September 2008 Archives
Words. I like words. Not only in sequences, but individually. I read incessantly as a child, and of course I'd encounter new words all the time, and some of them made me stop to consider them, turn them over in my hands, enjoy them for their novelty and outlandish fascination.
One of those words was gutta-percha. I have no idea what I might have been reading where I'd have seen that, maybe some Sherlock Holmes or something where they'd be creeping after some Victorian malefactor and they'd have outfitted themselves with shoes soled with gutta-percha. I understood that it was a rubbery substance, but the word itself was so strange, so unlike most words, that I would just repeat it to myself several times, like a talisman filled with a supernatural force. I understand now that it's a Malay word for a type of rubbery sap, of course, and I have a sense of language families, so that an unknown word based in a Romance language seems nevertheless familiar in a way that a word in, say, Basque does not. Gutta-percha! What an odd little kid I was. Well, at any rate, the dentist was finishing up my firstest ever root canal yesterday, and he filled the root canals with what he told me was gutta-percha, and I had this strange sense of a circle closing. It's as if I extended my hand in delighted recognition: Well, I declare! Gutta-percha! We finally meet, after all these years!
That was one of the day's high points, to be honest. The world of politics is unedifying. Law and sausages, man.
Far more pleasant to contemplate celestial things. There's a new round of sunspots happening, and we may hope that it'll be like in 2003, when we saw the aurora borealis here in the Mid-Atlantic. It was late fall, and I saw a ruby glow, like spilled port, spreading across the night sky. I'd never seen it before, and it was utterly fascinating. That was on my way home from some errands. At home, I sat at a window facing north, and watched as bars of light moved with stately grace across the sky, pale white on one side, green on the other. I sat in the dark, and the cat came and sat beside me, and we watched the sky. The Northern Lights, making a rare appearance further south. Unforgettable.
The Hubble Space Telescope is suddenly on the fritz, it seems. They were going to send the shuttle to fix one problem, and then the thing stopped sending data entirely, so they've canceled the mission until they can figure out the second problem and be able to address it. 
That's OK. If you get depressed about people in general and American people in particular, remember the Hubble. I didn't really contribute much to its actual design or construction or placement in orbit, or anything—I'm pretty terrible at math, actually—but I helped pay for it and I really, really appreciate it, and I guess that counts for something.
Now, of course I see a whole lot of arms flung up and hands waving all over the classroom, and I know what you want to say. I really would like to get in touch with Winthrop University, where Mr. Funderburk got his BA in Communications, and ask if there's a history requirement there. The Book of Revelation predates Islam by a number of centuries, and if it was at all explicit about Islam, that would be pretty remarkable. Revelation is a lot of fun, certainly, but over the years a number of people have wondered just how seriously we should take it. (One of those people was Martin Luther. He said he could "in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it," and frankly, neither can I.)
Anyway, it's amazing what you learn when you follow politics these days, that's all I can say. I do find Mr. Funderburk and the sudden publicity of his predicament rather endearing. And I hope, sir, that you don't mind if I call you "Danny." He told the Charlotte Observer that he sent the e-mails wondering if there was Scripture that would settle the question because he was "just curious." If you're that curious, Danny, check this out.
Me, I'm perfectly willing to take Danny Funderburk at his word, and quash any thought people might have that the most logical explanation for his floating the supposition that a black man with a foreign-sounding name who's running for president might be the AntiChrist is because Danny's a little—well, you know—racist, maybe. Personally I think it might be funny-name self-hatred. It can't be easy, going through life being named Danny Funderburk and trying to get people to take you seriously. I mean, on the schoolyard? When you're seven? It leaves a scar, and I think that if Danny Funderburk is a little suspicious of other people with funny names, we should try as hard as we can to understand and accept him and, frankly, love him. Here's where you can learn more about Danny Funderburk, a proactive (he says that a lot) leader who's really putting Fort Mill, South Carolina on the map. And that's all I have to say about politics today.
People with better sense than me avoid politics in their blogs, so I will too. Which is why I'm putting this up as a mental health break. Don't think metaphor, whatever you do. That would be a big mistake. : )
And the new subject is firethorn, or pyracantha if you want to get all Latiney on people. The arriving autumn brings a variety of pleasures, and one of them is the way formerly nondescript bushes and hedges that sat mutely on the sidelines now blaze with clutches of orangeish-red fruit called, I discover, "pomes." Much is made of the flowers of spring and the leaves of fall, but I'd like to chime in with this appreciation of the firethorn. My name is Matt, and I approved this message.OK, just looked, it was created by three bisexual activists. About what I figured. Wikipedia used the word "brainchild" to describe the idea. Which makes me wonder why some ideas are just ideas and others are brainchildren. What makes the difference? No idea. Anyway, I don't think bisexuals should be marginalized and I hope you all have a great day. Personally the holiday I keep wishing to celebrate and keep missing is Shakespeare's birthday. It was a month ago, and it sailed right by without my giving it a thought. It's been a busy summer.
But anyway, yesterday, in the midst of doing two other things (one of them taking a walk), I noticed a shoe on a path. I'm always noticing shoes on roadways and such. And I always wonder how in the hell people can lose so many shoes and not notice. I can't imagine a scenario in which you could lose a shoe and not feel a new sensation on the bottom of the shoeless foot and look down to investigate. But it clearly happens all the time. People are strange, that's all I can say.
If I regularly (or frequently) frequented opium dens and smoked a bowl or two until I was lost in a dreamy haze, I could not thereby obtain more bliss than I did in the dentist's chair Wednesday as the syringe passed the anesthetic into my jaw and the numbness spread through it. I woke up that morning feeling like the tooth was being drilled continuously. It was a long day of demoralizing, will-sapping pain, and I only managed to scratch out about three e-mails to friends. A cancellation at the dentist's allowed me to come in that afternoon, and I leapt into the chair the way a happy dog jumps into the car. "Let's get you out of pain," the good doctor said, and then he did.
I couldn't smile, because I was holding my mouth open, of course. But I was smiling on the inside. And my mental faculties returned, such as they are, and I was able to be curious about things again. How is it that shooting the anesthetic (procaine? lidocaine?) into one spot creates numbness on a whole side of your head? Does it spread physically, or does something happen to the nerves, or what? And as the dentist plumbed out the dead nerve, I wondered: What good does the live nerve do? Is it like the Vice President, just hanging out, not doing much, until a serious problem arises? No idea. And no way to ask, with my mouth all full of tubes and drills and fingers. The dentist told the assistant he wanted to irrigate the tooth, and I wondered what the etymology of the word was. And was it related to "rigatoni"? I'd only eaten a slice of bread the whole day. But then it was all done, and I went home and had dinner. When the numbness wore off, the area was fairly sore, but that was all. I was no longer the pitiable sufferer I had been—I was pitiable still, perhaps, but not because my tooth hurt, at least.
So that's why I haven't done much blogging—if you can blog while a tooth is mulling over whether to abcess or not, the stuff you're made of is sterner than mine. And I've been trying to get caught up—I didn't blog in the middle of the week and I didn't get much work done either, to be honest. So now it's Saturday and I'm being constructive. If you've got time on your hands yourself, check out some Fats Waller:
Which I do. At this moment—1:12 a.m.—I sort of wish there were all-night root canal parlors operating in Atlantic City or some other accessible casino town. That's because frankly, the tooth hurts like hell. I just took three aspirin, being fresh out of Demerol and morphine. I hope, but doubt, that the aspirin will do any good. I don't have many viable options at the moment. I could go to an emergency room and throw myself on the mercy of the court, but if they gave morphine or Demerol to every chump who came in holding his hand to his jaw and looking pitiable, they'd never keep any in stock. I think my only other option, if the pain continues or, God forbid, gets worse, is to rustle around in the basement until I find my rubber mallet and hit myself over the head with it. If you read this before the morning and have a better idea, send one in—I'm pretty sure I'm going to be awake.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. ... Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get.Personally I want the smartest president we can find. That skinny black guy seems pretty sharp, I must say, and so does his VP pick, although he does go on a bit. Do I want someone just like me to run the country? I should say not. I'm reasonably alert myself, to be honest, and it's still all I can do to run my own life, much less everyone else's. I want people with fancy degrees and policy expertise. We've tried an average guy and honestly, it hasn't worked out.
So they have this festival, and town gets all crowded to where you can barely walk. It's basically a street festival with a parade and music and a whole lot of booths selling a bunch of gewgaws. There's a tent about mushrooms, but mostly it's just stuff. This year they're charging admission, but if you lived in town you could get two free wristbands. So yesterday I went over to the town hall. No, they said, you have to go to the fire hall. OK, over I go. Three fire people are leaning against various objects by a door, smoking cigarettes, and since nobody says hello I address this woman. A stocky woman, as I recall, with an unfashionable hair style. I say this not to be catty—heaven forfend—but only because all the articles in the writing magazines urge you to use vivid details to make your writing come alive. Stocky gal, as I say.
I told her I was there to get a wristband. "We stopped giving them out yesterday," she said, in a smoke-rasped voice. "That was the cutoff date."
She took another drag on her cigarette. Nobody else moved or looked at me or acknowledged my presence except by making it clear, with their body English, that my presence should now be removed. The woman was clearly enjoying, with regal serenity, her power not to give out any more wristbands since the cutoff date was yesterday. But I thought I'd keep trying. You have to be persistent in this world.
"So there aren't any more?" I asked.
"Well, there are, but Thursday was the cutoff date. That's what it said in the postcard," she said. And took another drag.
My friends, I am a patient and tolerant man, and usually as gentle as a parson, but I confess that I walked away seething. And of course the perfect comeback came to me too late—the British call it "stair wit"—but I realized I should have asked whether she, herself, read the fine print in every piece of junk mail she got. But I will have my revenge, oh yes I will! Hear me now, Officious Cow! Hear me, Indolent Leaning Bystanders! Hear me, Babbits of Officialdom! I call down a curse upon your festival! May it be lashed by rain! May it be buffeted by wind! May the gewgaws go unsold! May the municipal overtime and insurance riders go for naught! Hear me, and lament, for I will be avenged, you miserable worms!
I had dinner with my folks, and stopped to get some cereal on the way home. Walking across the parking lot in the twilight, I saw some sort of flying critter approaching, jinking around, obviously chasing an insect, and started studying it. OK, not a bat, it had slender, crooked wings, a normal tail, not the slender falcon one, and two distinct white spots on the undersides of its wings. This made it easy to identify, once I got home: a common nighthawk. They're from a family commonly known as goatsuckers or nightjars, and they include the whip-poor-will, which Roger Tory Peterson charmingly describes as "a voice in the night woods." The common nighthawk is also known as a "bullbat," and I don't know how many times I've read that in books without any information about what sort of creature was being talked about. Now I'll know, the next time I read it.
Frankly, the whole thing is kind of depressing. The sneering and mockery and outrageous lying and general unseriousness of it all. A passage from Michael Herr's Dispatches comes to mind: Some Marines in Vietnam are joking around, and one says, "What's the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts?" And the punch line: "The Boy Scouts have adult leadership." I won't be labeled one way or another and I'm not going to tell anyone how to vote, but lately it seems to me that the Democratic candidates strike me as more interested in governing, in confronting the nation's problems in a serious. adult way. And not pandering to their own wingnuts. But like I said, the whole thing is depressing. Phooey!
And yes, times do change. I can think of a few people—Ilona Staller comes to mind—for whom nakedness was a career driver. I don't know what Mark Twain would say about the world today but I'll bet he'd think of something.
