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Real-Life Dialogue

March 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[The scene: a small quasi-hallway between garage and kitchen in a suburban house somewhere in North Florida.]

She: [pointing to weird, waist-high structure made of woven twigs and/or sticks, with four legs, a torso, and a head from which antlers sprout] Why is that still here?

He: [studiously ignoring the obvious] Why is what still here?

She: That. The reindeer.

He: Well, it’s a Christmas orn–

She: But Christmas was three months ago. Why is that reindeer still here?

He: Maybe it would help if you don’t think of it as a reindeer. Think of it as a stag.

She: It’s not a stag! Put it with the other Christmas stuff!

Everyday Heroes (Update #2)

March 21, 2009 by John 2 Comments

Things continue to pop on the real-life superhero front.

A few days ago, I posted an update to an earlier post about real-life people who don costumes, fight crime, have secret identities and sometimes superpowers, and so on. In that first post, from January, I featured (among other crusaders) one Entomo, a “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

So anyhow, earlier this week I got a comment to that January post, beginning, “This is Entomo. Please do not make fun of me.” Its author asserted that he takes very seriously the business of patrolling the streets, etc., is very sexy, and appeals to “the ladies… despite my bug size man proportions.” The comment ended with Entomo’s signature phrase: I inject justice.

Well, who was I to doubt? Accordingly, that comment was the focus of the news-update post from earlier this week. (You’re keeping the chain of events straight, right?)

Now I am in receipt of yet another comment… to the update! This one says:

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Dogs, Lions, and Fish (Oh My!)

March 20, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.

(Milarepa)

Not from whiskey river:

The End Of March
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source (pages 15-16)])

…and:

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WIP Serendipity

March 19, 2009 by John 8 Comments

In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about it except (and this is all merely alleged at this point):

The scene is in the Vale of Glamorgan, in Wales.
These are “restaurated” monuments.
They are about two meters — roughly six feet — in length.
The person who’d created the wallpaper could remember only that she’d come across the image on a page linked to from somewhere on Wikipedia.

I myself had been able to learn nothing further about the image or about what seem to be these three six-foot swords buried, tip-down, in the earth. Froog, likewise, came up empty-handed, despite a no doubt valiant effort.

(He did make an interesting suggestion, though: check Google Earth. Great idea; anyone who thinks that Google Earth is just for geology or geography nerds clearly has not laid eyes on the product recently. It’s already led me to Cadw, an organization responsible for managing historic monuments and sites — what they call the “historic environment” — in Wales.)

But he also said, almost by the way, that he’d grown up in a town close to the Vale of Glamorgan, a town named Monmouth.

At which point I started to whimper for The Missus to come pick me up off the floor. (Well, not really.) As I said to him in my reply, “I don’t want or need to know anything about your real name; just reassure me that you’re not a seven- to eight-hundred-year-old man named Geoffrey.”

Cryptic, eh?

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Everyday Heroes (UPDATE)

March 17, 2009 by John 9 Comments

You may remember my post from a couple months ago, about the real-life superheroes who have identified themselves via a site called the World Superhero Registry. I’ve recently heard from one of the superheroes featured in that post (or at least, from someone claiming to be that superhero): Entomo, the “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

(That’s Entomo’s logo over there at the right. According to a page at the Entomo Resource Center, this is “‘Broken Time’,” that is, “A stylized capital sigma resembling an hourglass.” Earlier, we knew only that he had chosen the sigma because (a) “I sum up all the powerful, silent and venomous small creatures inhabiting this world,” and (b) “I’m a synthesis, the human-like swansong of millions of races.”)

I knew something was up when my blog stats started to zoom over the last couple days — only on the “Everyday Heroes” page, and nearly all of them Google Image searches for entomo… and from various places around Europe, but nowhere else.

Still, I was surprised to hear from the man himself. Here’s what he said (which appears as a comment on that earlier post):

This is Entomo-
Please do not make fun of me. I am a Superhero. I have no time for child games. I patrol the dark streets of Naples, even though all my pictures are of me in my living room. I also have a partner. Pay no attention to the fact there is not a picture of the both of us together. So… do not make any comments. I am a very sexy Superhero and the ladies love me, despite my bug size man proportions.
I inject Justice

Update (2009-03-21): Curioser and curioser… For more about the above passage, see this comment, below, and my post of today.

I want to reassure Entomo and any other superheroes — as well as their everyday alter egos — that I was not “making fun.” (Regular readers here know that I rarely make fun of anyone, really, but myself.) As Entomo himself says in his writeup about the reasons why people adopt a superhero persona:

…you’re providing people with a real symbol, and yourself with somewhat of a “self-avatar”, one million of times stronger than your former “civilian-self”.

Inspiration plays a major role in this, of course. You can inspire people to believe in a symbol. You can inspire people to believe they can create themselves a symbol and embody it… and it’s not a lie. It’s all true. It’s the projection of an internal truth.

Everyone can lead his/her own destiny. We’re pawns of ourselves on the great, universal chessboard. It’s up to us to establish if the great game of reality must end in good or evil.

So no, I was not amused. On the other hand, I was (both originally, and now) what you might call bemused. Which is to say: confused; bewildered; perplexed.

In short, remember yesterday’s post, which concluded with the head-tilting dog? I think I just feel like that dog.

The Dog Owner Pinpoints the Onset of Dementia

March 16, 2009 by John 8 Comments

Out for morning walkies, the dog owner says, aloud:

No.

(Very good. The dog needs to understand No, and has even at times hinted that she does so.)

And then comes:

Uh-uh. No way.

(Hmm. Well, all right: it’s said in the same tone as No, and immediately follows it. So yes, within the limits of plausibility, the dog may read into one’s tone the continued sense of disapproval, the establishment of and the insistence upon boundaries.)

But then things deteriorate, and the dog owner finds himself having said, a split-second too late:

Sophie, stop. There is not a single circumstance under which you may go down this neighbor’s driveway. You know better than that. Have I ever let you go down this driveway?

The dog stops pulling at the leash. The dog turns, looks back at the man at the other end of the leash. The dog tilts her head, quizzically.

“Nerd Humor”

March 13, 2009 by John 4 Comments

That, according to Wikipedia, is how comedian Demetri Martin’s humor is “often referred to.” Hmph. That’s as may be.

Whatever you call the genre, I’m hugely enjoying his new show, Important Things, in which he takes a single topic and just riffs on it for a half-hour. His “important thing” this week was safety. In the excerpt below, appearing as a commercial pitchman for a nursing home, he assures us there will be no more lying about Tony Bennett (among other things). As soon as ~~possible~~ convenient.

Being Here (Today)

March 13, 2009 by John 16 Comments

From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):

from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])

…and:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])

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A Hrooom of One’s Own

March 10, 2009 by John 15 Comments

I know a fellow I’ll call Guy, although that’s not his real name. (He’s no longer a Boy, but not yet — not consistently– a Man, either, except in the most literal and least important sense.)

Guy recently took a weekend trip with his wife. It was a long six-hour drive in a rented car, of a US make and model which Guy knew of but had never even ridden in, let alone driven. They finally arrived, with relief, at the hotel — a chain which he had never before patronized — and unpacked their stuff in the fourth-floor room before heading out for a bite to eat.

The restaurant to which they’d been directed was farther from the hotel than they’d been led to believe, and the traffic heavier, so he was behind the wheel another half-hour before he and his wife could sit at a table, have a couple of drinks, and relax over dinner with the fellow they were meeting.

Then it was back to the rental car, back to the hotel, back to their room, and time indeed to get ready for bed. Guy’s wife wasn’t tired, and she’d be involved in a conference over the next 24 hours so wanted to prepare some materials and wind down before going to bed. But Guy himself looked forward to it after all the driving. He thought he might read for no more than a half-hour before drifting off.

He was standing in the living area in the room as his wife flipped through the channels on the big flat-panel TV. He was unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves before getting undressed, when he felt the floor vibrate, subtly, beneath his feet:

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

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Saving the Criminal Justice System from Itself

March 9, 2009 by John 6 Comments

The name of the fellow over there at the left is William (Bill) Dillon. At the time this picture was taken, in November, 2008, Dillon was 49 years old.

An unremarkable photo, really. A man in middle age, playing a guitar in what appears to be a kitchen of a suburban house or apartment somewhere.

But the circumstances surrounding that photo: remarkable indeed.

Until earlier on the day when that picture was taken, Bill Dillon had been imprisoned by the State of Florida for 27 years. His sentence, for the crime of murder in the first degree, had been life imprisonment.

Tsk, tsk, you may think. Once again, the bleeding-heart criminal justice system sets a murderer free to kill again. Perhaps you wonder how the people around Dillon could possibly seem so relaxed. They must be accomplices, you imagine.

Er, no.

For it turns out that Dillon did not commit — could not have committed — the crime for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

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