Life On Hold

What again? Does your menu never hold still?

 I’m glad my call is important to you but apparently some things are more important.

Every time I call, he's away from his desk. Couldn't he take his desk with him?

No, I don’t know his extension.

I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. Have you considered hiring more staff? 

Please don't tell me your menu has changed while I'm waiting. Should I hit 7 instead of 4 in order to get 1?

I’ll go with jazz for now. By the time you pick up the phone it will have become classical

No, I can’t call back between midnight and three.

I already went to your website. That’s why I’m calling.

I’ve given you the last four numbers of my Social Security and now you want to know my favorite movie? I can only say my least favorite is Texas Chainsaw Massacre...the musical comedy version.

Now, you’re telling me your mailbox is full.

Wait, don’t hang up.

I’ve been waiting so long I’ve read the entire newspaper, the weather report in Asia, the police blotter and the obits. For a minute I thought I spotted my name.

Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you've opened up the old wound.

The grandchildren have grown up. I’ve got the Neptune Society on the other line.

If you’ve changed your menu again, I’ll have the chef’s salad.

Now I’ve forgotten why I called.

I think it had something to do about paramedics coming over. I couldn’t manage to perform a Heimlich maneuver on myself.

Yes, I know my call will be answered in the order it was received. I am trying to get on your queue in case something happens the day after tomorrow.

 

Time and Time Again

OMG, it's almost two o'clock and I haven't had lunch yet.

In more ways than one we are off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

The notion of clocks came as an imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. As kids we were heedless of when movies started as if it was life itself, we were barging in on. Yet I remember that big clock on the wall of all my classes in elementary school, an early lesson in conformity. 

When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It could be regarded as the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. Everyone knew their place and when tea was served, one lump or two.

Football, basketball and soccer are all played against the clock as well as their opponent. Managing the clock has become the hallmark of a successful team while a baseball game defies it as the great board game moves counterclockwise into eternity.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither filled Third Man movie when he ridiculed the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

But Mrs. Dalloway’s noon was altogether different from the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf 's use of time was a way of giving voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of our existence being a chronicle. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. A generation was lost, and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without a godhead to write the fable.

Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took their Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway through a single day which recapitulated their entire life. History, both personal and otherwise, cannot be dismissed nor the consequences of our behavior ignored as it determines our future on this orb.

Long out of the workplace and back into the unpartitioned flow, the clock now seems an irrelevant construct except for meeting friends for lunch. I marvel at how hours fly, and days are indistinguishable. My wish is for moments marked by exclamation points.

From Munich to Michigan

I was born March 21, 1933, the same day, in Munich, Hitler made dissent a crime and cemented his dictatorship. Even gossiping or making fun of the Nazi regime was deemed unlawful. That summer over a hundred thousand citizens were arrested and sent to newly constructed concentration camps.

How did this happen? It happened because the three opposition parties could not form a coalition to defeat the dictator.

Today I read that the Muslims of Michigan will not give their vote to Kamala Harris. It is infuriating enough that Cornel West and Jill Stein would put their ego ahead of the public good. But for the Muslims to withhold their support for the Democratic ticket is itself a crime against humanity. 

In Hitler’s Germany the Social Democrats, Communists and Catholic Center Party together had an equal number of votes in their parliament but the Nazis prevailed because of their squabbling.

To see this same splintering unfold here and now, raises my blood pressure and my ire.

I share some of the outrage of the Palestinians but nothing can absolve them of their complicity in abetting the dissolution of democracy and the rise of American Fascism. Do they not realize their protest vote does not register except as a gift to Donald Trump. Will somebody inform them we do not have a parliamentary system here with proportional representation?

As a reward for their misguided act, are they blind to the consequences of their wasted vote in this most pivotal state; that Trump is a bedfellow of Bibi Netanyahu who would be unconstrained to unleash further lethal force against Palestinians? In addition, they are most likely to be deported.

Young pro-Palestinian sympathizers tend to live in an idealistic bubble. They think in absolutes. At some point they will understand it is much harder to live within the system than to throw stones at imperfections. I ask you to throw some water in your face and wake up before November 5^th. We are stuck with a two-party system. None of the above, is not acceptable. 

  

Perchance To Dream

At my age it’s safe to say I have slept for about thirty years. And that doesn’t include nodding off trying to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Imagine what I’ve missed. Yet sleep is not a waste of time. I could live without the philosophers but not without sleep, perchance to dream.  

There used to be a commercial for Preparation H telling us that while we slept our hemorrhoids shrank. I wouldn’t know about that but I’m sure my engine gets charged, my entrails realigned, and my all-night laundry recycled. I may wake with bafflements unbaffled as yesterday’s dangling threads find morning clarity. More often, dreams are unremembered or unopened gifts, a light too bright to see. Those rapid eye movements probe my shuttered chambers, yielding no more than a glimpse into the fertile turmoil.

Thirty years is more time than John Keats lived or possibly Mozart was awake. One wonders what operas and odes visited their nocturnal hours. It was their genius to reassemble the shards.

For many of us easeful sleep gets more elusive as we age. Dozing off on the recliner with a book on my lap seems to have no connection with my head on a pillow in bed. It’s my inalienable right, isn’t it? No, it’s more like a gift bestowed randomly.

Mantras have never helped. My most recent one was Beaujolais. The last syllable had the promise of transport, but I probably would have done better drinking it.

Most nights I drift off with wings sprouting from my shoulders but then there are those occasions when yawns are nowhere near, and my waking brain is firing off its synapses. When the river is churning, all I can do is trust the raft will eventually find an unimpeded stream.

Handful of Dust

In a recurrent nightmarish daydream, I’m the last one standing. Aliens have arrived and I’m there to greet the spaceship hoping, at least, for someone to have lunch with. After the usual small talk about our respective planets and what went wrong with mine, I ask what took them so long. The pilot apologizes because they’ve been monitoring our decline and fall for many moons, alarmed at our recent planetary suicide, but he says they just didn’t make the lights.

My new best friend speaks perfect English. Good thing because I only took Trash as a second language. It had been a while since I’d spoken at all and found myself fluent, at first, only in gibberish till I regained use of my tongue.

He then turns to a pile of what we used to call technology inquiring how all the gadgetry works. I dread this moment and plead total ignorance. Fearful of raising his hackles I try to explain that we earthlings used a lot of things but most of us had no idea how anything worked. His hackles did indeed rise. I worried that some form of inter-galactic enhanced interrogation was coming in which I might find myself impaled on one of his hackles.

He seemed to accept my ignorance since, after all, we had convincingly demonstrated our collective stupidity having elected an infantile despot to lead our nation. The visitors regretted their delayed arrival and having to deal with such a poor specimen as me to enlighten them on our human progress. 

I could only assure them that there used to live among us some who could explain how the loom with its punch cards led to player pianos and eventually to programming the computer. I told him there were a few of us undaunted by hot wires or hard drives who could fiddle with links and algorithms and blue teeth and black holes. If one of those had survived, they could build it all over again from a handful of dust. However, I was not the guy.

All I had to offer was the paperclip, coat hanger and orange juice squeezer none of which he had ever seen before. We agreed to call it a start and besides it would take a lot more than things to get it right next time around.   

Imagined Woods

Looking through the sliding glass doors

I find myself 

across the street in a forest 

of old-growth oak and pine thick with green sleeves

surrounding apartment buildings,

having dodged bulldozers and aphids, 

as I have been spared, yet also mirrored

in sloughing eucalyptus bark 

and elbows of boughs bent 

toward a solar charge. I celebrate this lucky life 

with candles from the coral tree

and a canopy of tall fig trees swaying cheek to cheek 

while wondering how it is I have been granted

this Eden, this longevity of random turns. 

A controversy of crows is calling but not for me.

 

While Most Drink Coffee

To rev their engine and open their lids,

I have my own way of waking.

A ritual below consciousness

that caffeinates me.

Frozen berries blue, black and rasp

of a measureless number,

known only to my quick eyes,

half awake, dropped into a bowl followed by

just the optimal sprinkle of Bran Buds

and Catalina Crunch

(This is no laughing matter)

wet by a precise, random splash of almond milk.

Then comes the casual exactitude

of the spoonful, with a nod of approval

from my congenitally wise tongue,

sufficient to open my taste buds,

my hemispheres, my voltage

to set an equipoise to meet the day.  

An un-berried portion would be an insult

to my entire palate, would tilt my planet,

crumble my architecture, already teetering

and I might never know why.

This is the way it goes, unrehearsed, 

in the dailiness of a plan that is no plan,

a knowledge beyond knowing,

making my way in the juice and crunch

of existence with berries and grains 

in this enormous bowl.

Hills, Stairs and A Big Climb

My friend Judy R. is an ace photographer. What I merely glimpse she composes. Stairs at Disney Hall become an abstract of intersecting angles with increments of light and shade. What are stairs but a series of horizontals within a diagonal to reach the vertical? She is a poet without paper capturing creases in the landscape and on faces. Stairs are what humans do to hills and high rises.

Artists have to find their place, their perch. half in, half out of this world. As A.A. Milne put it…….Halfway up the stairs / Isn’t up / and Isn’t down / It isn’t in the nursery  / And it isn’t in town / All sorts of funny thoughts / Run round my head  / It isn’t really anywhere / It’s somewhere else instead.

We step, we climb like Jack and Jill or Bill and Hill to fetch our water. Sometimes we break our crowns but if the land is parched, there is a thirst for justice to be quenched.

Five hundred years ago Incas built a city on top of a hill in the Andes. This was far more than a hill of beans.  It takes 3,000 steps to reach the top. I’d hate to have made the descent and forgotten my car keys.  They might also have prevented invading pseudo-pious Conquistadors. However, by the time Spanish marauders arrived Machu Picchu was buried under dust and rubble. It wasn’t unearthed until 1911. 

High as it is, nothing compares to the figurative mountain we need to climb. Ever since Donald descended on his golden escalator into the netherworld, he has dragged the country through an abyss with the slime of his indecency and delusional apocalyptic fictions. 

The transcendence I look for in the arts has its corollary on the socio-political scene. There is a moral violence in the air and voters need to dispel that miasma with a gust of fresh air. Not to be above the fray but to elevate the fray to civil discourse. Whether we can lift ourselves from his degradation requires a buoyant spirit and new vision that taps into this country's highest potential, releasing the creative and innovative force of our diverse population. Out of the mud, a lotus.

A few years ago, the poet Ann Lauterbach wrote a book called On A Stair which she said could also be read as Honest Air. We need some of that honest air.

Mattering

I must have been no more than five years old because my legs didn’t reach the floor when I sat back in a large seat of the darkened Austin movie theater on a Saturday afternoon. Besides the double feature there was the March of Dimes collection box passed around, cartoons, a serial and RKO Pathe news. It was an immersive experience. In those days people entered at any time.

Now the place was pitch black. A large man groped his way along my aisle, his eyes still wide with the sun. He inched slowly, feeling for shoes anxious to find a seat with no legs in front of it. Stopping in front of mine he started to settle down on top of me.

What could I do to announce myself in this world, to avoid eradication? My defense to being crushed and erased was to make a joyful noise, to shake my Good & Plenty. A sound that I was good and there was plenty of me or at least enough to live another day.

It was like Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo yelling to the cars as he crossed a street in Manhattan, I’m walkin here, I’m walkin. It was my declaration of existence, I’m sitting here, I exist, I matter.

I've returned to this scene many times in my head but there is a missing person in the scenario I have never included before; my brother who, four years older, was my keeper. Many fleeting snapshots stay in the album of my memory in those early years, but I seem to have photo-shopped Arthur out of all of them.

In the solipsism of my childhood, he didn’t matter… but, of course, he did. Too late to make amends; he died 62 years ago yet that needs now to be at least stated. Arthur had a short and troubled life. I don’t think he ever knew he mattered. His death came on a mountain road with high alcohol content in his bloodstream.

One day as early teenagers we were left a couple of dollars to have dinner in a restaurant. Either my mother was in the hospital with a detached retina and my father was working or he was laid up with double pneumonia and she was working. I recall how uneasy my brother was as we sat at the local deli waiting to be served. He wasn’t sure anyone would see us and if they did would the waiter even take our order?

There were times along the way when mattering took the form of vanishing. One class in pharmacy college was taught by a Professor Aldstadt who tyrannized us with his Gestapo-like tactics. The subject was pharmaceutical chemistry. We had to memorize structural formulas of new products coming on the market. Typically, he would say, You, with the pimples on your face hiding behind Goldstein, get up to the blackboard and show us how stupid you are.  

My strategy was to disappear by wearing a beige shirt to class that I hoped would blend in with the seat. It worked but a far better way of mattering happened when a returning G.I. cornered the diminutive teacher, grabbed him by the collar and reminded him why we fought the war against fascism.

 

My friend likes to talk to people in restaurants....  waiters, busboys and parties at the next table. It's a way of breaking down barriers, of leveling. Here we are together in this absurdist tableau. Maybe the man clearing our table has a novel-in-progress under the seat of his car and the server is waiting for a call from a casting director. Everyone has a story to tell. We all matter.