"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
The Richeys — Derek and Jennifer Sommer-R. — have been tantalizing us with their nostalgic images of Bloomington for years now. Their book, Bloomington: Then & Now and their Facebook page, Bloomington Fading, hammer home the dizzying changes this town has undergone through the years.
People here still like to call Bloomington a small town but it hasn’t been for a long, long while. As long as Indiana University, like pretty much every higher ed factory in this holy land, feels the need to attract upwards of 20 million students per semester, this burgh will seem, for much of the year, like every other moderately-sized city anywhere in the USA.
Anywhere, USA
■
Bloomington’s architecture has changed commensurate with the corporatization and marketing of our hometown U. The look and feel of the place is nothing so much as Lincoln Park-lite or faux-Clifton. Only those big city hot ‘hoods have vibrant, colorful commercial strips. B-town’s central district merchants and eateries have yet to catch up with the flood of residential units surrounding the Courthouse. They probably never will, considering the fact that downtown Bloomington’s new residents, albeit beneficiaries of Mom & Pop’s largesse in terms of luxe housing, are too cash- and time-poor to support a bustling business district.
So we’re left with imposing walls of multi-story, soulless, faceless apartment structures along Walnut and College avenues. These anonymous buildings seem at times an unholy mix of the utilitarian and the totalitarian. Any pedestrian moseying along either of the town’s main north-south arteries will find little or nothing to catch her eye or cause him to drop into a little shop.
The Richeys have produced a video explaining what’s going on north of the Courthouse these days. Here it is:
■
It’s part of the overall Richey push to get people involved in Bloomington city planning discussions and decisions. And, BTW, the Richeys inform us those new ugly apt. bldgs. really weren’t built atop the rubble of quaint, historic homes or anything like that. That ship sailed, the Richeys tell us, decades ago. No, those new residential structures mostly replaced eyesore parking lots and empty lots.
▼
Do You Read Me?
Yes, I sell books. Those quaint things made of paper and ink and certain plastic coatings and so forth. They can tear, fall, get soaked, burn or a dozen other things can happen to them that’ll make them, well, junk.
But people still love them.
I love them.
I also love reading online. And even though I read an old-school book every night before I go to sleep, most of my daily reading is done on an LED screen. That’s life today.
Even Old Birds Do It
■
Long, long ago, I swore I’d never give in to digital reading. Next thing I knew, I was reading New York Times and Chicago Tribune articles online. When some big news event happened somewhere in the world, I found myself immediately going to CNN online.
And then I wasn’t buying newspapers anymore. Paper newspapers. Before long, my bookmark list of online news sites had grown to what I’d have previously considered ludicrous proportions. Look:
■
When I was reading paper and ink, I’d never in a thousand years have enough time and money to amass such a reading list. Now, it’s nothing for me to skim through all of these in a day.
Now, I’m not focusing on these characters simply because they’re a man and woman of the cloth. Too many people take a perverse pleasure in pointing out the foibles of preachers. Me, I figure priests, lamas, rabbis, imams, and all the rest are no better or worse than the rest of us. They are, after all, human beings. Who happen to believe in something I don’t. I find no reason to persecute them — that is, unless they’re trying to impose their myths upon me.
Okay, that caveat out of the way, let’s look at what Mark and Grace Driscoll did to get their book, Real Marriage: The Truth about Sex, Friendship, and Life Together, on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Wait, what’s that? You say the way to do it is write a really terrific and compelling book and then hope and pray for lightning to strike? Isn’t that the way books have hit it big since the beginning of time?
Well, sorta. Today, you can buy your way onto the bestseller list.
The Driscolls contracted with an outfit called ResultSource. In exchange for the couple’s $210,000, ResultSource promised them they’d move heaven and Earth to get their title listed among the chosen few. That is, the Driscolls’ congregation’s $210,000. But that’s a matter for those who fork their dough over to them to worry about. Let’s stick with Real Marriage and the New York Times Bestseller list.
A month and a half ago, Real Marriage suddenly appeared as the number one selling non-fiction, hardcover, advice or how-to book in this holy land. It was a miracle, considering that the Driscolls had never before published anything even remotely close to a bestseller.
Wrong. Say what you will about the coffeeshop scribe who became the first billionaire author in history, the astronomical sales of her books were legit.
The Driscolls’ sales were not. See, Result Source used most of the $210,000 to purchase copies of the book in thousands of people’s names, in every state of the union, using upwards of a thousand different pay methods, to goose the sales of Real Marriage.
Now, folks had been gaming the NYT bestseller lists for years by making bulk purchases of books by preachers, moralists, business writers, hacks, self-help gurus, and other snake oil salespeople. Eventually, the NYT began marking such titles with a symbol meant to convey that the free market public wasn’t completely and innocently enthralled with said books.
But racketeers like ResultSource are a new game in town. Essentially, they’re hired killers. Rather than you, the author, or your pals and family doing the dirty work, ResultSource will take the sub-ethical, quasi-moral plunge for you.
So, how did people figure out the Driscoll scam? The week after Real Marriage had hit number one, it completely disappeared from the bestseller list. That’s unnatural. That means no one — or a scant few — had bought the book on the up and up.
“It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.” — Zora Neale Hurston
▲
DIGGERS
Stand by for another big book release from a Bloomington author in 2013.
Phil Ford, professor of music history at Indiana University, looks to August for the debut of his “Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture.”
Phil Ford
■
Ford’s got a publisher, Oxford University Press, and is now in the process of securing his last copyright permissions — “I had a ton to manage for the book” — and correcting the odd punctuation mistake.
“Dig conceives hipness as a part of the intellectual and cultural history of the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s,” Ford says.
The hip aesthetic has structured art and thought here since the end of World War II, according to Ford. He says American intellectual life has been profoundly affected by the storied postwar alienation from society.
The beatniks and the cool jazz cats of 20-year period after 1945 saw themselves as outsiders who had nothing to do with you, yet now you act and think in ways they did more than you or they would have ever dreamed.
The larger, dominant culture, Ford explains, aims to “foreclose” on creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression.
“The hipster’s project is to imagine this system and define himself against it,” Ford says. Think Jack Kerouac or Timothy Leary. “While hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from the consensus culture, it is music that has always been the privileged means of cultural disaffiliation.”
Studs Terkel With Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, & Peter Orlovsky
■
Ford tries to define the concept of hip in the book and then follows its path from what he deems its birth year, 1948. For instance, Ford has found rare recordings of Beat Poets singing along to jazz records in 1949. “You can hear them trying on the hipster persona like a new suit,” Ford says.
Ford enshrines Norman Mailer, author of the seminal “White Negro” essay in Dissent magazine, into the hipster pantheon. “He couldn’t carry a tune in a Hefty bag but he developed a notion of writing as existential challenge that remodels the act of writing to something more like the act of sounding, something like a musical performance,” Ford says.
The City Lights Book-Length Edition Of Mailer’s Essay
■
Ford has been published in the academic journals Representations, Journal of Musicology, Jazz Perspectives, Musical Quarterly, and others. Dig is his first book.
One of the jazz titans Ford covers in Dig is the late pianist, songwriter, arranger, composer, and Zelig-like figure, John Benson Brooks. He worked with everyone from Zoot Sims and Cannonball Adderley to Tommy Dorsey and Les Brown but remains unknown today. Ford feels Brooks’ life in New York City’s arts scene from the 1940s through the ’60s would serve as a great basis for a history of that capital of hipness. Ford just might start writing that book once he gets the final Dig manuscript out the door.
So, be cool until August and then dig Dig.
▲
HAPPINESS IS A GUN
You know it had to happen.
A Bloomington High School South kid has been overhead saying he’d pull off a Sandy Hook-type incident at the school tomorrow. Bloomington cops have found a small arsenal at his house and the kid’s been suspended. The guns belonged to adults in the home but the BPD confiscated the artillery nonetheless.
BHSS
■
And a kid at Batchelor Middle School has been suspended for bringing a BB gun to class.
Hard to know if the kids were just being, well, kids, or they were real threats to their classmates and teachers. Just this moment, though, no one’s taking any chances.
One observer has said that the BHSS kid needs immediate psychiatric treatment. Maybe.
Let me tell you a little story.
When I was 16 and 17, my circle of hippies and ne-er-do-wells that hung out day and night at Amundsen Park on Chicago’s Northwest Side faced a migration of gangbangers from the near West Side.
A Polish and Puerto Rican gang, the Almighty Jousters, started hanging around the park after they’d been rousted from their turf farther east by the cops and rival gangs. These guys were tough. They thought nothing of bloodying someone up for the slightest imagined insult. One of the Jousters, Little Willie, found himself in competition for an Amundsen Park girl with a guy from the neighborhood. Little Willie settled the dispute by breaking the guy’s jaw, ribs, and arm in an impromptu negotiating session held during the midnight showing of the movie “Gimme Shelter” at the Mercury Theater.
Backdrop For A Beating
■
The Jousters also liked to pack heat.
Even though I was a devoted peacenik, there was something about the Jousters’ hard coolness that attracted me. I became friendly with several of them. I even fantasized what I’d feel like carrying a pistol, as they did. In my fantasy, I’d feel important.
By and by, a consortium of neighborhood demi-gangs — the North & Nagle Boys, the Corner Boys, the Bank Boys, the Stompers, and others — agreed to join forces and try to evict the Jousters. The issue would be settled the old fashioned way, with a war. A date was set. It was a chilly Wednesday night in October. The park was packed with grim-looking teenagers from the area. The Jousters were due to arrive at about 8:00.
We had any number of guys in our midst who could handle their fists quite well. All told, we had about 50 guys ready to rumble. We smoked and chattered nervously, waiting for the Jousters.
At eight sharp, a couple of cars full of Jousters squealed up in the front of the park. “Let’s fuck these guys up,” someone said.
My pal Whitey and I had felt obligated to join the local army, even though neither of us was particularly noted for toughness. We glanced at each other, a wordless reminder that we’d previously agreed to run around the periphery of action and do our level best to avoid inflicting or suffering any kind of pain.
The Jousters exited their cars and stood gazing at our little army for a brief moment. We had them outnumbered five to one. “This is gonna be sweet,” another guy said.
At that moment, one of the Jousters named Crate — a guy even Little Willie gave a wide berth to — reached under his long coat and pointed a sawed-off shotgun at us. None of us budged — not because we were brave and tough, but because we were petrified. Whitey and I were on the verge of tears.
Respect
■
Like that, Crate squeezed off several blasts. The 50 of us local guys turned and ran like deer when we saw the first flash from Crate’s shotgun. I clearly remember hearing the pellets screeching and clattering past me across the pavement as we ran. Judging by subsequent audible pops, several other Jousters had outed pistols and began firing.
Only later did I realize I was concerned about soiling my pants for a hot minute.
The Jousters beat it as soon as they heard police sirens. The cops, who’d been miffed the gang had settled in our neighborhood but seemed to tolerate their presence to that point, now decided to get rid of them. None of us ever saw Little Willie, Crate, and the others again.
But for a while afterward, I remained enthralled by that image of the Jousters, standing before us, confident that they possessed the means to make us run.
At the time, I was working in a hot dog stand owned by a minor Outfit figure. Let’s call him Pat. I also served for a brief period as a driver for him and his “boss,” “Mr. Martin,” an Outfit member of slightly higher standing than Pat. Whenever Pat or Mr. Martin needed to do some business down on the West Side or in Little Sicily, they’d call for me to drive them there in their Cadillacs and wait for them outside. “Keep your eyes open,” they’d advice me as they got out of the car.
I never knew what I was supposed to be on the lookout for.
Pat carried himself with a Mob mien that “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos” aficionados today deem cool. Pat never raised his voice. When he was mad, he wore The Look — his jaw set, his lips a line, and his eyes staring. You couldn’t read any emotion on his face. That’s what was terrifying about The Look.
Fabled Hitman Harry Aleman With “The Look”
■
Pat kept a small pistol in an ankle holster in the backroom of the hot dog stand. Every now and again, he’d hold it lovingly and warn me to be careful. “Don’t touch this unless you gotta,” he’d say. He never elaborated on when that would be.
As Pat came to trust me, he left me alone at the hot dog stand more often. I started formulating a plan to wear the pistol home after closing the place at night.
I wanted to feel invincible.
For a period of about two months, I’d strap the holster to my ankle and walk around the hot dog stand toward closing time, just to get the feel of it. I wore bell-bottom pants so the bulge wasn’t noticeable. I learned to position the holster just so, so that I wouldn’t brush against it with my other ankle as I strode.
I practiced standing with my leg propped up on a carton of soft drink cups so that the bottom tip of the holstered gun would be visible just beneath my pants leg. After all, what’s the point of carrying a gun if other people don’t know about it?
I couldn’t wait to summon the courage to wear it home and, naturally, to Amundsen Park. Who knows? Maybe there’d be a moment during the course of a typical evening of hanging out when I’d have to pull the pistol out, just to make a point.
■
Then I’d be invincible.
Somehow, some way, the three of us — Pat, Mr. Martin, and I — all got into hot water with the cops at the same time. Pat’s and Mr. Martin’s photos ran in newspaper accounts of their troubles. Mine was kid’s stuff.
In any case, the hot dog stand was closed and I was out of a job. I never got a chance to wear that holstered pistol home or to the park.
I was lucky.
That BHSS kid who bragged about planning to shoot up the place tomorrow was lucky as well. And that middle school kid was lucky he never fired his BB gun in the Batchelor hallways.
I don’t know if these kids need psychiatric help, any more than I might have needed help when I was 16 and 17, just for wanting to carry a gun
Guns are awfully seductive, and insecure teenagers are primed to be seduced by them.
Rather than worry about putting kids who dig guns on a psychiatrist’s couch, we ought to consider treating the adults who manufacture these things by the millions in this holy land.
“There has been no great political movement in the United States since Jefferson’s day without some purely moral balderdash at its center.” — H.L. Mencken
▲
GO!
OUR TOWN’S BEST EVENTS LISTINGS — SCROLL DOWN
▲
MY CALENDAR IS STOPPED ON AUGUST
It’s Fall today.
At least it is according to the Indiana University calendar. Fall semester classes begin this morning.
▲
QUACKS
Now, how about this dangerous goof, Todd Akin? The Senate candidate from Missouri has said “legitimate” rape does not generally result in pregnancy.
She’s Asking For It; Ergo, She’ll Get Pregnant
✍
Akin — a Republican, as if you had to ask — claims doctors he knows have informed him that women’s bodies have an internally-produced magic elixir that makes pregnancy in such instances nearly impossible.
Let’s take Akin at his word — not, of course, about anything having to do with the human reproductive process; he’s an idiot on that subject — but about him having spoken with doctors.
Medical doctors, presumably.
If so, each and every one of them should have his medical license revoked forthwith.
BTW, folks, here’s yet another chicken coming home to roost thanks to the Republican War on Science.
BTW II: Fox News online at 8:15am EDT has not even mentioned the story.
▲
SUDDENLY, I’M THIRSTY
How cool is this?
The Earth’s Water
✍
The image is from the US Geological Survey;the blue bead represents all the water on the Earth.
According to the USGS, that bead also includes all the “groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.”
Yikes!
So all our deepest lakes, seas, and oceans make up the flimsiest skin of H20 hugging our planet’s surface.
Of course, when your boat’s going down in the middle of Lake Monroe, it doesn’t feel that way.
Nevertheless, this is just another illustration of how insignificant we are.
You know how people who want to persuade you to accept Jesus or Allah or Zoroaster hit you with the You have to give yourself over to something bigger than you are line?
Well, guess what — everything‘s bigger than we are.
▲
FLAT NOTES
Seems as though musicians are going hog wild these days, oinking about Barack Obama. First it was Dave Mustaine, then Hank Williams, Jr., and now Ted Nugent jumps into the slop.
My lefty and lib friends are all aflutter that Nugent was quoted as saying, “…Obama represents everything bad about humanity….”
Okay, that’s pretty deranged but it’s got nuffin’ on the line that followed: “…and Romney pretty much all that is good. It is really that stark.”
Willard Romney represents all that is good about humanity?
Honestly, Ted?
Really?
The Best Our Species Has To Offer?
✍
You know, Nugent also commented after the Supreme Court decision on the Obama health care reforms, “I’m beginning to wonder it it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.”
So really, can’t we can stop pussyfooting around and say it like it is? Ted Nugent not only spouts a controversial political opinion or two, but he’s a racist jerk.
Read it. If a media outlet targeting the Arab world scares the poo out of you, then read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on the Billionaire Boner Boys from a couple of years ago.
Of course, you may think all Arabs and liberals are against good, rich American boys like Davey and Chuckie who pretty much own the nation. If so, I ask you this: after studying their positions and their tactics, do you really want to be on their side?
And are you certain they’re on yours?
▲
Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.
It won’t be too long before the Swedish company opens up its hotels here in America.
Yeah, you’ll save money but you’ll have to assemble your room with your own screwdriver.
▲
UGH! COOTIES!
I Couldn’t Have Said it Better Myself:
“Let me just put this right up front, for all the die-hard disinfectors out there: REGULAR SOAP WILL DO. For almost everything. Really. Not every surface in everyone’s life has to be wiped with antibacterial agents, not every child needs to be autoclaved on the daily, not every sneeze needs to be medicated with antibiotics, and regular soap works just fine. Unless you are some sort of domestic mom-surgeon making sandwiches out of immuno-suppressed bologna, you do not need to scrub up just to live your life. You’ll be fine — and, most likely, better — without this antibacterial obsession.”
I’m telling you, few things bug the bejesus out of me more than those ubiquitous antibacterial sheets certain Moms — and it’s always Moms, make no mistake — scour down shopping carts with at the grocery.
Honestly, after Oprah hypnotized every Middle American Mom to tremble in terror at the very thought of s-e-x lest they immediately develop AIDS, the entirety of the Earth must be wiped clean every 13 seconds or so now.
You’d think our planet was nothing more than a gargantuan Petri dish of HIV, ebola, e-coli, gonorrhea, listeria, and every other bad boy microbe in existence. Which it is, actually, but that’s OK because we have immune systems which afford us a modicum of protection.
And those immune systems are going all to pot, thanks to our mania for rubbing down everything we see with disinfectant wipes. I shudder to think what some Moms might be wiping down when Daddy-o starts getting a little frisky.
Apparently, West reports, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has found that triclosan, an alarmingly common antibacterial substance, can actually stop your heart.
Read West’s piece, or if you’re really into arcana, peruse the study itself.
Here’s a suggestion for anybody thinking of getting one of these: I Am An Asshole.
▲
Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.
“”Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.” — Earl Warren
You know, growing up in Chicago and living within the city limits every day of my adult life until March 20th, 2007, I’d come to the conclusion — like most of my city-mates — that Indiana University was the place where Bobby Knight threw tantrums, won a few NCAA championships, got himself fired for being a jackass, and then the school went out of business.
That’s not much of an exaggeration. Of all the Big Ten schools, IU is probably the most anonymous. Perhaps Minnesota and Iowa might give IU a run for the title, but, nah, Indiana wins it.
If you can find three people in Chicago who know what town IU is in, I’ll give you a prize. I wonder if even a hundred people in Indianapolis know what town IU is in.
Northwestern is where all the future wealthy businessmen and doctors go. A few journalists, too. Illinois is known for Chief Illiniwek and the controversy of using the symbol of a wiped-out race to drum up support for its sports teams — at least it’s known for something. Purdue puts out engineers. Ohio State, Michigan, and Michigan State are sports factories. Penn State tolerates child sodomizers. Nebraska has a funny team name, Cornhuskers.
This Man Has A PhD In Cornhusking
✍
And Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana may as well be in Bulgaria, especially Indiana.
Chicagoans no more know that Booker T. Jones, among many, many, many other great and fabulous musicians, studied at the Jacobs School of Music than they know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait City. (In fact, many Americans assume KSM was born in the same nebulous African/Asian tribal town that Barack Obama hailed from — and for all the average American knows, all three men went to a madrahsah there.)
Booker T. gave the commencement address at one of the two undergraduate ceremonies Saturday. According to the IDS, he told the grads that he used to walk to class at the Jake every morning at 7:15.
I recall listening to an interview with him on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air show on NPR when his “Potato Hole” disc came out. He told Gross that he still practices his scales every single morning and he works on his music eight hours every day. Booker T., it should be noted, is 67 years old.
Booker T. Jones — he’s someone Indiana University ought to be known for.
♢
TIME IS TIGHT
This is my absolute fave Booker T. and the MGs hit, from back in 1969.
♢
THE PRESIDENT IS A SOCIALIST!
Looks like Obama-haters will finally get to see what an honest-to-gosh Socialist looks like now.
François Hollande beat darling of the Right, Nicolas Sarkozy in the French national election for president this past weekend. Hollande is a card-carrying member of the French Socialist Party (or Parti Socialiste, in French — the French are so bizarre, Steve Martin once observed, they have a different word for everything.)
Hollande — Ayn Rand Is Spinning In Her Grave
✍
Not only that, Hollande lived in sin with a woman, fellow Socialist pol Sègoléne Royal, for more than 30 years, and then the two split up in 2007 when Hollande found himself a younger tomato named Valérie Trierweiler. Oh, and Hollande is a Jew.
Trierweiler — So, What Is It With French Presidents And Gorgeous Women?
✍
A guy like Hollande would be as electable in these Great United States, Inc. as, well, Khalid Sheikh Mohhamed.
Now get this — the French Socialists are considered a Center-Left party in that country. Center-Left! There are, apparently, des gauches even more, um, gauche than the Socialists in France. Either that or we have lost all perspective on the political spectrum in this holy land, considering that the very word Liberal is dirty here.
♢
✍
Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.
Monday, May 7, 2012
◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Exhibits, “Blended Harmonies: Music and Religion in Nepal”; through July 1st — “Esse Quam Videri (To Be, Rather than To Be Seen): Muslim Self Portraits; through June 17th — “From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”; through July 1st
◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Arts Center — Exhibits at various galleries: Angela Hendrix-Petry, Benjamin Pines, Nate Johnson, and Yang Chen; all through May 29th
◗ Trinity Episcopal Church — Art exhibit, “Creation,” collaborative mosaic tile project; through May 31st
◗ Monroe County Public Library — Art exhibit, “Muse Whisperings,” water color paintings by residents of Sterling House; through May 31st
◗ Monroe County History Center — Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th
“We who are about to die salute you.” — Spartacus, et al
♢
GEE, TOO BAD YOU HAVE TO GO (COULD YOU JUST LEAVE YOUR MONEY?)
One of the odd things I’ve learned since moving to the bustling metrop of Bloomington, Indiana, is that graduation day is considered a major event here — and I’m not referring to the viewpoint of the graduates.
We in Bloomington long for the final day the 40,000 or so students will be in town because it’s the start of three months of bliss around these parts.
State Road 45/46 Congestion During The School Year
✍
We’ll actually be able to park around Courthouse Square. The grocery stores won’t be jammed with students and their parents filling shopping carts with competing lists of products (the students loading up on frozen pizzas and the parents stuffing salad greens into the carts.) And nineteen-year-old kids won’t be clogging up the town’s arteries with their bought-and-paid-for luxury SUVs.
So, we’ll enjoy our brief respite from the little darlings. Come August, though, we’ll be starting to feel a tad nostalgic for all their parents’ money we can squeeze out of them.
Well, it wasn’t a lie exactly. I’d fully intended to pound out a screed or two later in the day when I published yesterday’s mini-post. Only after having my pupils dilated to the size of dimes and having a passel of eye techs poke and probe my cornea and measure my ocular jelly ball from every possible angle for three hours, I decided the world might survive without my daily dose of wisdom just this once.
Anyway, here’s the prognosis — the doc over at Old Man Grossman’s Eye Center has me scheduled for surgery two weeks from this past Thursday. He promises that, with the help of lasers and drugs, he’ll restore sight to my left eye. Cool. I’ve been a virtual cyclops for a couple of years now.
The doc marveled at the size of the occlusion in my lens. He called it a hyper-mature cataract. He also assured me the Grossman operation has the heavy equipment to demolish it and cart the debris away.
✍
The only thing that bugs me is having an old man’s ailment. But I’m not one to shy away from the truth (much) so let me state for the record here and now: I am now officially an old man.
♢
WHADDYA COMPLAININ’ ABOUT? Y’GOT YOUR DOUGH, DIDNCHA?
Can we now all agree that football is the dumbest-assed of all sports?
With mind-addled players dropping like flies, you’d think the NFL might actually do something about all the trauma. But no, we Americans dig it all too much.
✍
Callers to radio sports talk shows and even an NFL player or two have said, hell, guys like Seau made bushels of dough playing the game, that everything they have they owe to football, so stop all the hand-wringing and sob-sistering.
In 2000 years, the only significant change we’ve made to the spectacle of gladiators facing off in an arena is that we don’t tolerate them actually taking each others’ lives in front of our eyes.
Now we prefer them to shoot themselves in the privacy of their own bedrooms.
♢
DO IT
You only have two more chances to vote in the 2012 Indiana primary: Monday and Tuesday. No excuses; it’s the least damned thing you can do.
Wear This Or Just Shut Up
♢
✍
Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.
◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Exhibits, “Blended Harmonies: Music and Religion in Nepal”; through July 1st — “Esse Quam Videri (To Be, Rather than To Be Seen): Muslim Self Portraits; through June 17th — “From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”; through July 1st, 9am-4:30pm
◗ The Solution Lab — Conference, Bloomington Startup Weekend, for developers, designers, entrepreneurs, etc.; through Sunday
◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Arts Center — Exhibits at various galleries: Angela Hendrix-Petry, Benjamin Pines, Nate Johnson, and Yang Chen; all through May 29th
◗ Cafe Django — Ron Kadish on bass & Kevin MacDowell (Kid Kazooey) on guitar; 6:30-8:30pm
◗ Brown County Playhouse — “Under the Umbrella: Life Is a Circus” by Steven Ragatz; 7-8:15pm
◗ Paynetown SRA, Monroe Lake — “Sunset on the Water,” Interpretive naturalist Jill Vance leads a paddling tour of the lake shore, bring your own canoe or kayak; 8pm
“I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.” — Alfred Hitchcock
♢
THE READING MENACE
Books are dangerous things. That’s what quite a few jittery folks in this holy land think.
There are enough bibliophobes around to cause heaps of trouble for librarians who are brazen and perverted enough to stock their shelves with certain titles that any god-fearing soul knows will weaken the nation and destroy the family.
The Lauren Myracle series including “ttyl,” “ttfn,” and “l8r”
The Kim Dong Hwa series “The Color of Earth”
“The Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins
“My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy” by Dori Hillestad Butler
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie
The “Alice” series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
“What My Mother Doesn’t Know” by Sonya Sones
The “Gossip Girl” series by Cecily Von Ziegesar
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
Harper Lee, Contributor To Delinquency
✍
Any of these books may well turn your child into a young socialist or aspiring terrorist. If you are an older person and you even inadvertently read one of these tomes, you’ll suddenly find yourself wishing to acquit black men falsely accused of crimes, use indelicate language, and — worst of all — possibly think about sex.
♢
BULLIED BOY
Drop everything you’re doing right now and pick up a copy of the Indiana Daily Student or click over to the IDS website. Read the unsigned editorial about the personal struggle of a self-described chunky Hispanic latent homosexual who endured years of bullying at the hands of his schoolmates.
If it doesn’t make you cry, you’re probably dead.
✍
The author of the piece points out that a conservative Christian Cro-Magnon man named Douglas Wilson is slated to speak at IU Friday. Wilson thinks current anti-bullying efforts let gay and lesbian kids off the hook. They’re bad seeds, he concludes.
I checked out Wilson’s website. Man, this guy is a piece of work. He links the late IU sex researcher Alfred Kinsey with Nazism. He also espouses age-old Puritan chestnuts like a wife should be submissive to her husband (but not in the fun, light bondage way, either).
Nazi?
✍
Here’s an example of Wilson’s “thinking” on Barack Obama’s health care reform bill: “When they urge the passage of Obamacare because this person will now ‘have coverage,’ they overlook the fact that nothing good can come from men wanting to be God.”
Wait, what?
Wilson’s wife also has a blog. They’re both the kind of folk who need to cite a Bible passage for every thing they say. Only their Bible doesn’t seem to have a passage advising them not to terrorize kids who are struggling with their sexuality.
♢
SCARY COP
I’ve long suspected noted brute-with-a-badge Joe Arpaio is playing with a short deck. Now I know it’s true.
The longtime Maricopa County (Arizona) sheriff jumped on the Birther bandwagon months ago. He’s upping the ante now. Arpaio’s current take on that particular psychotic reaction makes earlier Birther charges seem almost sane.
“America’s Toughest Sheriff”
✍
Tough guy Joe now says the Republicans are in on the scheme!
Yep. GOP senators and even the motley crew running for the Republican nomination for president all have have thrown in their lots with the conspirators who took a Kenyan baby and groomed him to become the President of the United States.
Not even Stephen King could come up with this stuff.
♢
ONLY 90 MILES AWAY
Does the thought strike you that this great nation is riding a time machine backward?
Guess who’s in the headlines again, 54 years after the Cuban revolution, 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fully four years after he quit as Cuba’s boss because he was getting too old and feeble to terrify anybody anymore.
Yep. Fidel Castro.
America, I’ll Be Living In Your Nightmares For The Next Fifty Years!
✍
I’m not part of Castro’s fan club. There’ve been good and bad things to say about his bully-boy reign. Sure, everybody can read and health care coverage is universal in Cuba. But just try being a dissident and see how far that’ll get you on the island.
Anyway, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen, who has no filter between his reptilian brain and his mouth, the other day was talking about the Marlins new stadium which is located in Miami’s Little Havana district.
Perhaps Guillen, not normally known as a sage political observer, figured Hmm, lots of Cubans around here. I’d better say something nice about Castro.
So he gushed about the Havana strongman. “I love Fidel Castro,” he brayed. “I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years but that son of a bitch is still here.”
Suddenly, Guillen found out that the nearly one million Cubans who live in Miami are the ones who’ve wanted to slice Fidel’s throat this last half century. Don’t ask me why, but there’s hardly a group on Earth with longer memories and holding a deeper grudge than the people who fled Cuba after Castro took over.
Miami has rarely seen a storm like the one that’s blowing over town right now.
Local pols are screaming that Guillen should be fired. A state legislator is calling for “punitive measures” against him, according to the Associated Press.
No one knows if this will be enough to satisfy the baying hounds who right now are ringing Marlins Stadium, calling for Guillen’s head.
Look, Guillen’s a big-mouthed dope. So are Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus and every other professional gabber who has delivered racist, sexist, insensitive, insulting, or deliriously uninformed diatribes. But we don’t punish people for stupid talk in my country. We don’t take their jobs away from them.
If we did, everybody would be in hot water and nobody would have a job.
Not The Most Respected Political Commentator Around
✍
Wait a minute…, everybody is in hot water and nobody does have a job. Oh well, you know what I mean.
Back to this going back in time bit, though. Wasn’t it just a few years before Fidel Castro blew into the national consciousness that we proud Americans were punishing folks and taking away their livelihoods just for talking or thinking the wrong way?
It looks like old Joe McCarthy has never really gone away.
“Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.” — Joseph Priestley
♢
WANTING TO REBEL IN THE WORST WAY
Let’s look at something from the viewpoint of a dopey kid who’s burning up with the desire to piss people off.
It’s an easy task for me because that’s precisely the kind of dopey kid I was. That urge to thumb my nose at grownups and society at large was so overpowering that I got myself busted. It wasn’t until a couple of tough guy detectives pounded on the back door of my family’s home and slapped the cuffs on me when I was 17 that I realized the whole F.U. I was shouting at the world might not be a strategic success.
Believe me, having my belt and shoelaces confiscated, sitting in a cell where the toilet has no seat because inmates can kill themselves with it (I still don’t know how they can do it), and being offered the traditional bologna sandwich and a glass of water for dinner profoundly changes one’s attitude toward senseless rebellion.
✍
Anyway, a couple of Bloomington teenagers presumably faced that same reality check this week. The two high school students, a boy and a girl, were hauled in on suspicion of drawing a swastika and writing the word Hitler on a poster at the Jewish studies program office in Goodbody Hall.
Apparently, the kids were hanging around the IU campus, bored, and decided to liven up the decor. The IU police say crude drawings of female parts were also found around Goodbody, drawn with the same type of black marker that the anti-semitic stuff was scrawled in.
I could have been that boy (if I had a girlfriend at that age). So I ask myself, Why would I have done it?
When I was 15, 16, and 17, the Vietnam War was just winding down, Watergate was just gearing up, and the country was just emerging from the chaos of assassinations and race rioting. I concluded this was a sick nation, that I was one of the select few souls perceptive enough to grasp that elementary fact.
Sick Nation
✍
My parents were the two stupidest people to walk the face of this Earth. How they survived the mere act of getting to work in the morning baffled me. My teachers were idiots — all they were concerned about was the length of my hair. The cops were fascists. Politicians were crooked. Corporations were run by greedy pigs who’d sell out their grandmothers for a profit. And even the music on the radio was execrable — I mean, honestly, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree”? And what about “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”?
For pity’s sake, can you blame me for wanting to overthrow the world?
The Last Straw
✍
I was too much of a dope to understand that I could have channeled my rage in some constructive way. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I could have done to, say, force the executives of Ford Motor Company to mend their ways, or convince the Illinois governor not to slurp at the public trough.
The only thing I could think of was to roar.
Yeah, I was dopey, but I didn’t really mean anybody any harm. I wasn’t about to take a gun (which I had access to, thanks to some of my associates in small-time crime) and go out blasting for the lark of it.
Hell, I could hardly muster the bile to punch a guy in the face, although that talent was considered requisite in my neighborhood.
So what was I to do to inform the citizens of this holy land that I considered them consummate boobs?
I fell back on the old reliables: busting windows, splattering paint on walls, petty theft, flashing the finger at passing squad cars (all the while making sure they wouldn’t see me doing it), and other teen boy annoyances.
“Yeah, This’ll Show ‘Em!”
✍
Those two Bloomington kids might well be harboring some of the same grievances I did. Hell, cops are still dousing protesters with pepper spray these days. Corporations are still run by greedy pigs. Pointless wars are still being fought. And Illinois governors are still going to prison.
Work Hard, Study, Mind Your Elders And You, Too, Can Grow Up To Be Governor
✍
The two kids may not know exactly who Otto Kerner was or Rod Blagojevich is, but rest assured they know pols still are adept at digging their hands in our pockets when we aren’t looking. It’s a safe bet to assume, as well, that the two Bloomington teens feel their parents are spectacularly uninformed and incapable of tying their own shoelaces.
And maybe — just maybe — they needed the world to know just how contemptible they think it is.
So, pretend you’re a kid with a half-formed sense of morality. What’s the worst thing you can draw on a wall that illustrates how despicable you think the adult nation is?
A good starting point might be a penis or a vagina, no? That’ll shake ’em up. They’ll realize what idiots they are when they catch sight of that, huh?
Okay, now that we’ve made our point clear on that score, how about politics? Let’s see now, who was the most evil politician of all time?
Duh! Adolf Hitler!
“This Is What I Think Of You.”
✍
Man, nothin’s gonna show these pigs what we think of ’em better than writing the name of history’s most evil man on a poster and drawing a swastika.
You think you’re gonna pull me into your bullshit world, man? Take that! Hitler. Hah!
You may counter that I’m being too forgiving here. Perhaps these two kids have had their brains turned to mush by the rantings of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Perhaps one or both of the kids really hates Jews.
I doubt it. My guess is that neither of the kids knows exactly what a Jew is.
They most likely only know that writing Hitler’s name on a wall pisses people off, big time. And it’s a sure-fire way to make the announcement that we are not you.
I hope the kids had an epiphany when they had their belts and shoelaces taken away.
♢
BIRTHERS NEVER DIE
Can you believe it? Birthers are still around and still making bleating noises.
Birthers.
Jerome Corsi is one of them. You’ve heard of him. Several of his books have made the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
Corsi
✍
Which is ironic because they’re as far from nonfiction as the number one bestseller called “Heaven Is for Real” by that Nebraska preacher named Burpo about his kid’s fever dream fantasy that he died and came back from paradise.
Corsi, of course, is the fabulist who popularized the Swiftboat canard against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, and has since thrown his lot in with the likes of Orly Taitz, who is to sanity what the hot dog station at the Circle K is to gourmet cooking.
Taitz
✍
Corsi earned a doctorate in political science from Harvard, which proves only that even Ivy League institutions make mistakes.
Corsi’s latest flight of psychotic fancy is called “Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case that Barack Obama Is not Eligible to Be President,” published last year even as Barack Obama produced his long-form birth certificate.
Per Corsi’s peculiar logic, that is not the birth certificate.
Corsi, according to Bucco, raised “interesting points I wasn’t aware of, and it made me believe this thing isn’t going away.”
Bucco, by the way, is an alternate spelling of the Italian word for hole. As in the things in both his and Corsi’s heads. Taitz’s cranium is a sieve.
Osso Bucco — Literally, Bone With A Hole
✍
Bucco is the deputy Republican leader in the New Jersey House. Corsi’s speech was sponsored by a gaggle of Tea Party groups as well the Morris County Republican Party.
So this is fairly mainstream stuff. Within my lifetime, the cranks of this holy land have become respectable — which says absolutely nothing about them but everything about us.
See, there’ve always been those who fixate on marginalia. There were guys I used to see at City Hall, for instance, who rode their rusty three-speed bikes to every single City Council Zoning Committee meeting, convinced they were the average citizen’s bulwark against corruption. You know the type — they loiter in the county building halls and mumble hello to passing county board members and whoever is foolish enough to acknowledge them immediately becomes the object of the loiterer’s mantra-like anecdote for the next few weeks: “I was talking to so-and-so at the county building and she says….”
Or how about the insomniacs who listened to all-night syndicated talk radio shows? They knew that the government was sitting on alien visitation evidence in Roswell.
Proof!
✍
They reside at the flange of the sanity’s bell curve.
For most of our history, the ramblings of these folks have been the aural equivalent of the croak of a toad in a wetland ten miles from the nearest outpost of civilization.
Now, though, that toad croak must be breathlessly covered by TV, radio, and newspaper reporters across the nation.
How did that happen?
Is it the inevitable result of me-generation huffing and puffing from the 70s?
You know, everybody’s opinion counts? Feelings are paramount? Facts are fascist? If you believe it, it’s true?
They all preached that you create your own reality.
And no matter how much the Right derides the touchy-feely, post-hippie, 70’s generation, most of them grew up in that era. If they didn’t care for est training and I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, they surely dug the patronizing message that whatever you think or believe is valid.
Well, guess what folks — it ain’t.
No matter how passionately you feel, the world is not flat. The Apollo moon landings were not staged. Alien bodies were not hidden in a hangar at Area 51. And Barack Obama was born in Hawai’i.
“Sex is like bridge; if you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.” — Mae West
♢
THIS JUST IN: ORGASM IS “INTERESTING”
Perhaps the best story I’ve ever read in the Indiana Daily Student appeared Friday. The story, I tell you, makes living in a college town all the more worthwhile.
It’s here, after all, that people actually investigate things like the origin of the universe, the inner workings of the cell, the psychological underpinnings of economics, and — even more intellectually compelling than those topics — the human orgasm.
Debra Herbenick — who, I’ve since learned, is a semi-regular visitor to Soma Coffee — is a research scientist and a director of IU’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. She has released a study indicating that a significant percentage of women who work out at your local gym actually experience orgasm while they’re panting.
Herbenick
✍
One of the Boys of Soma, Real Estate John, works part-time at the Monroe County YMCA. He usually pulls the Friday night shift. I pointed out the story to him. He read it with great interest. He turned to another Soma Boy who regularly works out at the Y on Friday nights and who also read the piece. Real Estate John said, “I have the perfect candidate.” he mentioned the name of a woman they both were acquainted with.
“Oh yeah!” the other guy said. “No wonder she always has an ecstatic look on her face.”
The woman, the fellows explained, is generally attached to the spinning bike.
That device, according to Herbenick, is one of the exercise machines that lends itself nicely to stimulating certain locales of the female anatomy. “[W]omen,” Herbenick told the IDS, “are moving their genitals in the bike seat.”
Spinning classes are awfully popular with women. Now I may know why. It occurs to me I’ve not met many men who take spinning classes. I wonder if this study will inspire more men to get into that regimen.
“Phew. I Need A Cigarette.”
✍
Anyway, Herbenick said her study, which indicated that a shade more than one third of women canvassed have experienced the Big O while working out, “reminds people how interesting orgasm is.”
Can’t argue with that.
♢
SPIES IN THE CLASSROOM OF LOVE
Most of what I learned early on about sex came from a fellow named Dr. David Reuben.
At the age of 14, mine was the most inquiring of minds. Especially about sex.
The book had somehow found its way into our house. I know I didn’t buy it; if I had, it would have been safely stashed in my room somewhere. Under the bed, next to the old liver sausage sandwich, probably — it’s true, for several months there was a liver sausage sandwich under my bed. I recall having made it late one night and, after bringing it back to my room, had promptly fallen asleep without eating it. It wound up under the bed.
Hey, I was 14 — leaving sandwiches under the bed and devouring all printed material pertaining to sex were defining characteristics of the age.
✍
I know Dad didn’t bring the book into the house. My sisters had flown the coop ten years before and my brother was away at college so it couldn’t have been them. Process of elimination left Ma as the likely culprit.
Makes sense.
The women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution were in full swing. Now, Ma wasn’t a practicing libber, nor did she sample the pleasures afforded by the newly relaxed attitudes toward sex. She was Ma, after all.
She was, though, eager to be seen as “up on things.” If either Gloria Steinem or Xaviera Hollander, for instance, was to appear on, say, Dick Cavett’s show on a given night, you can bet Ma’d be parked on the sofa, watching. She bought bestsellers like “Love Story,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and, I assume, Dr. Reuben’s book.
Gloria Steinem
✍
Man, as soon as she finished that thing, I snapped it up and started memorizing it.
Reuben described female topography in terms I’d never heard before. He revealed techniques and practices I could only dream of trying out. My time wouldn’t come for another five or six years, though.
Until then, I considered myself the sexual theoretician of my circle. “It says in David Reuben’s book that a man should…,” I’d begin whenever some sexual topic had arisen.
My pals listened raptly. None of them had the slightest patience to read a book — even one about sex — but they still were curious about the purported expertise Reuben offered.
One day I told Tough Marc about Reuben’s assertion that women know secret methods of masturbation in public. Reuben reported that many women liked to cross their legs and squeeze their inner thigh muscles repeatedly, often bringing themselves to orgasm.
“Oh My God, Is She? Do You Think?”
✍
Now, Tough Marc was a gearhead and he packed a punch that could have been confused with the blow from a sledgehammer, but he was smarter than the rest of my neighborhood pals. He’d confessed he was almost tempted to forgo his long-lasting embargo on books and buy Reuben’s.
Such a concession made him, among my peers, an intellectual. Still, he was able to resist the urge. Last I heard, Tough Marc owned a car wash on the northwest side of Chicago.
Anyway, Tough Marc was fascinated by the revelation that women had ways to stimulate themselves under the table, as it were.
They’d do this on the bus, in the office, in the movie theater, and even standing in line waiting for the next bank teller. The impartial observer, Reuben revealed, could tell when a woman was hard at work in this manner by the swinging of her leg (if she were sitting) and the dreamy look on her face. Tough Marc and I pledged to monitor the legs and face of every woman we might encounter.
In the summer of 1971 both Tough Marc and I found ourselves in summer school taking a make-up course in algebra.
One of our classmates was a girl named Kathy Masterton. We noticed on the first day of class that Kathy Masterton was a champion leg swinger. You couldn’t walk down her aisle for fear of getting kicked in the shin or knee.
Kathy Masterton, too, often stared off into space, her eyes glazed.
Tough Marc and I looked at each other and nodded. After class on that first day we compared notes.
Leg kicks — check. Dreamy look on her face — yup.
Yeah, we concluded, Kathy Masterton confirmed Dr. Reuben’s assertion.
A couple of days later, Tough Marc said he’d come up with a new name for our leg-swinging classmate. “Kathy Masturbant,” he proclaimed, triumphantly. I congratulated him profusely.
As the summer school semester passed, we became transfixed by Kathy Masturbant. We maintained surveillance of her from the bell that signaled the start of class to the one that ended it. She kept up a rhythm with her swinging leg that can only be described as heroic.
Miss Fritz, the algebra teacher, wrote formulas from one end of the blackboard to another but we took no notice of them. Pythagoras, balanced equations, polynomials — none of them meant anything to us. Our focus was on Kathy Masturbant.
“Huh? What? I Dunno.”
✍
Kathy noticed us staring at her. I became concerned she might suspect we were on to her. Nevertheless, she kept swinging her leg.
Kathy smiled at me one day and I smiled back. Tough Marc and I conferred about this development immediately after class. It was decided I should chat her up and, if I was lucky, get the inside dope on this leg-swinging business. “Good luck,” Tough Marc said, solemnly.
It’s important to note that we didn’t hatch this plan just to embarrass her. Nor was our aim to somehow get sex from her. We were still too far away from that Holy Grail to consider it a reasonable possibility.
No, our goal was knowledge. We wanted to know if Dr. Reuben’s leg-swinging theory could be proved. Ours was a scientific quest.
Oh, on second thought, the idea of having sex with Kathy Masturbant must have crossed my mind. I can’t imagine being 15 and certain a girl I knew was masturbating in public and not think it conceivable she might have sex with me.
Then again, Kathy Masturbant was an exceedingly plain-looking girl, which is a nice way of saying she was a gargoyle. In fact, Tough Marc and I cursed our luck that the most likely public masturbator we’d yet found was so homely.
So, we gamely carried out our scientific pursuit.
The next day during class break, I approached Kathy Masturbant in the school parking lot. She was busy lighting one cigarette off another. We exchanged greetings and engaged in a bit of small talk. She seemed easy enough to talk to, although it must be admitted I was scared to ask her about her swinging leg.
“Go On, Man. Talk To Her.”
✍
I glanced over at Tough Marc, who was eying us from several cars away. He could sense my resolve was fading. He mouthed the words “Ask her!” at me.
I screwed up my courage and spoke up. “So, uh, y’know, I see you’re always, like, swingin’ your leg. Know what I mean?”
“I do?” she said.
“Um, yeah. You do.”
“Oh,” she said.
“So, uh, what’s that all about?”
Kathy shrugged. “I dunno. I’m nervous I guess. What’s the big deal about it?”
“No big deal,” I said. “I’m just interested.”
Oops. Wrong choice of words. Kathy interpreted that to mean I was interested in her.
Which I wasn’t. I still had a teenaged boy’s arrogance that made me think she was not attractive enough for me.
Kathy became giddy. She started telling me all about her family and friends. She suggested we go to see the movie “Patton” someday soon. I let it slip that I was a Cubs fan and she jumped on that, saying we had to go to a game that weekend. Next thing I knew, she’d invited me over for dinner that coming Friday.
“Y’mean, Like A Date?”
✍
I hadn’t the heart to turn her down. Plus, there was that little part of me that hoped she, the public masturbator, might let me have sex with her.
That Friday I showed up at her family’s apartment at dinner time. She and her mother had laid out a fancy spread. Clearly, my presence made the affair a special occasion.
After we ate, Kathy’s mother said, “You and your boyfriend go in the living room and watch TV. I’ll do the dishes.”
Boyfriend. My hair stood on end (yes, I had hair.)
We watched “The Brady Bunch” (which I loathed), “Nanny and the Professor” (not only bad, but boring), and “The Partridge Family” (now, that was a good show; Susan Dey inhabited every heterosexual boy’s nocturnal fantasies). For her part, Kathy loved “The Brady Bunch” and was in heaven when “Nanny” came on. “The Partridge Family,” she could take or leave.
Unnnhhh….
✍
Throughout the hour and a half, Kathy’s leg never stopped swinging. At eight-thirty, her Mom came into the living room and said we’d better call it a night. By that time, Kathy had scootched so close to me that I was squeezed into the corner of the sofa.
Kathy put her arm in mine and walked me to the door. I thanked her Mom for the delicious dinner and was about to say goodbye to Kathy when she ushered me onto the front porch and closed the door behind us. She launched into an itinerary that included “Patton” and the Cubs game and four or five other engagements for the two of us over the next couple of weeks. She held my hand as I leaned toward the front steps — swear to god, had she let go, I’d have fallen down the stairs.
Again, I didn’t have the heart to turn her down (nor did I wish to pass up the chance, however negligible, that she’d let me have sex with her.)
Funny thing was, we had a lot of fun over the next couple of weeks. The next Friday night when we walked home from the Tivoli Theater, we took our shoes off because we fancied ourselves sorta-but-not-quite hippies. When we went to the Cubs game, we sat in the very top row of the upper deck and looked out over the city and Lake Michigan and pointed out landmarks to each other. We went to hear Styx at the high school gym and danced until we were soaked in sweat.
C’mon, Go Easy On Me — I Was A Teenager, Okay?
✍
One day in class, Kathy stopped swinging her leg long enough to inform me that her mother would be out that evening. I should come over, she suggested, so we could listen to her new “Shaft” album.
When I told Tough Marc about this, it was his turn to congratulate me profusely. And again, he said solemnly, “Good luck.”
“Shaft” was a double album — total running time, 68:50. Oh, the things we could do in that time frame!
I was beginning to like Kathy. And, truth be told, she wasn’t that bad looking really, as long as I ignored her horn-rimmed glasses and slight case of acne. Only now am I strong enough to admit she had to ignore the same things on me.
We were laying on the living room floor, kissing deeply, by the time Track 4, Side 1 came on. “Ellie’s Love Theme.” Kathy’d said, “I’ll show you how to French kiss.” I thought I might pass out.
John Shaft
✍
By the time Side 2 fell onto the turntable, Kathy pushed me away. “Look here, buster,” she said. “We can do this all night long if you want.”
I nodded enthusiastically; unfortunately there was more.
“But I want to tell you something. I’m a virgin and I’m gonna stay that way! Capeesh?”
I’d never been so relieved in my life. I’d only just learned how to French kiss moments before. Despite reading Dr. David Reuben’s book from cover to cover several times over, I still had no idea what was expected of me had she said tonight’s the night.
Kathy’s Mom came home around 10:30. She looked at us suspiciously. Kathy said, “Mom, we didn’t do anything. We just listened to albums.”
Her Mom looked skeptical. “I don’t want anything going on around here,” she warned.
“Oh no!” I said quickly. “No, no, no, no. Nothing.”
With that I said good night to Kathy and told her Mom how very nice it was to see her again. She nodded but her eyes were narrowed.
Kathy and I lasted about another two weeks, which constituted a committed, long-term relationship at our age. A cosuin had introduced her to a boy who, Kathy told me apologetically, had bedroom eyes. The unspoken question being How could she not start dating him.
I began walking home certain I’d kill myself that night. By the time I’d hit the back door, though, I was over Kathy.
I never did find out if Kathy Masturbant was, well, masturbating when she swung her leg so heroically. In retrospect, I realize I was never cut out to be as accomplished a sex researcher as Debra Herbenick.
♢
THEME FROM SHAFT
Any song off this double album still makes my legs weak.
“The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.” — Clarence Darrow
♢
BZZZZZZZZZZZ!
Steve the Dog and I just had a major drama. I was in the process of typing up the entries below when Steve started getting unusually curious about something in a corner of the garage (where I keep my office).
Suddenly, Steve screech-barked and jumped back. I went over to see what was up and I saw a gigantic bumble bee staggering and lumbering around on the concrete floor.
The hair on my arms turned to tiny needles.
A Cute Little Bunny — I Refuse To Post A Picture Of A Bee
✍
Apparently, the bumble bee took exception to Steve’s sniffing and gave him a shiv to the snoot. Bumble bees, I understand, essentially commit suicide when they sting. I would normally look something like this up to verify it but I’m not gonna do it.
See, I have a bee phobia. Wasps and hornets, too. Merely typing the words makes me shudder. I can’t even look at pictures of the brutes or else I’ll spend the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder in a panic.
You think I’m neurotic about these guys? Take my sister Charlotte and snakes. She can bear them no more courageously than I suffer yellow jackets. Swear to god, Charlotte one day cut the picture illustrating the entry for the word snake out of her family’s dictionary. That’s nuts.
Wanna know what’s more nuts? I wouldn’t even have the cagliones to cut the picture of a bee or wasp out of my dictionary. When I was a kid I read my family’s set of the World Book Encyclopedia voraciously — all except the B volume. I didn’t want to take a chance on seeing a picture of a bee.
See? No Bees
✍
This reminds me of an incident that happened in the Book Corner last summer. I was straightening out the half-price book table near the big front windows. Suddenly I heard what I originally thought was the drone of a World War II fighter plane. It turned out to be one of those titanic carpenter bees.
They stand about six-foot-three and have a wingspan of some three yards. This particular one was hurling himself against the window trying to get out of the place. Honestly, he was smoking a cigarette. I’m not certain but I think he might have been carrying a gun.
I almost lost control of my bodily functions. I dashed to the other end of the store.
Right at this time, my pal Mary Damm, a soil biology researcher at IU, walked in. She could see the terror on my face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I pointed toward the window where, by this time, the carpenter bee was picking up a large volume and preparing to fling it at the glass.
“You’re afraid of a bee?” she marveled. “It won’t hurt you.”
I looked closely at the bee; he glared back at me and drew one of his fingers across his throat in a threatening manner.
“Look,” I said, almost mewling, “I’m scared to death of these things. I don’t know what to do.”
At this point, Mary started telling me what terrific citizens of the Earth bees are. How they keep to themselves and help propagate countless floral species and how they won’t attack you as long as you don’t molest them.
The bee in the window gave me a terrifying glance and made a shushing gesture in my direction. I think I squeaked.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, “but they still petrify me.”
Almost As Terrifying As Bees
✍
“Well,” Mary observed, “that’s not rational.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, my voice shaking. “That’s why they call it a phobia.”
“Well, do you want me to get it out of here?”
Oh! Had I the courage to get within 50 feet of the carpenter bee, I would have run up and hugged her. As it was, I could only shout out, “Yes, please!”
Then I offered to fetch her a cardboard box and a push broom and a snow shovel. “Whatever you need to do the job, I’ll get,” I said. I remembered seeing an axe in the basement and so I made a move in that direction before Mary stopped me.
“I won’t need those things,” she said. “I work in the fields all summer long. I’m used to bees. They don’t bother me at all.”
She directed me to bring her a soft drink cup and a piece of paper. She carefully and calmly crept up on the bee as he stood there, trying to figure out his next strategy. She gently placed the cup over the bee and slipped the paper between it and the glass. Then she took the bee outside and released him over a planter on Kirkwood Avenue.
The bee buzzed off without a single word of gratitude, the hoodlum.
“That’s that,” Mary Damm said. “See. They won’t hurt you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said.
Anyway, the bumble bee today. I grabbed the longest broom I could find and positioned myself as far from the bugger as I could. I stretched and craned and flicked him toward the now-open garage door.
I flicked, that is, if flicking is the proper term one would employ to describe moving something the size of a wrecking ball.
Victory! I got the bumble bee out of the garage.
Safe At Last!
✍
Only I’ll be glancing over my shoulder in a panic occasionally for the rest of today.
♢
HOORAY!
I’m the first guy to howl when the Reagan/Bush/Bush Supreme Court issues one of its baffling decisions — say, the Citizens United imprimatur for big money interests to take over the electoral process in this holy land.
So, when the Court does something praiseworthy, as it did yesterday, I’ll have to give it its props.
The gist of the main case before the Court in this question was that prosecutors had offered a suspect’s lawyer a nice plea bargain deal. The client would have served a 90-day sentence for a petty infraction.
The lawyer, though, forgot or neglected to tell the client. The plea bargain offer expired, the client pleaded guilty without the deal in place, and he was sentence to three years in prison.
Only later did the client find out he could have accepted a three-month sentence.
Oh, just in case you’re thinking that murderers and rapists and terrorists will now waltz out of prison or never even serve time because of this decision, well, you’re wrong.
This decision was based on the case of a man who was — brace yourself — driving without a license.
Kennedy wrote that America’s criminal justice system is no longer a procession of trials but a virtual assembly line of plea bargains. Ergo, when a guy is denied a possible plea bargain because his attorney is a knucklehead, he’s being denied justice.
Kennedy was tabbed for the Supreme Court post by President Reagan in late 1987. In fact, Kennedy was Reagan’s third choice to replace retiring Justice Lewis Powell. Old Dutch first named Robert Bork to the Court but Bork’s history as a collaborationist in Watergate as well as the fact that his views on American justice were formed by his attendance at the Cro-Magnon School of Law torpedoed his nomination. Reagan came back with a fellow named Douglas Ginsburg, who, it was learned — horrors! — had occasionally smoked a joint while he was a law student.
Bork Abetted Nixon
✍
So Kennedy, a less reptilian judge than Bork and a man whose lungs were virginal, was named and confirmed.
Since then, Kennedy has been considered a sort-of swing vote in the Court, although he generally pendulates (I just made that word up!) between Right and Far Right as opposed to Right and Left.
The Court since the days of Reagan has become about as Right Wing as a country club locker room. Here’s the current lineup of the Court:
Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush)
By the way, Kennedy was confirmed 97-0 by the Senate a quarter of a century ago. Doesn’t that kind of bipartisanship seem rather quaint?
Anyway, the Court often rules 5-4 in cases that reflect any cultural or moral divide in these Great United States, Inc. The five, of course, being the quintet of Reagan/Bush/Bush boys.
The lesson? Even though it appears there’s barely a fine hair of distinction between President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, would you really want Romney to start paying off his political debts by naming a sixth conservative to the Court?
And what if this great nation fully tumbles into the Twilight Zone this summer and fall and somehow winds up with Rick Santorum as president? Who’s he gonna name to the Supreme Court? Michele Bachmann?
“No, Really. My Husband’s Straight. No Lie. He’s Into Women. Really.”
✍
All I’m saying is your vote matters this November.
♢
AM I ALIVE?
With all the Big Questions swirling around these days, isn’t it disconcerting to realize we don’t even know exactly what life is?
Oh, I don’t mean all those clever answers like “Life is a long lesson in humility” (James M. Barrie) or “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act” (Truman Capote).
No, I mean what is life?
As in, what’s the difference between a rock and a human being? We all agree a human being has life, right? And the rock does not.
Not Alive
✍
Now tell me why we know that.
You can’t.
Nor can the greatest life scientists on this weird planet.
Lisa Pratt, Provost’s Professor of Geological Sciences here at IU, for one, can’t tell us what life is. And, hell, she’s a specialist in something called biogeochemistry. Yee-oww.
Pratt told a panel of life scientists at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures yesterday that no one has developed an agreed-upon definition of life so far. “To accept the fact that scientists can’t seem to reach an agreement on the most basic ideas is troubling,” she said.
Alive
✍
It may be troubling to her but I find it rather comforting. Nature humbles us. The imams and priests and lamas of the world tell us they have the answers. The scientists, though, say Search me.
From now until mid-November the little domed structure just off Indiana Avenue near the Sample Gate will be open to the public. You can peer planets and stars through the Astronomy Department’s telescopes each Wednesday night, provided the sky is clear. Hours are from 9-11pm until mid-April. Every couple of weeks thereafter the facility will open and close a half-hour later due to Daylight Savings Time. After the June solstice, open hours will begin creeping back earlier as the summer wears on.
