Johnny boy, he's always propping up the bar He sees life crystallized through his jar He says he only lives for beer But deep in his heart is a cry of fear Give me a heart to hang onto Give me a soul that's tailored new Give me a heart to hang onto A heart to hang onto --Pete Townshend, "Heart To Hang Onto" from the album Rough Mix with Ronnie Lane
if you’re going to post poetry as if you’re a poet, for God’s sake, learn the damn language! It’s pretty easy to do that and still write bad poetry, but it’s impossible for you to write good poetry without a basic understanding of grammar, usage, and mechanics.
I’ve just completed reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman. He’s the one who wrote A Man Called Ove which was made into the movie A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks recently. It’s a tear-jerking adult fairy tale of a book which skirts the edge of formulaic, contains frequent self-referential passages (which I find tiresome), tells a well-worn tale without breaking any new ground,…and I gave the book a five-star rating. For one thing, I like a pathos-riddled book which adroitly brings tears to my eyes. Mainly, though it’s for two other reasons I gave it those stars. The book re-taught me a lesson about reading (and therefore about life a bit): when you dislike a book (or a person or whatever) because it isn’t what you thought it was going to be, then you’re not disliking it for what it is, you’re disliking it for not living up to your expectations. If those expectations were based on very little, as most of our snap judgments tend to be, then it isn’t the book’s fault. In this case, my expectations were built upon some not-very-specific blurbs which said what the book was ‘about’. I expected a different storyline. Once I accepted it wasn’t going to follow my imagined plot, I realized I liked the book very much. (Had I not, I would have put it down, but with the acknowledgement that I did so based on what it was rather than what it wasn’t.)
Since the blurbs I read led me to expect a book where an adult protagonist runs around Europe delivering letters from her now-deceased grandmother, here’s my blurb, only slightly more accurate and still very vague:
When the grandmother of the “almost-eight-year old” protagonist dies, the granddaughter is charged by her Granny to deliver a series of letters to people from her grandmother’s past. Through this device, Backman weaves together the competing narratives of being someone’s hero and being a shit, and teaches a young, precocious girl that Truth (and Life) lie somewhere between the two. Oh, and along the way he makes a good case for forgiveness and tolerance, fairytales, loyalty, courage, and that anyone can redeem themselves and become a hero.
Me
Other than that, I liked the book for its style which led to some lovely little quotes:
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 89). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
Children know that time is just an emotion, so “now” is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn’t a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist,…
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 231). Atria Books. Kindle Edition
Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 368). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
I wish there were more quotes, but I became too involved in the novel to take time to highlight them. I’ve been gifted some alone-time what with my wife gone for a week, which led me to read hours yesterday and today, which I do too seldom much as I did before adulthood. (True, many would argue about calling me an adult, but I’ve shook them from my boots like the clods they were and kept walking.)
And now, because all posts deserve a photo, here are the mushrooms I’m going to sauté in an hour or two. After the fiasco of the first kit, my purveyors made good with one which burst forth in just seven days and has yielded these fully ripe, ready-to-harvest golden oysters in just 11 days:
Universe beneath my feet surreal: optimistically colored.
As mentioned in a post on Monday, last week I began an unusual period of travel: all of it by someone else, unless you count this day-trip to coastal waters last Friday. The above contradicts the National Weather Service’s forecast of partly sunny, but temps were in the 70’s, and it wasn’t raining. I would have traded Thursday’s sunny weather, but it permitted a nice walk around Lake Lynn where we espied turtles, ducks, geese, more turtles, still more turtles, and a couple of hunting herons:
That afternoon my good buddy received his wish, and we visited the Duke University Store to purchase swag. While there we took a quick peek at the chapel:
The cones and barriers in the photo were courtesy of the setup for Game Day, a Saturday morning TV show focused on college football–according to my friend since I do not follow any sport except baseball. The resemblance to construction fit right in with all the real construction which was occurring nearby.
Now we entertain my brother and watch post-season baseball. Good times.
[Note to CIMPLE: all photos taken with Google Pixel 6 Pro. Top two edited with Faststone. Last one not edited.]
When I converted an old, seldom-used blog into this one, I envisioned a writing outlet and ‘daily’ blog combination. After all, I’d just canceled Facebook for reasons too obvious and previously stated. I figured my need to communicate, to shout into the gale winds of social media would inevitably fill this site up with lots and lots of pithy writing punctuating my daily doin’s. It’s now time to admit something about getting older I had witnessed but not from this side of the divide, so to speak: that driving urge to make something happen and accomplish something fades. Some of this is good. Recently I’ve reflected on my typical mindset four years ago when I juggled weekly trips across the continent to San Diego and Seattle from my Raleigh home, monthly visits to attend to my ailing mother in Spokane, and to arrange her final rites in October. (I ended it all with an audit performed in Toronto…in rainy November weather. Yay.) I barely recognize the person who kept multiple itineraries in his head, who could tell you which airports had which kiosks at which intervals, who had a set and efficient routine for unpacking and packing a suitcase, who parleyed sarcastic cynicism into a business persona, and who grabbed beers and food as time allowed. I wish I could convey the inner pressure which led others to give me wide berth at times, but which seemed to be crucial to my survival. But now…
Hard to thrill,
from “Hard To Thrill” by Eric Clapton/John Mayer, performed by Clapton & J.J. Cale on The Road To Escondido
Nothing really moves me anymore.
When Covid partnered with retirement to give me a crash course in inactivity, I reverted to a boyhood prototype: read; pursue an idea as it blossomed; eat; drink; repeat. But don’t call me lazy. I bristle at being called lazy. “Inside my head I’m more active than you’ll ever be,” I think. (We’ll leave to another day what steps I took to slow down and/or turn off the voices in my head.) I learned early that giving voice to my stream of consciousness at speed guaranteed a fairly quick response: “oh god, would you PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!” (Well, I somewhat learned it. I’ve received refresher courses throughout the ensuing 50 years.) Example from a coastal drive during this past week’s visit from a lifelong friend: “There’s a Free Will Baptist Church…not to be confused with a movie about orcas…and definitely Free Willy shouldn’t be confused with that series of pornographic films.” I think I saw heads spin in the car. Did I mention I liked Robin Williams because he delivered comedy at a speed I could appreciate?
All of this by way of explaining my consternation at noting only three or four posts in the past six weeks. Remove the writer’s conceit of a Virtual Vacation and I’ve posted little in the past three or four months. No promises, but I’m headed into a (slightly) more optimistic future in October. In mid-month I’m looking at two periods in the month which hold a dozen days of solitude–a gift to a loner like me.
Our shriveled photo at the top represents a failure at growing a beautiful blooming of golden oyster mushrooms. I was promised a gorgeous cluster, maybe two or three from a kit I purchased in early August. It should have looked like this…ah but that would be stealing someone else’s photo. Let’s just say it would be ten times bigger than the clump in the photo above.
Instead, nothing happened within the 10-14 days it should have. I gifted a friend with the same kind of mushroom kit, and he started a week ahead of me. He didn’t reach harvest until about day 19 or 20, so I held on. About three weeks in, I finally got some growth where it shouldn’t have occurred and it consisted of two distinct clusters which both looked like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an accurate symbol of my shriveled hopes these days. The vendor came through though and sent me a new block which arrived Friday. I started it Sunday, and noted I had not followed instructions–imagine that. This time I made the required shallow incision in the mycelium-impregnated starter block as specified. Stay tuned.
It’s possible that the advent of Oktoberfest with its namesake beer has contributed to some of the lassitude I feel. Or…others…. I’m still polishing off some representatives from the Michigan trip in July. (Though not representative of the state: it’s where I found North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, an imperial stout that drinks like a cross between beer, chocolate, and coffee, all without any additions. Good stuff, but potent. Two of these babies and you’re more than halfway through a typical six-pack.)
September saw a few happenings. We got to know our new steel steed, Percy Pilcher:
We set out at the end of August to replace Mr. Lincoln, a 2015 Lincoln MKC and a beautiful realization of automotive vision, but who had become a bit outdated, frustrating, and tired after eight years. “A hybrid, dear,” I told my wife. “That’s what we need. And probably a minivan, though I’m loath to admit those words. We need the cargo room.” We went shopping. Hybrid Toyota Sierras would be available six to eight months–if we pre-ordered. Chrysler Pacificas looked cheap, even at the so-called high end of the model spectrum. The others were DOA, and so…we headed back to the Lincoln dealership where we were treated like returning royalty. No hybrid Aviators? There’s a familiar song. A ‘pre-owned’ model? (Hmm. Weren’t those called “used” not long ago? I think I’m differently opinionated!) Sure. And that’s how we wound up with a current-year Aviator which was returned after five months because the purchasers just loved the vehicle they had traded in, so they bought another one and used this one to cover the cost. Their disappointment was our gain. We bought a vehicle with less than one year’s mileage on it, looks sharp, has all the features we wanted, and…it’s a Lincoln. When I woke up from the euphoria, though, I realized we had purchased another gas combustion engine and that it had 25% worse gas mileage than what we had traded in! Ah, no matter. For now Percy is our new Aviator. Why Percy? Because Percy Pilcher, a relative for sure–there aren’t many Pilchers in the world–achieved quite a bit of notoriety as an inventor and aviator, and likely would’ve bested the Wright brothers at the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft if he hadn’t been killed right before attempting it. If you click through to that link, the photograph of him looks similar to my grandfather, the Rev. Howard B. Pilcher, enough that he could’ve been a cousin. I’ve not done much with genealogy, so I’ve no idea how close the relationship is.
Tuesday marked the beginning of a month of travel, both us and others. Or more specifically, both my wife and others. I’m not going anywhere. In my teen years I became acquainted with a guy who later became a good and close friend. Throughout junior and senior high I knew who he was, saw him in groups, but not until I dropped out of college after my freshman year in 1973 did I start working at a Spokane hospital where he also worked. We started hanging out, and because I had become just a little more “normal” we connected. Though diametrically different, we became friends. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1983. We fell into and out of touch, but by 1990 we had renewed it for good. I moved away, and he served in the wedding party for my second wedding. (It was only fair. I participated in multiple weddings for him. Perhaps I’ll tell that tale later.) This past week represented the second time he visited us in Raleigh; the first occurred only because he had followed a woman to Florida in 2009. Had that not happened….but that’s also another story.
This week my brother visits for the first time in over a year. When he leaves a week later, one of my wife’s triplet sisters drops in the next day to pick up my wife and continue to Florida where she (my sister-in-law, not my wife) will look for her retirement home. When that’s done my wife and I will enjoy a whole seven days all by ourselves before she takes off again with a group of friends called The Biker Chicks (though my wife has never ridden a hog or any other type of motorcycle that I am aware of). Finally, as October bows itself out with Hallowe’en, and All Saints and All Souls ushers us into November, I will settle into a sedate period of enjoying my life with my wife. I really don’t need much else. She lets me be to sit here and write these screeds, matches me drink for drink and recipe for recipe, creates handcrafted art in a panoply of media, and joins me in a love of good video, good music, and good times.
What could be better? It’s why I sometimes don’t post here regularly. I’m having too much fun.
In 2014 we vacationed to Edisto Beach, an off-the-beaten path resort area in South Carolina. I was over a year into the Job from Hell (as it has been known to my wife and me). Though this vacation started on some bad notes, Edisto worked its magic. I returned refreshed by a simpler time spent walking, staring at scenes like this, and strolling to one of the dining/drinking establishments at dinner. Sometimes one just doesn’t know until one knows. (“How profound,” says the Editor drily. “Been smokin’ that ganja again, boy?”)
We watched, sadly horrified when little human-things took down Lokisson--one fine oak with humors unusual. "I lean over their rock-paths, put down by these silly human-things: they look up fearful, ignorant of my deep-rooted stability." He would laugh at his humor. If only he were stable as his roots! No. Humor's ultimate end: fearful, weak-full, they attack first. Angry, snarling chainsaws bit from all sides, ganged up, velociraptors hunting arboreal prey. We knew their type from so long ago. Elephant-bellows issued from metal contraptions which looked vaguely tree-like, screaming their masters' fears skyward, their cries sometimes oddly resembling bugling elks we heard in times before. Lokisson's beautiful limbs disappeared first, fed into hungry maws, exiting pulverized to bits. Metal sheets rang thunder to our sky. Then...section by section...his segments fell, crashing, loudly cutting off his jokes forever. We cannot laugh through our hurt, perhaps won't for many seasons. For two days afterward our living sky cried and grumbled.
This month LibraryThing provoked me with its monthly newsletter. It contained a link to an ongoing discussion topic (months-long): “What is the most disturbing book you’ve ever read?” (If like me, you find library cataloging software and sites lacking, you might want to look at LibraryThing which offers a version for running small libraries. For a control freak like myself, who also needs much more data than a site like Goodreads can provide, this has been a godsend.)
When I read that question, I immediately thought of One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. I read this book in the first half of my 30’s; it came as part of a four-volume set of Latin America writers from Quality Paperback Books. I enjoyed them, great works all: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa; Dora, Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz. But the fourth one, One Day of Life by Argueta haunted me then and haunts me whenever I think about it, and that’s more often than you would think despite its detailing the lead up to the El Salvador Civil War in the 1980’s and despite the fact I never re-read it.
The book’s matter-of-fact, simple prose details horrors the same way any war-zone child would. It just happens. It is what has happened. It is their life. Though it covers a single “day of life”, the flashbacks offer more detail, all of it disturbing. This was the time of the death squads where people were tortured and executed at the hands of faceless men.
[SPOILER COMING UP]
Though I haven’t read the book since the mid-1980’s, it’s seared into my brain. All I had to do was read this synopsis of the end of the novel, about the central character, Guadalupe Guardado and the novel came back to life. Guardado’s granddaughter, involved in the protests of the time, is Adolfina:
At the end of the novel, the authorities bring a beaten man to Guadalupe and Adolfina who had said the name “Adolfina” after being severely beaten. Adolfina does not recognize the man, but Guadalupe recognizes her husband José. On his previous advice, she denies knowing him, and he is taken away.
Wikipedia entry “One Day of Life”
There’s a horrific beauty contained in vessels such as this which exquisitely contain the pain, the despair, the sadness, the very twisted ways of life which the mainstream hopes to avoid. Argueta’s novel reminds me of another version of the same thing, a song by Rubén Blades, “In Salvador” on the album Nothing But the Truth released in 1988. (I’m unable to find a YouTube video of the song although you can watch a “complete album” video of the album. It’s the 7th song.) Although Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, and Sting contributed songwriting efforts to this album (Blades’ first in English), this song is not one of those. Critics have knocked the fact that Blades sings with an over-enunciated English but to me, it makes the album more honest. We’re hearing his description of what life is still like in El Salvador, and we’re hearing someone from Central America (Blades is Panamanian) speak to us. We wouldn’t expect to hear someone speak fluid English when it’s a second language. The refrain:
“No one can protect your life in Salvador. Judges that condemn you have no name. Could it be the gentleman who lives next door? Or the guy who goes with you to work?
transcribed from the album Nothing But The Truth
There are several other disturbing songs on the album in varying degrees. “The Hit” describes how a young Hispanic male violates the main law of the street that “you don’t double-cross the ones you love”. He’s gunned down. “Letters to the Vatican” describes a woman who’s lost a good chunk of her mind, but finds support in the bar scene where the patrons remember how she was “before she got this way”. In “Ollie’s Doo Wop” Blades sings about the cultivated ignorance of Ronald Reagan to Ollie North’s nefarious doings. I get a very personal meaning from “Hope’s On Hold” where Blades sings of all the things that inhibit falling in love, which leads to “hope’s on hold”.
If we go into the beauty of ugliness, of disturbance, I would offer up Lou Reed’s Berlin which has a semi-rock opera construction. It’s about speed freaks living in Berlin. You can imagine the seaminess of it.
Raw emotions of any type remain more true to me than than the equivocal nature of living in polite society. For this reason, I rarely tell anyone, even my wife, what is going on inside my head. As a creative, we entertain the un-entertainable, the unappreciated, the unapproved. We shed the mundane memories which frankly hamper our movement in polite society. We accept all, winnow it, and feed it back to our world, hoping that if we do it in a meaningful manner, it will illuminate rather than obscure.
Read Argueta’s book. It remains pertinent because the horror merely moved to different countries. It’s the same visceral, hateful viciousness which fuels America’s cultural and political battles. It blossoms in central Africa, in Singapore, in India, in the Europe. It sustains all ideologues on right and left.
Or if you need the short course: listen to Rubén Blades’s song.
This will be short but a necessary post if we are to obtain closure. Day 14 took us down the interstates to Beckley, WV, where we spent our first night out. For variety’s sake, I reserved a room at “Tru by Hilton” instead of the Hampton Inn where we had lodged on Day 1. If you’re over the age of 50 and like things such as closets, drawers, and enough desk space to plop down all your electronics, I would steer you away from this brand. Similar to Marriott’s Aloft, it appeals mostly to 20- and 30-somethings who thought the dorm aesthetic in college “was really rad” or whatever I should have inserted here to show I’m not too far over the hill to know (or care).
Before we checked in, we dropped by the Tamarack Marketplace. We had visited in 2010 when I said, “hey, let’s explore West Virginia” and even though that vacation offered a very mixed bag indeed, I still managed to be surprised when we circumambulated the center (it’s more or less a circle): “That’s it?” We revisited in 2023 because we thought, “hey, we probably were just jaded by the end of a vacation. It couldn’t have been that boring.” It was, exemplified by my uttering the same comment I had the first time: “hey, I think we’ve seen this already. Have we really walked the whole thing?” If you would like to pay $23-25 for a semi-unique pottery coffee cup or hundreds/thousands of dollars for art, then this is your place. Even the snacks get priced as if they’re works of art.
We checked the dry-erase board of recommended restaurants–yeah, that’s how Tru does it–and found an acceptable Italian place close to our lodging.
I’d entertained the idea we would stop by the New River Gorge National Park a second time on Day 15, but the idea of getting home in the early evening didn’t appeal to us. When you’re headed home, most of the time you just want to get there. We arrived around 2 p.m., cracked beers while we unloaded: luggage-direct-to-laundry hamper; ice chests disgorging their contents to the beer fridge; and all the miscellaneous crap which creeps out of your luggage and hides in various corners of the car over the two weeks you’re on the road. We joined our good friends from around the block and went out to a better dinner than we had enjoyed in three days.
Returning from a vacation satisfies just like leaving. The familiar looks slightly less so, but the routines comfort in ways hotels cannot provide. Cats cling like two-year-olds demanding you never leave again. You revel in about ten times the square footage you’ve had for the previous two weeks. For me, I look forward to the next day because the day after returning is Re-entry Day, nearly as good as the vacation itself. One gets normalized again, processes multiple loads of laundry, considers midday naps, starts drinking as if it’s still vacation, catches up on all the videos cached during one’s absence, and pulls leftovers from the freezer. It’s like a stay-cation; it’s transition; it’s re-entry. Here we go again.
all the voices in my head 