19:18:00.000-04:00

Rigid doesn't begin to describe my coworker. Twice divorced, no kids, caretaker of four cats and living in her brother's house, she carries two part-time jobs, and advocates for feminism and islam at the same time.

In my darker fantasies, we debate the role of women in the Quran, and all her nuclei divide and grapple with each other in the form of zillions of angry microscopic soap bubbles.

Actually, debates of any kind are taboo. Last week she held forth for ten uninteruppted minutes on humankind's (no, she used the gender-specific "men's") tendency to destroy, as extrapolated from the body's "battle" at the cellular levels to fight off viruses and hostile bacteria. It made me think of Dr. Yamaguchi in Tom Robbins' 'Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas':

What you mean, 'conquer'?
What you mean, 'destroy'?
Western Medicine all a time think in terms of destruction.
In west, person get virus, he wish kill it. Get tumor, fire magic bullet at it. Not a healing, but a gunfight. O.K. Corral, ne?..
My method not warfare. My method pacify. Make friend with tumor. Friendship with cancer. Change friend's diet, teach friend good manners.

That's what I was thinking until the room became silent. Aloud, I said:
"I'm afraid I can't quite agree with your example, because-"
"Forget it." she hissed, suddenly on the edge of tears.
"Oh, I'm sorry." I said. "I thought you were finished. Please, continue."
"Just forget it." She stalked out of the room.
"No, really," interjected my boss. "You can go on."

No good. Lillith-Fatimah was already gone.

-Into the Twixter-

2005-05-13T00:30:00.000-04:00

My weekly service gig at the food bank has another element, now. Ever since the volunteer coordinator talked about introducing me to his daughter, all of my duties there are less volunteer, and more obligatory. To think that a service project lasting less than two hours per week could have someone imagining how weird it would be if this guy should become your future father-in-law. And mind you, this is before I met the daughter.

Now that I have, these thoughts haven’t quieted down. And the only reason why they haven’t gotten louder is working across the hall, working her last day, in fact.

Some part of me wanted the getting-to-know-you lunch with the Artist on Tuesday to fail miserably, making the choice that much easier. Likewise, it would have simplified matters if the Scientist had turned down my offer of last-day-on-the-job drinks tonight.

Neither did, and both gave me a turn today when they nearly collided. I am not, strictly speaking, dating either one of them yet. But if they did run into each other, I can easily see how things would appear. They might strictly-speak my ass right out of the building.

The Artist

It started with an email from the artist’s father that I believed had settled the matter once and for all. He told me there must have been a miscommunication, because she had to work all afternoon and couldn’t meet me then, as I thought we had arranged. His comment at the food bank on Wednesday had seemed odd then – now it came flying back:
“Even if you two don’t hit it off, she can probably introduce you to some other people in town!”

Guess she wasn’t really interested, I thought, and felt the tiny but familiar wrench of rejection coupled with a sigh of relief that part of the equation had fallen into place. Both feelings jumped out of my chest at 11 AM when the Artist intercepted me in the library. We perused the stacks for a while, and exchanged phone numbers. I am currently lying to myself, pretending that everyone else: coworkers, students, tutors, etc. all believed she was a patron, but it must have been sadly obvious that she was not. Still, my luck held – the scientist did not round the corner as she wrote down her number.

I’m conditioned to believe that sort of thing usually happens, and when it does not, I exult like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court who just learned his execution date coincides with a solar eclipse.

The Scientist

Hours later the Scientist came into the library. She told me it was her last day; I surprised myself by asking her out on the spot. She accepted, and we chatted as much as one can on their last day of work, when there are so many other people to say goodbye to.

At some point my community service came up; she was intensely interested in the food bank. Interested, she repeated, in volunteering there.

In the Norse version, this is the part where the heroes realize that the jaws of the great wolf Fenrir scrape heaven and earth. No one escapes their Ragnarok or mine intact.

-Arts and Sciences-

2005-05-11T01:07:00.000-04:00

Just won't be happy until I'm a cad, will you?

In addition to the Playdate whom I did not repulse, the Student-worker is flirting hard to get my attention. And before I go any further, I see that some better names are in order. "Playdate" should never have been used as a noun here, only as an event. Our next outing will not include papa or her cousin, and she hardly qualifies for such a snotty moniker. As for 'Student-worker,' no one outside communist party leadership sounds right tossing that around.

How to name them? And yes, I am fully aware that my experiments in nomenclature may have played a role in the deterioration of past relationships.

The two women in question have names that begin with "A" and "S." This makes me think of "Arts and Sciences," (often abbreviated as "A & S") which is convenient - "A" is an art student, and "S" is going into the dental profession; she can stand in for science even if dentistry is not the "Science" in the academic sense implied by "Arts and Sciences."

Choosing between an Artist and a Scientist would not have required any deep thought on my part a few years ago. But age has shaken my certainty; much to my chagrin, I have no favorites at present.

And, lest you become revolted at what appears to be verbal egotism, a written kiss-and-tell, bear in mind that having two simultaneous romantic choices surprised me as much as anyone. I average one relationship per year, which is usually nasty, brutish, and short.

-Play Date-

2005-05-08T01:45:00.000-04:00

The date is set.

On Tuesday, the four of us will meet at an Italian restaurant a few blocks away from where I work. The volunteer at the food bank and instigator of this get together, his niece, (whom he claims has met me) the daughter, supposed object of my future affection, and me.

I've got grave misgivings, and for many reasons.

1. The man has described his daughter as an artistic girl, which I like. But the laws of pink-and-black-apparel are very clear on this point; the black-clad woman who meets me also meets my whiffenpoof hair, antiquated expressions, and near-ignorance of alternative music. Conversely, the pink-clad princess attracted to me because of the above isn't someone in which I'm usually interested.

2. I'm still not entirely sure of the volunteer's motives. Perhaps I'm doing him an injustice, but anyone so unnecessarily complimentary to someone they've just met should be viewed with suspicion.

3. He tells me the niece met me while I was working at the college. That I was very helpful, even though she knew almost nothing about navigating a library. She even (he says) wondered where the card catalogs could be found. I can't picture her, but I think only three people have asked me where the card catalog was, and two of them were younger than I am - meaning that the card catalog had been replaced with the online public access catalog about a decade before they were born.

4. And most important, the events of Friday. Months of fleeting glimpses and chaste technical assistance with a student-worker (she's graduating in days, so it won't be unethical!) came to a climax that day under the noses of my boss and coworkers. The back and forth was fun, made even more so by my need to keep the appearance of respectability while surrounded by so many eavesdroppers. We still don't know much about each other, but made tentative plans to get together.

When it rains, it pours.

The student-worker wore red.

Oh, and papa's buying lunch.

-Writing to say she saw him-

2005-05-07T18:38:00.000-04:00

WHOLE FOODS-
Me: Shy little red head in green
pants. You: Tall Man with cute
smile. Sorry I ran from your smile.
Give me another chance?

-From "i love you, i hate you" in the Philadelphia Weekly

-Just Friends-

2005-05-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

In a wedding where the guests are restricted to spouses or soon-to-be’s, the bride’s brother brought a friend. Not a girlfriend, as both hastily correct parents and grandparents. Just friends, longtime friends who met in their first year of college, a young man and woman familiar but never intimate. Since the bride’s brother and friend are designated as overflow, same as me, the three of us roomed together and formed a temporary cliché, and I was surprised to find that our threesome easily exceeded the wedding in chatty fun.

Physically, he’s become much more imposing than I remember. But he still carries a smile and a sincere laugh, so it’s surprising when he lifts his sleeve to display bruises he picked up in a bar fight. It was very one-sided, he explains, just like this one - here he gestures at a scab along his hairline.

They correct another guest in unison. “Just friends.”

“Do you ever claim to be more than friends to get rid of a guy you’re not interested in? I ask her.
“All the time. He doesn’t mind.”
“And vice versa?”
Not an issue, she says, he is never interested in girls like her.
I’m watching very carefully to see if she twitches over this, but it’s inconclusive until she regards her closest male companion, stuck in space and peering into the screen of his camera.

“He likes girls with thin waists.” She tells me, and puts her thumb and forefinger together with a silver-dollar sized circle of air in between.

-Merit-

2005-04-30T09:58:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-27T23:34:00.000-04:00

"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-

2005-04-25T09:28:00.000-04:00

(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-

2005-04-19T18:34:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-18T22:45:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-15T11:33:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-11T16:46:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-06T17:34:00.000-04:00

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?-

2005-04-04T17:23:00.000-04:00

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-

2005-04-01T16:56:00.000-05:00

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.

-Midnight Jolt: Social Disease-

2005-03-31T00:26:00.000-05:00

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

MidnightJolt
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

[Don’t worry. It’s probably fiction.]

-Wow!

After all these years of failed relationships with different women met through work or school, I’ve found a much simpler way of getting along socially.

The old way had its convenience, I suppose. Carpools, only one conversation about classmates and coworkers in the evenings instead of two. But when the relationship goes toxic after one or both of us got to third base with a department head, I’d have to quit or transfer. And I hate to update my CV or find another place to do laundry, and (this is the killer) declare another 20 or so good songs lost forever because hearing them post breakup is the catalyst for a night of crying and drinking.

No longer! It’s just so much easier, I have learned, to ask the stranger who’s been circling the block all afternoon, every afternoon for as long as I’ve lived here. She’s so fit from all that walking, and all I did was ask. True, her habit of assigning ‘prices’ to individual sex acts seemed a bit anti-romantic, but everybody has their kinks, I suppose. Maybe she’s a business major or something. I’ll have to ask her when she and her brother (what a grip that guy has!) get back with the $200 I lent them for groceries.

-The Partner who didn't get it-

2005-03-25T20:16:00.000-05:00

It must have been 2002. A cast party in Minneapolis. And the partner who didn't get it.

Allen Gurganus once wrote that among every pairing of artists, there was always the talented one, and the one whose parents were paying for the studio. Both partners in my example had day jobs, but we couldn't help but make that association.

You know, another actor said, We've all been rockin' out backstage to the musical interludes. The guitarists laugh, and the singers titter.

It took several shows before the meaning of the lyrics dawned on us, he continued. I mean, those are really dirty. Murmurs of assent all around, with the exception of the partner who didn't get it.

No-they-weren't, she scolds. It's healthy. It's human nature.

Her partner (who got it) took a long stage-length swig of the Shiraz, and all was quiet except for the recording of Louie Armstrong.

The actor tried again. I guess, he said, that it was the line where the girl "was in pigtails when the boys learned she'd go down" that made me think it-

'That's human nature, too.'

She doesn't get it, but she gets that she's alone because she's looking around with wild eyes for support, ultimately seeking her partner's over the rim of his glass. I suppose any one of us could have helped her over the final stumbling block and identified the clue of age-inappropriate behavior, but by now she was so convinced she was trapped in a den with puritans that she might not recognize one of the last and greatest taboos.

For whatever reason, our group let it drop there, and our hosts - the partners who did and didn't get it - began to clean up, and we gave them what assistance we could before they drove all guests out of the kitchen and out the door.

On the way back home I thought about the uncomfortable moment earlier, and marveled at the difference the uncomprehending partner could have made if she had delivered 'that's human nature, too' in a resigned voice. I think we all would have assumed that she did know what we were talking about, and had rather cunningly advanced the discussion. I never saw her again, and I have no idea how they turned out. I could imagine some Fitzgerald-like scene in the kitchen after everyone left, but that would all be conjecture.

And through the years, this mystery has stuck with me. Maybe that's why I didn't remember until now that they still possess the decorative plate I brought to transport and present the peanut butter brownies.

That's one mystery solved.

Damn. I liked that dish.