American Fez

Barnacle Bills

The start of each new month brings its economical storms, when the bottom line is transformed into transactional tidal waves of profit and loss, crests and troughs in our pocket books. It's an uncharted ocean with murky depths, sudden swells but also hidden rocks, difficult to navigate without a budgeting compass. I saw my financial advisor get swallowed by a great white whale and have been my own captain ever since. I sail up to the Wells Fargo teller in my yellow sou'wester and oilskin cape, peg leg clacking on the marble floor tiles. 'I'd like to make a deposit to Davy Jones' Locker and transfer fifty Spanish doubloons from my Dead Man's Chest,' I say. The teller shakes her head of seaweed hair and speaks, but all I hear is the mournful sound of the foghorn. 

A spendthrift in spindrift, the old sea dog-eared dollar is tossed in a northerly gale. Batten down the bank balance and bale out those overdue bills. Beware the whirlpool of predatory lending: for around and around you go, unable to escape until you are finally sucked under. Try to find safe harbor in a high yield savings account, if you can. Land ahoy!, we hear from time to time, hoping it's Treasure Island. But more often than not, they're minting Robinson Crusoe's face on their promissory notes. Piracy seems the only way. Hoist the Jolly Bitcoin, I guess.

Parole Parole Parole

This crumpled, dog-eared blog is lodged in the back of my brain like an unpaid bill. American Fez owes at least a hundred words to Reader Utility Corp but all I have in the idea bank is a few pre-decimal paragraphs, some old Cyrillic letters left over from my Macedonian vacation five years ago, and that incomplete sentence I'm saving in my back pocket for a rainy day. But it's been a few weeks since I updated the page so I suppose this must be my mind making a final demand. So how am I going to pay? It's a mystery to me but every now and again I do manage to scrape a post together to keep the blog bailiffs at bay.

And even when I do cough up the requested 'content,' is it still credited to my account? Honestly, it often seems as if nobody at Reader Utility Corp is actually checking my balance, probably because they've long ago written off American Fez as a deadbeat proposition. Nevertheless, here is my latest remittance: a self-referential amalgam of self-justifying statements that will only please myself dispatched into the digital void and receiving no receipt. You surely can't get more 'Internet' than that, although maybe I should try sending non-sequitur sentences to a legion of Twitter doom-scrolling followers. It is the approved method of modern micro-blogging, after all.

Will There Still Be Wasps

Like many people in these interesting times, my thoughts turn to the human colonization and environmental development of Mars. In particular, I wonder whether there will still be wasps buzzing about our terraformed, idyllic, child's picture-book landscape. As we new Martian citizens sit down to picnic on a smorgasbord of genetically modified sustenance, will wasps still dive bomb our synthetic ice creams and cakes? And what about ants? Will armies of determined  ants still march over our ham-clone sandwiches and lab-grown salads? 

Of course they will. Somehow, someway, annoying insect stowaways will sneak onto the space ships blasting off towards humanity's future home. We may be intrepid pioneers and pilgrims creating a technological Garden of Eden on the so-called red planet, but in entomological respects our Adam and Eve will be Little Miss Muffet and Gregor Samsa, and I doubt, clever though he may be, that Elon Musk has calculated exactly how much bug spray Space X will need to send into orbit. Nevertheless, it is a great relief to know that those of us who don't understand computer coding will still be able to find work as fly swatters and cockroach exterminators in this brave new world. So westward ho and hurrah for the wasps and their creepy-crawly friends

Goggle Boxing

Everyone has a TV mind these days: she is streaming self-produced dramas straight into her synapses; he still has Cable hooked up to his cerebral cortex. Both are constantly broadcasting a roster of inaccurate news updates, infomercials for disposable lifestyles, unfunny split-second sitcoms and long documentaries about themselves and their opinions. She is currently hosting her own version of The View, discussing new shoes for Fall; he is a contestant on a game show, trying to win the first prize Porsche but he'll settle for twenty thousand in cash. Their entire day is filmed live in front of an imaginary studio audience of the world, who clap and applaud when he and she enter the scene and utter their famous catchphrase "Please pay attention to me." 

Alas, everyone else has a TV mind too, so attention spans ares short. Even if I do momentarily acknowledge their presence on my screen, it's only as a walk-on role, not the star of the show, who of course is me, or at least was me until the latest episode of My Working Week got such very low ratings. Industry insiders claim My Working Week will be cancelled after this season, in favor of an Investigative Reports special where a camera crew follow me going to different offices in search of another job. I just hope it's a feel-good story about finding a new vocation after fifty, and not some hard-hitting expose of rising unemployment amongst middle-aged men. I guess we shall see when the next issue of my personal TV Guide is published. Until then, tune in next week for another thrilling installment.

Polls Pall

Never before, at least not in my lifetime, have our presidential candidates been so selective and exclusive with their appeals to the American people. Instead of appeals for national unity, both Trump and Harris are writing-off entire sectors of the population in order to focus on scavenging the 51% of votes needed for election. If you cannot be included in their 'base' then you will be ignored and ridiculed and threatened with either imprisonment or deportation if your side loses. Which candidate has the most celebrity endorsements? I don't know. I've never heard of any of these people. Honestly, I think WrestleMania staged in a mud bath has more dignity and subtlety than the Republican and Democratic campaigns combined. The both make Silvio Berlusconi look like a philosopher-king.

Consequently, since our current choices are limited to these unacceptable showmen and buffoons, I shall write-in a name on my ballot. I'm not sure who yet, possibly a fictional character worthy of the role of Leader of the Free World. And why not? After all, surely our recent technological advances in the areas of cybernetics and AI can make such a gambit feasible. The boffins could maybe even merge two venerable personalities, one real and one imaginary, into a single supreme presidential figure: Aristotle and Eisenhower mix with a melange of Moses and Cleopatra as their running mate. That should cover most political bases. Their opposition could be Disraeli fused with the Queen of Sheba, which would be really interesting in the swing states. Then our AI ballot could also contain a Akhenaten and Buenaventura Durruti blend as a third party option for all the contrarian voters. The possibilities here are endless.

Je Pense

In the olden times, back when city book shops were still thriving, I would wander their paperback-bulging aisles for many hours. But like an apprehensive pedestrian crossing the road when confronted by approaching delinquents, always studiously avoiding the so-called Self Help section with its pop psychology best sellers and pop-up chakra alignment guides.

Not that I held any particular animus against positive thinking or personal growth, I just didn't see why I should have to do all this Self Help work on my own. After all, it wasn't my fault if I was born diffident, shy, and melancholic. Surely these apparent defects were an accident of birth and environment and not my fault at all. So I was damned if I was going to spend good money on a book requiring hours of reading and naval-gazing to address them.

Consequently I eschewed Kahlil Gibran, Madame Blavatsky and Norman Vincent Peale in favor of Andre Malraux, Albert Camus and pretty much anyone else who'd been photographed with a very serious expression in the pages of Combat magazine. In those days I thought all the answers were published by Editions Gallimard or could be found by looking through a pair of Vuarnet sunglasses, darkly. In purely literary terms, I obviously made the correct decision but unfortunately found myself smoking far too many cigarettes and drinking entire carafes of coffee, a lethally cliched combination that seriously affected my health. If only I'd researched Tarot cards and pyramid power back then instead of Left Bank arrogance I'd not entertain wheezing second thoughts about ascending the Rue Foyatier steps today.

I suppose that's the wisdom of the ages: follow your mentor's philosophy but for Heaven's sake reject his accessories, whether they be a pack of Gauloises or homemade sandals and a Kaftan. Any form of self-flagellation is the big no-no here, especially carrying a huge cross on your shoulders at Easter or spending your life's savings on an economy plane ticket to Mecca. It's too late for me. I'm typing this at an alfresco cafe table while pontificating about Algerian history to an unrepentant communist. But even though there are no extant city book stores today, if you want to help yourself, there is still time for you to download the complete works of Parmenides to the e-reader of your choice. It shouldn't take long because there's only one work and it's composed of fragments. Now that's the best kind of wisdom, if you ask me.

Mariana Trench Inc

Today is Wednesday, also known as 'Hump Day' in office jargon. For some reason, for me, that image of a hump always calls to mind a whale surfacing in the sea rather than an obstacle to be surmounted. From there it's easy to imagine the progress of the entire working week as a great Orca swimming through the ocean deep: Monday is the flopping tail that propels me forward, Wednesday the aforementioned hump, and finally Friday as a joyous spout of water vapor in the air. And I am obviously Jonah, swallowed by the behemoth on Monday morning then spat out again on Friday afternoon.

Except, these days, the working week is surely more of an ugly bottom-feeder than a majestic whale. In fact, let's go with a slippery saltwater eel and the nine-to-five as just one long unpleasant wriggle, in and out of the empty eye sockets of some drowned sailor's skull. And there is no sunken Spanish galleon this far down, no shell-encrusted treasure chest overflowing with golden coins, not even a mermaid to guide me through the trails of seaweed. Just the impenetrable darkness and eerie silence wherein lies the wreckage of your desk.

Falling For Fall

In the midst of winter, Albert Camus apparently found within himself an invincible summer. One can only imagine the oppressive humidity; the perpetually sweaty armpits; the wasps repeatedly dive-bombing your ice cream. You'd think, having grown up in the Algerian heat, Camus would make better seasonal choices in his life.

For me, I think I'd find within myself an invincible Autumn. I'd be reasonably content with an invincible Spring but I'd prefer Autumn. Just imagine, it's deep midwinter, your heart is frozen stiff and your brain is encased in ice, but all of a sudden you feel fruitfully mellow. Is that mulled cider running through your veins and an apple pie baking in your solar plexus? Yes it is and it sure beats the painful sunburn you'd  suffer from in an invincible summer.

I suppose there may be dark moments when a dreadful sense of pumpkin spice pervades the air, but on the whole you're sitting on a park bench admiring Mother Nature's paintbrush tinting the trees shades of red and orange. The days maybe shorter than summer, but who in the name of Sisyphus likes long days? Bring on cozy nights by the fireside.

NIMBY

The wood at the bottom of the road is quite frightening. Even Pan would think twice about playing his pipes in such a dark, unwelcoming thicket. The trees seem huddled together, shivering in the wind, their crooked branches reaching into the sky as if trying to claw themselves out of the undergrowth, desirous of being elsewhere, anywhere else besides being rooted at the bottom of the road. But that's impossible now and so the trees have turned inwards, developed a sort of evergreen insularity that denies shade from the sun or shelter from the rain to their human neighbors, won't allow owls to perch in their hollows and irritably shakes squirrels from their boughs. Only fungi are welcome in the wood. In fact, for all I know, maybe the fungi are calling the shots here. After all, a simple mycelium brain is perfectly happy subsisting at the bottom of anything, never mind a two-way road that's recently been repaved.

Of course, once upon a time, this entire area was the wood. Then Josiah Pitman felled a few conifers and built his house. Ebenezer Gifford felled a few more conifers and built another house next door. And so on. Soon the only conifers remaining were the conifers at the bottom of the newly formed road. And I suppose those conifers have been afraid of being felled ever since, which is why they've become a vicious gang of thuggish trunks with body-armor bark, knuckle-duster roots and razor-sharp leaves. See how those crows keep their distance, preferring the relative safety of the power lines; how the windblown plastic bags evade getting snagged in the treetops by clinging to telephone poles instead. It's been like this for as long as I can remember and long before that no doubt.

Nevertheless, the wood, defined by developers as a vacant lot, is up for sale. Someone has plans for one of those fashionable cubist homes that look like life-size Lego blocks. It will be strange to see the bottom of the road filled with bright yellow electric light and the blue flicker of widescreen television. Perhaps it's all for the best. After all, the frightening wood serves nobody and Mother Nature herself has apparently forgotten it exists. A new house, despite its incongruous architecture, will at least be a genteel addition to the neighborhood and not the setting for some cautionary fairy tale. Although I suppose that very much depends on who comes to live in the new house. I do hope they don't ally themselves with the two or three vengeful trees which will surely survive the building contractor's axe. We don't want a frightening family collecting multiple rusting cars and overflowing garbage cans at the bottom of the road. 

Just Sayin'

I was about to dive into the waves at Half Moon Beach when Autumn tapped me on the shoulder. Beware, a mellow voice said, the sea is much colder than it was yesterday; observe that it's not so blue now, and perhaps even saltier, and how the incoming tide harvests endless streams of black weed; the sun won't shine for as long today and the sand beneath your feet is no longer golden. Time to collapse the umbrella and fold up the loungers and those stripy towels. All you can hear is the sound of shells being crushed beneath sandaled feet as the refugees from summer disappear between the dunes. You should pack your stuff up too, the voice continued, but maybe come back tomorrow, well-wrapped up in a rain jacket and wearing boots and perhaps you could stand at the water's edge and write a poem if so inspired. Then Autumn laughed and kicked sand in my face. Never mind, it concluded, you looked pretty stupid in that straw fedora anyway and those round shades are the wrong shape for your face. You're too short for surfer board shorts and definitely too old for that punk rock pattern. You also might want to check out how much unwanted back hair is sprouting across your shoulders these days. Not a pretty sight, it must be said. Even the washed-up jellyfish don't want to see that. If I were you I'd consider investing in a full body wet-suit next year. You'd be doing everyone a favor. Actually, it would be for the best if you just remained sat on the benches by the parking lot, watching the sunset and remembering days of yore, instead of venturing down to the beach in all your scrawny, pasty-white glory.

Noise Annoys

Last week, I attended the grand opening of Quiet Place: A Human Sanctuary, which is a small local park newly built on the site of a decommissioned gas station. The event was celebrated with performances from three rock bands followed by a "guided community meditation" conducted with the aid of a megaphone. So much for being a quiet place. And, judging by the cosplay-inspired appearance of some of the participants, I'm not entirely sure it was entirely human either.

The rock bands had all arrived in tricked-out transit vans. I hoped they had enough gas to get them home again, as the decommissioned gas station whose grave they sang upon was the only gas station for miles around. Nowadays you need to drive about ten miles out of town to find the nearest Shell or Sunoco. We joke that you need a full tank just to fill up, which is why I drive an electric car these days. I charge its battery at the EV-Go outside the library, another supposedly quiet place full of rambunctious patrons playing loud video games on the free computers.

Fortunately, from time to time, I can now claim access to an almost inaccessible beach; a hidden cove whose inconvenient geology defies the best efforts of sunbathers and swimmers. It's far away from home but worth taking the trip whenever I can. Walking there, however, is a risk, as you must clamber around slippery rocks and slalom between piles of flea infested seaweed. But I love the peace it provides and soak up the relative silence like a budding flower soaks up the sunlight. The sole disturbances are the occasional cries of the cormorants, the crash of the waves, and the crunch of pebbles under my feet. Ah yes, how typical of the modern world that to bask in a quiet place and a human sanctuary I must move as far away as possible from the Quiet Place: A Human Sanctuary.

The Free Range Manifesto

The state of the world, I feel, may be likened to an egg being fried in a skillet. This egg once had the potential to hatch into a fecund chicken, prancing and clucking around the farmyard in feathery splendor, laying yet more eggs from coop to shining coop. Alas, its current fate is to become breakfast for some avaricious, ungrateful child, who devours the egg in a high-chair while we hungry multitudes are forced to watch.

And it's not as if we haven't hear the sizzling of this egg being fried all along. We even applauded the cracking of its shell. We approved the addition of salt and pepper. We ordered 'sunny-side up' but the cooks weren't listening. They had other plans: lots of processed cheese and greasy bacon in what they call an omelette for everybody. But all most of us get is trickle-down drips of fat. Is it any wonder we are unwell? If only the egg was allowed to hatch, then at least we could nurse ourselves with chicken soup. But hatching takes time and time is money and plutocrats are greedy.

Obviously, my egg-as-world analogy does require the existence of a chicken-as-world that came first, a self-perpetuating chicken that I believe was slaughtered crossing the road from an agrarian to an industrial society. But did this original chicken only lay a single egg? If not, where are the others? Is there an egg box hidden somewhere in a secret vault from which a fresh egg is drawn whenever needed? If so, how many eggs are left in the box? Alas, these are the important questions only a conspiracy theorist with a podcast and much time to waste can answer. 

The Ghost of the Good Humor Man

So the old ice cream shack at Golden Sands has finally fallen into the sea, victim of a crumbling shoreline as flimsy as the brittle waffle cones the shack used to serve. I recall how the burden of two scoops of vanilla would result in significant structural damage to the cone that supported them. God forbid anyone requested the additional weight of slivered almonds or other toppings. The trick was to devour your treat as quickly as possible before the cone collapsed and half-licked balls of ice cream tumbled to the ground with a sickening splat. In those days, the shack was always surrounded by many tearful children whose parents could provide no consolation.

But that was many years ago, back when I was an anxious and sweet-toothed adolescent. The shack itself had been abandoned sometime in the early 2000s and was now a weatherbeaten ruin even the town couldn't be bothered to demolish. Occasionally I'd stroll by at sunset, observing how the multicolored delights the shack once contained were all melted away, except for that single tub of unloved and unscooped Stracciatella which was no doubt still inside, cobwebbed in a corner like a rusting drum of toxic waste. Nobody ever ordered Stracciatella as far as I know, but since the owner was Italian he insisted it remain on the menu regardless. I wonder whatever happened to Sal Gelato? His family came to the New World and built a business on a part of it that was now eroded into nothingness. Prego. 

Who would want to eat ice cream here these days anyway? Even the golden sands the area was named after vanished back into the ocean during the late nineteen-eighties, leaving nothing but a narrow band of coastal wasteland. The washed-up sea-glass is still sharp and the seaweed smells like Death's armpits. I think I remember sun-kissed, curvaceous dunes and salty air but I'm not sure anymore. Perhaps it was always this barren and, hypnotized by summer and the illusions of a youthful sugar rush, I just didn't notice back then. It's probably best to let those memories be washed away with the shoreline before they reveal layers of rotting, flaky sentimentality.

And besides, there's a brand new ice cream franchise in the strip mall only a mile down the road, offering a larger variety of flavors in more substantial waffle cones, including fat-free frozen yoghurt and artificially sweetened sorbet. It's called Chill Out Palace, and despite not having water views, yet, you can take your time enjoying your ice cream without fear of it falling on the floor. Of course, I usually order the Stracciatella because that's become my favorite flavor in adulthood. Would Sal Gelato be smug or bitter? I don't know, he never gave much away. Whatever, his work at Golden Sands was definitely done in every sense of the term.

How To Look At The World

How to view the world in these troubled times: Through rose-tinted spectacles?Cheekily, through those over-sized joke shop glasses equipped with a big plastic nose and spiky eyebrows? Through defocused binoculars pointing backwards? With one eye through the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, pretending to be Admiral Nelson? Through repeatedly manipulating a child's kaleidoscope? Or perhaps from the relative safety of the International Space Station like the astronaut in David Bowie's song.

Alas, most people apparently view the world these days by constantly refreshing enraged social media posts on their computers and phones. Put your electronics down, I want to say to them, here is an Etch-a-Sketch representation of a human brain and it reveals as much truth about the world as the Internet does. Observe how the brain cells are instantly rearranged when you shake the Etch-a-Sketch and twist its knobs. Have fun with it, go crazy. Now shake your head and try the same thing with your real brain. The possibilities are endless although you might get dizzy.

As regular readers will know by now, I view the world through a process of Bibliomantic divination, using a combination of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Fodor's Guide to the Best Beaches in the Seychelles (1994 edition). The answer this oracle imparts is usually "Beneath the sidewalk, the beach!" which I guess is a type of confirmation bias, but nothing is perfect, obviously.

Genius loci

Jerry worked in Accounts Receivable. He died about two years ago. I don't think the pressures of the job killed him but you can never be quite sure these days. A career in  Receivable is a subtle assassin; a deft hand with its own voodoo enchantments and at serving up poisons disguised as ambrosia. 

Sometimes I think I see Jeff's anxious shade still wandering the empty cubicles, doomed to haunt the photocopier for eternity, seeking the replacement ink cartridges he could never find in life because our parsimonious office manager always hid them. Although her drastic tactics didn't help the bottom line one jot.

But such paranormal activity is just my imagination playing tricks, as I toil by myself in this deserted and silent former place of business. Everybody else is working from  home today and the phone doesn't ring anymore. I tap on my computer keyboard with one finger and it sounds like Chinese water torture.

I remember when the elevator used to ping as it arrived at our floor. Then a satisfying whoosh as the doors opened, discharging a gaggle of chatty executives into the lobby. Oh the days of dynamism and endeavor. Now there is just the monotonous hum of fluorescent lightning and the ghostly footfall of long gone colleagues. 

Even if Death had not taken him, I doubt that Jerry would still be here. We no longer have any accounts to receive so what would he do? I guess Jacob Marley is the only job he is qualified for in the current climate. But Jeff's spirit would not be caught up in his own chains, of course. No, instead he'd be enshrouded in spectral graph paper and unpaid bills. "I told you so. I did try to warn you," he would moan and wail, then fade away like all our profits of yesteryear.

So here I sit, acting the Hamlet in a desolate lonely conference room. But the situation is not really that Shakespearean except for the ghost, probably closer to the Theater of the Absurd, I'd guess, The Chairs by Ionesco maybe. Meanwhile, since I can't afford to retire or quit, I'll search the Internet for a reasonably priced exorcist. It's time for the spirit of this place to move on to a better place. Sooner rather than later for the sake of my sanity.

Stale

In the break room at lunch time, Terry always eats the same sort of sandwich. His ritualized repast begins at twelve-thirty on the dot. A semi-translucent Tupperware container is ceremoniously unsealed, revealing two rectangular assemblages of brown bread whitewashed on one side with mayonnaise then plastered with oval slivers of brick red ham and a square of fluorescent yellow cheese each. Perfect edible geometry not even disturbed by an anarchic flourish of lettuce nor polka-dotted with pickles. It's just sliced bread, mayo, meat and Swiss with no variety of vegetable at all, and methodically chewed through in glum silence. Bonn appetite, Terry. I imagine even condemned men provide more convivial companionship at their last meals, the execution chamber like party central compared to our break room. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if one morning he failed to appear at his desk, having hung himself in his kitchen at home, unable to face the unremitting repetitiveness of the daily grind.

Consequently, I avoid the break room when Terry is there, often eating my own lunch before noon or, if Terry is masticating especially slowly, as late as two pm. He's too reminiscent of the Jonah character in ancient sailing lore, the cursed deckhand destined to bring bad luck and disaster down upon his ship and fellow crew. If only there were a metaphorical desert island where we could abandon him, a remote cubicle located at the other end of the building, isolated from the regular office and its staff. He'd be allowed the Man Friday of an email account but unable to access any kind of visual communication. Then he could munch his monotonous sandwiches in private without depressing everybody else. Perhaps I will suggest this solution to Human Resources, such as they are, although collecting cash from my co-workers to buy him a box of sushi or Pad Thai every now and again would be much easier. Most people would contribute, I think. Just another tax we must pay to stop the insidious contagion of sterility creeping into our own lives.

The Dark House

After sixteen years of service, Sally has become part of the furniture. In her case, one of those old-fashioned lace squares that a grandmother might drape across the top of a wing-backed armchair. It once was white but has now yellowed with age. And there are a few stains we try to ignore. I'm not sure we'd know how to clean them off anyway. Hand wash? Too much trouble; not worth the effort.

No doubt Sally thinks I'm part of the furniture too: a metal storage cabinet full of graph paper who dreams of being a sleek, mid-century coffee table strewn with art books and a vintage vase. There's some truth in that, I suppose. Or perhaps she doesn't think anything about me at all. I'm invisible to Sally, like the grime that gathers in the corners of our cubicles or the layers of dust falling week after week on the office printers. I guess we're both part the furniture in an unloved house.

So what about the new guy, Colin, with his new ideas and new energy? He's not part of the furniture yet and he probably never will be. Colin wants to be a breath of fresh air but he's more of a sickly-sweet scented candle. He will burn briefly only to find his flame extinguished within a year or two, replaced by one of those traditional legal lamps with a green glass shade. That's what happens if you don't 'go' with our existing decor.

Ship's Log

While seeking the fabled "folder containing the actual information I need," the arrowed pointer on my computer screen froze like Franklin's icebound ship in search of the Northwest Passage. Perhaps the files languishing deep its hard drive will resort to byte-sized cannibalism. Maybe National Geographic will one day feature the mummified remains of all my software in a six page spread. I suppose I could Google the problem but the Internet here is now snow blind, inaccessible tundra. It's a long and difficult trek to the cafeteria from here but I can assemble a reconnaissance party of interns to forage for coffee and donuts. Meanwhile, I'll send out AI created distress signal emails from my phone. There is always hope, even in the bleakest of conditions.

 

Thou Shalt Consult Expedia

There is a Moses in my mind, tending to a flock of idle thoughts, who is surprised by a majestic voice from within a burning synapse. "Call your travel agent," the voice commands. "You must lead your luggage into the promised vacation."

Suffice it to say, the ten bucket list destinations are carved in stone tablets of gray matter. Top of the list is northwestern Sicily, which although unreachable by floating down the river in a basket doesn't require parting any red seas to get there. I can simply book a seat on ITA Airways, the new Alitalia.

Apparently, the Moses in my mind is done with working for Pharaoh every day and who can blame him? After all, over the years, the daily grind has changed from a challenging eight hours of productive activity to an interminable fog of superficial burdens; specialist knowledge and consummate artistry become merely the installation of an app and a series of point and clicks on a computer screen.

Other prophets I know are already retired and living off manna from their many investments. Alas, I'm not sure this Moses has got enough stashed away his Ark of the Covenant to give Pharaoh the finger just yet but his knuckle is slowly unfolding. Meanwhile, he has the consolation of pontificating to the juniors about the good old days while downloading street maps of Palermo

Customer Service

The agent's face was stone cold, disengaged, her thoughts elsewhere, like the marble face of some minor deity's sculpted head emerging from the earth after thousands of years of burial beneath a Turkish shopping mall. Despite being surrounded by much activity she was deaf to the world around her, especially the world as represented by the man in line in front of me who was almost screaming across the counter in her direction. Blind, also, as she seemed completely oblivious of an ever-lengthening queue of irate customers who were quickly becoming an uncontrollable mob bellowing into bottomless pit.

Staff shortages, I suppose, was the explanation. Overworked and underpaid, the agent's brain had simply shut down and surrendered to the nirvana of total apathy. Perhaps she'd eventually rouse herself to depart the counter in body as well as mind, leaving my fellow plaintiffs and I to demand answers from an empty chair. I couldn't blame her. Minimum wage was surely not worth suffering through this much soul destroying aggravation every day, processing the trivial and petty complaints of an enraged and entitled consumer society. 

I'd only joined the line to ask about getting a new membership card, something to do during my lunch break. But my plans were stymied by someone who could not comprehend that last week's price-saver deal was not extended into this week; someone else who for some obscure reason needed to return an entire shed of unused gardening tools; and finally the screaming man in front of me who, well, I wasn't sure what he wanted because his argument had rapidly become incoherent. Clearly I was not going to get my new card today. Just another unproductive hour spent struggling in the quicksand of other people. Will the robots, when they come, be more efficient wranglers of humanity and its discontents? Probably not. After allm, even circuits blow and gears grind to a halt when put under too much pressure.

A Shell Of One's Own

So many homeless crabs stagger sideways across the beach, seeking makeshift shelters in shanty towns of seaweed and driftwood. The rip tide of pebbles here is strong enough to crack any crustacean in half in a flash. Predatory gulls circle overhead and there are callous children with nets and buckets. Meanwhile, luxury rocks pools like these pictured below are vacant and unused all summer long, bought up by speculating mussels and clams as investment properties or second homes. No wonder poor crabs are forced to carry their homes on their backs from shore to shore when they'd much rather settle down in some sandy cove. Where's the justice? 

Ink Stains

At work, but not busy, I look up from my newspaper and see the puzzle page reflected in the faces of my coworkers: He has a Sudoku frown imprinted on his forehead; she wears a full-body crossword; they collaborate to connect letters in the Word Jumble. And I sigh, knowing that soon everyone will be cheating, surreptitiously glancing the answers printed upside down on the following page. Only I attempt to solve the daily chess problem. It takes me all morning until I'm finally checkmated by the classified ads.

Frankly I'm surprised we still get the newspaper delivered. Our subscription is surely an unnecessary extravagance in an age of cutbacks and economies. Yet it arrives at the reception desk each morning without fail (the only thing around here that doesn't fail, if I'm honest). It's a relic from the antediluvian past, as ancient as a fax or a carbon copied memorandum; a Memento Mori reminding us that we, too, should perhaps be actually doing something worth reporting, instead of immediately turning to the funny pages to kill a little time.

But actually doing something is not so easy when your company's entire business model is as dynamic as a fly trapped in amber. Which is no doubt why we still subscribe to the newspaper. The medium is the message, of course, and this message is: your processes and methods are as obsolete as the printing press. You are still thrashing about in sheets of A4 when you need to be zooming across the digital Cloud. You are distracted by unfunny cartoons and bamboozled by irrelevant puzzles. You go to shake hands with potential clients only to find your fingers are covered with newsprint ink stains. 

My Theological Schism

The anceint Temple of Typo stood on a plateau overlooking the vast keyboard plain and the rolling printer hills beyond. During the Festival of Fat Fingers, throngs of wailing scribes would prostrate themselves before the colossal statue of Qwerty the Proofreader, begging forgiveness for their egregious errors. Each penitent scribe's forehead was marked with a cross by the Temple Editor, wielding a yellow highlighter pen as a symbol of his divine authority. "Strikethrough! Strikethrough!" the baying mobs outside the temple chanted. "Strikethrough!" 

Such passionate scenes of religious zeal were common only five years ago, as many apostates failed to read back what they had written before releasing their typo-laden documents into the world. Alas, today the Temple of Typo lies in silent ruins. Chants of Strikethrough have been silenced by the creeping advance of Artificial Intelligence. The Temple Editor's highlighter pen is broken in twain, abandoned by the heretical adherents of Chat GPT and auto spell-checking text bots.

Employing these tools of the Devil to create amusing images that illustrate your blogs posts, however, is pretty cool if you ask me.

NIMBY

The gentrification of Armpits continues apace with some exciting news. In addition to the biweekly trimming schedule initiated last month, a new block of luxury, designer deodorant has been applied to both underarm districts. It is not only Aluminium-free to address environmental concerns but also offers an attractive sandalwood scent, so is sure to become a welcome addition to our daily ablutions. 

Alas, some neighbors have complained that zoning regulations demand the new deodorant has antiperspirant properties also. While we understand the interest in reducing streams of sweat from contaminating the areas in question, we feel that such manipulation of the sudoriferous glands undermines the natural bacterial processes of our local biosphere.

If these gentrification proposals prove both popular and effective, frequent maintenance of the type described above will be extended to other regions of the body where age and apathy have taken their toll, notably East and West Nostril, Upper Lip, and the bailiwick of Scrotum, all of which are in much need of care and attention. Planning proposals have been posted in the bathroom.

The Other Wall Street

The buck has stopped here. Okay, fine, I can deal with whatever. I'm inured to it by now.  Honestly, if I had a dollar bill for every buck that stopped with me I could finance a pole dancer's college education. Such are the economic realities of office policy.

Apparently someone was very busy surreptitiously passing the buck from desk to desk until its long journey finally ended at mine, materializing out of thin air like forgotten money falling from an old jacket pocket. I guess I'll just save this buck with the others that came to rest in my purview this fiscal year.

So the buck slowly reveals itself, crawling out of a sealed manila envelope marked 'Immediate Attention Required' in block capitals so the handwriting cannot be identified. Not that I care who's responsible. All the usual buck-passing suspects are equally as worthless as each other. Consequently individual culpability is irrelevant since any buck passer caught red-handed is merely replaced by yet another buck passer. It's a vicious circulation, so to speak, apparently without HR regulation.

No doubt I'll be required to explain the buck's provenance at some point in the future. The current rate of exchange is fifteen emails per buck; inter-departmental memos having fallen three-eighths of a percent against the rising email in recent trading. Fortunately, I can afford to take the hit. I've been working here so long I've become to big to fail.

And my vague 'In God We Trust' excuses and justifications do keep the higher-ups happy whenever a stopped buck is questioned. I call these exculpatory presentations "Quantitive Pleasing.' I have become the Federal Reserve of Failure.

Text written by me. Image produced by AI, obviously.

Ship Wreck

Whenever reference is made to Plato's political allegory of the Ship of Fools, I always recall Roy Schneider's famous quip in Jaws: "You're going to need a bigger boat," because God knows there are far too many fools already. 

But to my dismay, our modern systems of governance has provided a bigger boat, one much larger than any luxury ocean liner currently at sea. Observe this monstrous vessel steaming into every port to unleash its blundering rabble of useful idiots upon a previously quiet and serene way of life. They may introduce themselves to the locals as senators and presidents but in truth they are are nothing but rapacious tourists with a bucket list.  Atop that list is an unquenchable compulsion to wreck everything they see, then take selfies with tour guide Ozymandias standing among the ruins. These are the souvenirs shown to the folks back home on Capitol Hill: a slide show of the shit show that is the Ship of Fools cruising around the world.

Considering it only stays afloat thanks to a combination of hot air platitudes and constant bailing, there's a good chance the Ship of Fools will sink beneath unforgiving waves of popular apathy before too long, or even be smashed to pieces by some anarchic Kraken. But I know its ominous sails will once more darken our horizon at election time, the supercilious and self-interested crew demanding our galley-slave votes and press-ganging us into the polling booths. So ahoy there, ship mates, gather your compass and charts and prepare for another rough passage. 

Go Ask Your Mother

The child is father to the man, according to William Wordsworth. But I'm not so sure. In fact, if you ask me, the child is more like the stepfather of the man, or perhaps the eccentric uncle of the man, who the child scarcely sees once or twice a year. After all, the lives of most men amount to little more than a shadow of their infant plans, so somewhere along the path to maturity the auto-parenting went wrong. Apparently, the negligent child spent more time at the playground and the soda fountain than to providing adequate guidance for his successful transition to adulthood. Lucky, then, the man whose younger self even manages to remembers his own birthday. 

I passed a pre-school daycare center on my way to work this morning. There was a familiarity about the architecture of the building or maybe just a pattern in the cloudy weather that instantly recalled my own experience of such institutions: an unformed identity confronted by a table of crayons and blank paper, not really knowing where he was or what he was supposed to do, but nevertheless trusting implicitly in the fact that he was placed there at that exact time for some specific reason that made sense to somebody. Four years old, what potential this child has. Who will he turn out to be? What kind of fledgling hero stands here in embryo? How will he learn to make a worthwhile difference in the world? This recollection of pubescent potency only lasted a second before I remembered how I preferred to hide in the toy cupboard rather than make friends with the other kids or draw pictures to stick on a fridge.

Nowadays, of course, in the Age of Transgenderism, may indeed not be the father of the man. It's also possible that the female child turns out to be the father of the man, and the male child becomes the mother of the woman, and any other progenitorial combination you can assign to any individual identity. It's a very confusing situation for any person trying to figure out who was father to him or herself. Just imagine the philosophical paternity suits that unscrupulous lawyers could file if they were smart enough to take advantage. Fortunately, the unimaginative and mediocre law student is usually father to the typical attorney. 

Faith Based Gambling

I have a lot of time for Pascal's Wager, time I spend at the roulette wheel of life, shouting "everything on lucky seven." I've never broken the celestial bank but I've never lost my hair shirt either. I simply make a few bucks, enjoy a complimentary cocktail and the buffet, then quit while I'm ahead. Hallelujah. Faith, after all, is basically just another form of confidence and we all need to be confident that we backed a winner, otherwise why are we even at the table. Luck be a deity tonight, you might say.

My cardinal rule is: never bet against the house, especially when it's the House of God, and the odds will always be in your favor. For God moves in mysterious ways, like a croupier in a casino of the clouds whose unseen hand distributes gaming chips according to your prayers: 'Oh Lord, may the spinning ball come to rest upon number seven, and in thy mercy deliver to thy humble high-roller another scotch and soda. I knoweth it shalt not be top shelf stuff but that's okay because I am humble, as I said. Amen'

Cynics often claim that Pascal's Wager is little different than the Power of Positive Thinking, insofar as you may as well think positively about life since negativity will get you nowhere. However, positive thinking is merely a meditation on Keno numbers when compared to the glory of God's benevolent Monte Carlo on high. For there you sit in tuxedoed serenity, calmly watching the roulette wheel rotate as two glamorous angels with sequined wings drape themselves across your strong shoulders. How can you lose?

 

Parley Voo

Footsteps fell on deaf ears; cobblestone ears slick with recent rain, undrained and consequently clogged. Somebody was pacing back and forth in Rue Cranium again, top hat and tails, folded umbrella employed as a walking stick, waiting for the lamplighter. But he stops suddenly in front of Chez Thought, regarding its forbidding facade with suspicion. Behind this big cerebellum of a building is the long and winding Avenue Proust leading to the tree-lined Boulevard de Blanchot, an upscale neighborhood where pompous opinions of oneself peer from behind net curtains at callow inspirations playing in the street. You could give the man in top hat and tails directions, chapter and verse, but he'd probably get lost. Unfortunately the map is the territory here, and the map is falling to pieces. 

Salty Air

These sentences, driftwood words washed-up on an unpopular beach of language. Readers need to read between the strands of seaweed to collect the meaning then carry it back up the beach in their buckets of a brain; or they can just stare into the oil-slicked rock pools like a carbuncle encrusted Narcissus; or perhaps they might even skim rune-stamped pebbles back at me across the shallows? But nobody lingers long enough on this bleak shoreline. It isn't Dover Beach with its picturesque metaphors nestling in sandy dunes. No, alas, the surfing here is terrible and so is the sunbathing. At least the parking is free, I suppose.

The tide is coming in, or maybe it's going out, hard to tell from my standpoint on the crumbling bluffs. Nevertheless, here is the first washed-up driftwood of 2024: a short, bleached-brown stick of tempest-tossed words. It's not, to be sure, the kind of elegantly curvaceous, antler-like artifact worthy of exhibition on a seaside cottage mantelpiece next to the scrimshaw whalebone, but merely the whim of an ocean that doesn't know what to do with itself. 

Hopper's Holiday

Imagine the cover of an Edward Hopper Christmas card: perhaps the Angel of the Lord appearing to those Nighthawks at the Diner; possibly the two women in Chop Suey are captivated by yonder star while tending their soup at night; maybe even the furniture in Room In Brooklyn is decorated with holly and ivy and a strategically positioned sprig of mistletoe.

But most likely we're looking at a lonely cattle shed beside an abandoned railroad track rendered in shades of brown, devoid of humans and animals, no heavenly light shining forth, absolutely nothing in Excelsis. 'Season's greetings, love Ed and Jo.'

Not the most festive imagery, I'm sure we all agree. So I decided the create a Hopper nativity scene of my own. It lacks the artist's melancholia and muted color palette, no doubt, yet I feel if some ceramic souvenir company were interested we could manufacture the components of an Edward Hopper Christmas Village to supersede the more conventional and rather tired Charles Dickens Christmas Village that people's mothers find so enamoring. Here's my original design, let me know what you think you holiday giftware wholesalers out there.

Festive Foie Gras

My favorite Christmas song is the brief ditty about 'the' goose getting fat, presumably via a rigorous program of force feeding: festive foie gras, as I have called it. The poor goose's waistline increases as our Lord's nativity approaches. Soon it will be roasting upon a spit while we retrieve gleaming, bow-tied boxes from beneath the over-baubled boughs of our star-topped tree. Farewell obese bird and welcome Yule.

Later, the song encourages listeners to place a penny in the old man's hat, despite the fact that almost all modern panhandler's prefer to shake a Starbucks cup in your face rather than an upturned fedora when collecting alms. If you don't have a penny, the song continues (and who does carry cash around with them these days?), then you can consider yourself blessed by God. I suppose it's some sort of special seasonal beatitude: blessed are the none penny havers. Whatever, there is plenty for Christmas musicologists to dig their teeth into here, besides that mouthful of festive foie gras. It certainly beats Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Once In Royal David's City and all those dreary carols, that's for sure.

For Whom The Fax Machine Screeches

In a touch screen world, I'm still finger-clicking on this peripheral device: my hand shunting the beige, hump-backed 'mouse' through an invisible maze so it reciprocally guides a tiny arrow on my monitor two centimeters over to the required desktop folder. Find me on the Evolution of the Workplace timeline, I'm closer to Bob Cratchit than Elon Musk. Imagine a waxwork exhibit in a museum devoted to defunct technology from the previous century, that's me at my daily labors. I may not be dressed in period costume but the wages are about the same. 

Like the last of the lamplighters in the last gas-lit street in town, I perform my antediluvian errand of replacing the toner cartridge in our single remaining laser printer. Then I return to my computer to try to print again but now there is a paper jam. Surely modern business must offer easier, more productive, more rewarding ways to make a living. Or am I always doomed to be the Clerk That Time Forgot?

Purchase Of Things Past.

I've always loved vintage bric-a-brac, not necessarily antiques, but ordinary objects that lived a life before and retain within their creases and cracks the patina of times and people long since gone: art deco lamps still casting shadows from their past; ceramic teacups into which someone's soul once was poured; mid-century love-seats Beatnik girls fell asleep upon at parties they weren't invited to; coverless coffee table books, of course, and scratchy vinyl recordings of phantom orchestras and crooners; not to mention sepia-tinted old souvenir maps of Florida featuring no reference to Orlando. 

But what do with all this junk? I suppose there's the secret hope that the art deco lamp might have a magical connection with Aladdin, that perhaps the teacup will turn out to be valuable fine china hand-painted by Edward Hopper, that the love seat came from the Hollywood home of James Dean, that such dusty ephemera will ultimately be worth a small fortune if sold at auction. Unlikely, obviously. These objects, whatever their provenance, are merely the archives of our consumer society. Bits and pieces of yesterday saved from the scrapheap by a vague apprehension that even inanimate things have feelings. You are mine now, teacup, will you love me?

Kafka In The Office Park

Much like a rogue factory's clandestine sewage pipe spews outlawed effluent into the ocean, the powerful HVAC system at Oblomov Inc radiates raw ennui throughout every floor of the building. These regular blasts of lukewarm apathy swirl around our desks and I watch my colleagues wilt and collapse across their computers, never to rise again until called to the conference room for yet another pointless meeting. 

If only we could vacuum the ennui away as if it were just dust. But it has become the very substance of our working lives. Without our frowns and half-closed eyes and stifled yawns we could claim no identity at all. At least here at our desks we are not crushed into nothingness like the rusting, redundant hulks of the unemployed at the scrapyard. We remain beings who can still measure our days in desultory mouse clicks if not in meaningful activity. Come friendly AI and annex Oblomov, it's too automated for humans now.

Nevertheless, I suppose making AI images does give me something to do during my lunch break, in between bites of stale chicken sandwich from the cafeteria, washed down with a century-old can of Diet Dr Pepper. Maybe in the future, when Oblomov is long-since bankrupt and the building transformed into a community arts and craft space, I will hold an exhibition of the AI pictures I created here, like a former Soviet dissident giving tours of the salt mine wherein he was forced to labor in the bad old times.

AI And Its Discontents

AI's learning curve from text prompts, at least as far as images-making is concerned, proceeds rather like an Internet shopping algorithm: "Other people with similar tastes to yours purchased tan pants so you will want to buy tan pants also." In other words, AI interprets what it thinks you want based on what other people have wanted in the past, which probably isn't exactly what you want. It adds it's own AI gloss to your most specific prompting. For example, the image below has a certain Steampunkish tone, which wasn't what I intended at all.

What was I going for? Well, I suppose an Edward Burra or Rene Magritte type figure, in Boston, in the twilight of his career salvaging legacy media from the scrapheap of history. Instead, there's an ambivalent avian Private Investigator from some sort of pre-war science-fiction comic strip, rummaging through microfilm of top secret prototype bird-feeders stolen from the vaults of the Customs House, in a race against time before he must fly south for the winter. 

No doubt AI will keep learning, just as the Amazon algorithm will one day work out I prefer grey to tan pants, despite the fact there's a guy in Wisconsin with a standing order for tan pants who also bought the same Last Year At Marienbad DVD that I did. The funny thing is, none of the characters in Last Year At Marienbad would be caught dead in tan pants. But it's going to take years before AI can assimilate such fine shade of niche detail.

In the spirit of the times and possessing little artistic talent myself, I attempted to create an image for this blog using AI prompts. As you can see from the images below, in addition to being no Rene Magritte, I'm apparently no proficient AI prompter either. The first image looks like a GQ fashion spread photographed in Beirut. The second image is nearer the mark but still far distant from the bullseye. So much for modern technology, bring me my watercolors and a blank canvas. Paint, paper, and inspiration are still superior to zeros and ones, even in the hands of an amateur.

In the Spirit of the Thing

Once upon a time, things were generally reliable although sometimes experienced failure. Nowadays, things are mostly unreliable but occasionally can prevail. Such is the state of things. 

I remember when you could trust things to work out. Back then, things were actual physical things. Alas, things have become invisible data on solid-state things on computer hard drives  ... or worse, things are intangible things on the so-called Cloud, which is a thing I don't understand. 

Yesterday's something is tomorrow's nothing. Apparently built-in obsolescence is a thing that affects us all and everything has its sell-by-date, even that thing you thought was inviolable fact. Nobody believes in that thing anymore. It is a thing of the past.

I should probably just pack up my things and go but quitting is the last thing on my mind. I need to see this thing through to the bitter end. A demonstration of personal resilience is the important thing in times like these.

Fahrenheit 451 (Preheating)

Here is the imaginary, fog-shrouded library housing all the books I've loaned to other people but were never returned. Someone who looks a lot like a particularly forlorn Franz Kafka sits behind the desk, informing a long line of my former friends that anything by Albert Camus is at least forty years overdue. Two copies of Pessoa are still in circulation somewhere, also the novel about death in Bruges, whatever that was called. The Confessions of Zeno, the Manuscript Found At Saragossa, At Swim Two Birds, Jakob von Gruten, all the Anthony Powell and Patrick Modiano, just leave them in the bin and my assistant, Gregor, will sort them out later. 

This library is obviously Brutalist style architecture, set back from the road in a sort of concrete piazza featuring a solemn statue of the Unknown Reader. A shadowy figure sprawls across a perimeter bench, thumbing through a copy of Waystations of the Deep Night, an old paperback I'd forgotten I'd even owned, never mind who had borrowed it from me. The scene recalls a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a monograph of whom no longer graces my bookcase because I didn't get it back from that guy who lived upstairs in that apartment I rented in the early nineteen-nineties.

I think, perhaps, I should receive an award for my services to adult literacy. Maybe a small arts grant to support and maintain my library's collection. Alas, it's too late for that. Patrons are fewer and fewer each year so it seems my years of lending are coming to an end. A book, whether low brow or high, is no longer special, merely an unread travel accessory to be left behind in an Air BnB when it's time to check out. Somebody else will surely peruse a couple of chapters before leaving the dog-eared curiosity in the back pocket of their airplane seat. Books do furnish a room, but only in the same way that peeling, unfashionable wallpaper does.

Memories of Magma

Whenever he was angry, which was often, my colleague Paul became a human volcano. His head would visibly vibrate as red mist filled Paul's infuriated mind and fiery streams of lava poured from flared nostrils. We joked that his bulging eyeballs were visible from space and that he needed a therapist who was also a gifted seismologist. Meanwhile, the targets of Paul's temper were burned into ash figurines like those on display at Pompeii. Everyone in the office knew when Paul was pissed off. He was a Krakatoa amongst the cubicles and we could see the red mist rising from seven desks away.

The tiniest transgression of Paul's unwritten laws could provoke an eruption. An intern named Janice was once guilty of carelessly leaving an empty coffee cup on the conference room table; a terrible crime resulting in plumes of red mist and knee-deep pools of steaming lava followed by a thirty minute harangue. Such over-reactions to trivial offenses led to a culture of fear and employees would take extreme measures to escape the all pervading wrath of Paul. Nobody wants to be browbeaten, intimidated, and harassed first thing in the morning. It was easier to avoid him, which created chronic productivity problems since Paul was unfortunately one of the biggest cogs in our operating wheel. He was certainly the noisiest, which just made everything ten times more difficult than it already was. Compared to Paul's hot red mist, my own anger was merely a brief exhalation of breath on a window pane, quickly wiped away with a wave of the hand. Consequently, Paul's assistants would confess their errors to me rather than risk instant immolation by him. Should Paul ever discover these errors, I would attempt to appease the volcano God with a sacrificial offering of buying him lunch. A small price to pay for preventing destruction of our entire office by a rain of burning rock and Paul's skull collapsing into a caldera.

Of course, in our world of modern HR, Paul was long gone before you could say 'Lawsuit.' He was sent away for endless diversity training and anger management courses, never to return. The volcano was no doubt made dormant, possibly by prescribing antidepressants be tossed into its crater on a regular basis. That's probably all for the best. Nine to five were the most miserable hours of the day thanks to Paul. I suppose he was the quintessential Angry White Male we hear so much about these days. Whatever the socio-politics of the situation, I must admit we are better off without him. It's like Spring around the office now. Our little acre still doesn't bear that much fruit, but the weather is pleasant and the young people working at their desks are no longer afraid. They call me 'The Dinosaur' behind my back, although it is said with a smile rather than a sneer because they know I'm a nice old Barney and not a wannabe Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The Flow

Old Heraclitus claimed no man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

Today, of course, no sane man is going to step into that same river once, never mind twice, because the water is toxic or full of flesh-eating bacteria and various other slimy dangers. But he will probably be the same man since we have lost the capacity to change in any meaningful human way.

We update the software on our computers and machines but not the software in our own consciousness. In fact, 'our own minds' will soon be an obsolete concept: as useless as a floppy disk, as slow and ponderous as a dial-up modem, as inexpressive as a broken laptop screen. Our artificial intelligence avatars will think and do everything for us in the future. I always used to joke about people surviving death as brains attached to electrodes in jars of formaldehyde, but obviously our actual brains are no longer necessary in that equation. 

So where does that leave Heraclitus' aphorism now? It seems to me that his man stepped into the river the first time but was unable to get out and simply drowned. Meanwhile, the river flows remorselessly onward.

State of the Art, 2023

If this blog were a book it would be out-of-print, missing its dust-jacket, crack-spined with yellow and coffee-stained pages. The author and subject matter obscure, its publisher long-since bankrupt. Mis-shelved on the bottom stack of a cobwebbed aisle in the old library that is never open.

Of course, the same could be said of Christ Stopped At Eboli, The Worm Forgives The Plough, The Little World of Don Camillo, the cartoon collections of Osbert Lancaster and the Reverend Kilvert's Diary, so at least my unloved book rubs covers with real literature. If I'm honest, however, this blog is not really much like a book.

It's more like your black sheep uncle's home movies: a bird's nest of badly spliced, scratchy 8mm film unspooling itself from rusting metal reels, dumped into a cardboard box and exiled to a dark corner of your parent's attic because it's just embarrassing footage of the family that nobody wants to watch. And that ancient, stupid projector is broken anyway. 

Then again, my blog has much in common with the works of a weekend watercolorist, whose pale green landscapes and pastel beach scenes are given an annual albeit ill-attended show at the local gallery. Here is a view of Rockport harbor, only $250 framed but still unsold.

Or perhaps a student orchestra featuring a big bass drum player who can't keep time, a trombone player who finds it funny making fart noises, and a lead violinist with a broken arm. Listen to their performance of Mahler's fifth symphony that could be mistaken for feeding time at the zoo.

For the most part,  however, these short electronic paragraphs are simply a letter sent to distant galaxies in a rocket ship called The Internet. Ah yes, the eternal hope of discovering life on other planets. But, alas, The Internet is a malfunctioning satellite, doomed to lose contact with mission control, destined to drift through space and time for eternity, drawn inexorably towards a black hole where they will be sucked into parallel universe where people can neither read nor write. Space junk, in other words.

The Karl Marx Diet

We learnt about the food chain in school, with the help of directional arrows and colorful diagrams. Maybe I drew a beard and glasses on the poor organisms languishing at the bottom of this chain. It was the sort of thing I did back then.

Later, at the same school, I read Hamlet's speech about the common man who eats the fish who ate the worm who ate a king, and realized that the food chain is more like an ouroboros (which I knew about from extra-curricular reading).

These days, I'm mostly concerned with a different kind of food chain: the food chain of business. A hierarchical measurement of employment status that runs from boardroom predators down to the prey in their cubicles. I see myself reflected in a computer screen and observe that life has drawn a beard and glasses on my anxious face.

And I can't even find consolation by eating the fish that ate the worm that ate the CEO because the founder of this company had himself cryogenically frozen. 

Utility and Dignity

How gratifying it must be to be useful. As functional as a fork, for instance, or merely pleasingly decorative like a fish knife, which can nevertheless claim its specific purpose in a dinner service, if only seldom utilized. 

Me? I'm not sure I have a purpose anymore and I'm probably too old to be repurposed. Much renovation and refitting of my working parts is required. There is not enough oil in all the world to stop that incessant squeaking whenever I rise from my desk. No-one would reissue a lifetime warranty for me now. Behold the obsolete man. He still has a blog, even. How far past his sell-by-date is that?

The lamplighter, the chimney sweep and me, creeping down the street into a sunset obscured by newly built but as yet untenanted office blocks. Soon everyone will join our lugubrious conga line of irrelevance. I am reminded of the Dance of Death scene that ends Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, except our characters are dwarfed by a digital cloud of Artificial Intelligence. Downloadable doomsday for the common man.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, so the saying goes. But the old dog doesn't want to be taught your stupid tricks anyway. He was born to chase rabbits and herd sheep as was quite happy with that role. He's sick of straining at the leash in this open-plan dog pound. He's tired of growling at the printer-repair man. He's just so fed up of being fed client scraps from the conference room table. Frankly, he would rather bite your hand off when you give him a patronizing pat on the head. Beware of the dog.

Meanwhile, maybe I can eke out a living as a designer of artisanal fish knifes. Sensuous silver-plated blades ideal for flaking slivers of flesh from branzino, rainbow trout, and sea bream. Perhaps not the most useful late career path I could explore but better than slaving away in the so-called gig economy. 

Into The Inter Zone

The Emergency Room in this hospital reminds me of a refugee camp dumped in the middle of a TV news control center. Prostrate patients grimace and moan amid a million screens broadcasting their latest blood pressure updates like the NASDAQ stock ticker. "We're still waiting to go over to Dr Unction reporting live from Cardiology. Meanwhile here's Nurse Clog with today's vital signs."

And me? Well, fortunately I'm just a minor human interest story about a spell of dizziness; the sort of low key snippet the anchor man might deliver with a wry smile and raised eyebrow. Frankly, they may not even have time for me if the ambulance stringers rush in with more urgent dispatches. I guess that's a good thing for me. But it also means I don't know when I'll be able to change the channel and go home. The downside of not being a critical case is being wheeled off to one side and told to wait.

And that's why, despite all the pulsing technology, the ER feels like a refugee camp. I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the doctor to arrive and stamp my exit visa. Someone in scrubs on a previous shift said he'd see me hours ago, so long ago that I've lost track of whether it's day or night, whether it's still today and not tomorrow already. It's easy to fall into a sense of creeping despair when staring interminably at the hospital ceiling. I must keep thinking of my saline drip bag as half full and not half empty otherwise I'll never get out of here. 

And eventually the doctor does appear, bathed in a shaft of light at the end of the corridor like a great prophet whose second coming was always promised to the faithful but always somehow delayed until now. And like all great prophets, he is the bearer of Good News: my blood work is deemed satisfactory and I am finally handed discharge papers allowing me passage into the land of the healthy where I can make a new start.

Wish You Were Here

I expect too much from the ocean. Its surface, after all, surely implies some sort of stage upon which the moon's theater of waves is performed: a giant squid rises from the deep; the Flying Dutchman's prow emerges from the mist; a mermaid models the latest in scallop shell lingerie. At the very least, standing at the water's edge should provide me with a transcendent experience, inspiration for a poem or the urge to return to my oil paints and easel. But, alas, the sea remains relentlessly aloof and does not speak to me. Its mysterious depths do not flow into an estuary of my soul despite the old mystic's suggestion that they should. Confronted by its tides I am nothing but human driftwood, an object of scorn for the gulls, a companion of beached bivalves, a brief moment of salted supplication quickly lost in trails of indifferent kelp. I think it's time to get an ice cream cone.

The Petty Juvenile Inside

Within the walls of the Citadel of Eternity, beneath the towers of the Palace of Life, at the furthest end of the Hall of Now, there is a small Bathroom of Anxiety where I spend most of time.

"Are you going to be long in there?" demands the Gatekeeper of Experience, persistently knocking on the locked door. 

"Just finishing up," I lie, before returning my attention to the unforgiving Mirror of Uncertainty screwed into the wall.

"Well don't be all day," the Gatekeeper replies. "You've got things to do and places to go."

I instantly respond with a Fake Flush of Apathy then turn the Faucet of Irritation on full blast, wasting as much hot water as possible. Stupid Gatekeeper of Experience, I tell the Mirror of Uncertainly, he's so annoying.

"I'll be waiting for you in the Antechamber of Today," the Gatekeeper tells me. "If you're not there in five minutes I'll leave without you and you might miss some good opportunities to do some really great stuff."

If only he could be less vague and offer up a few concrete examples of 'some really great stuff' once in a while.

As it is, sooner or later I have to leave the Bathroom of Anxiety, head for the Antechamber of Today, and just hope for the best as I wander the winding streets of the Citadel of Eternity with toilet paper stuck to my shoe.

Night of the Shooting Stars

A meteor shower of mixed nuts makes a wasteful trajectory through the kitchen's atmosphere. This absent-minded, clumsy God was clearly too cavalier when unsealing the bag. And there, crouching on that unswept galaxy of a hardwood floor, is a black hole disguised as a dog who will devour this manna from Heaven faster than you can say 'Exodus.' 

Of course, it was the pistachios, cashews and pecans that made landfall and were slobbered up within seconds. All that remains for me is an inedible heap of a few paltry peanuts, some scrawny walnut halves and those withered almonds that always seem so unappetizing. So what is this son of Jeremiah going to nibble on now? It's a cosmic catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Famine in Pharaoh's Egypt was a cornucopia compared to this cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I only wanted a modest repast while watching La Notte di San Lorenzo, a handful of salty morsels to tide me over before dinner. But my journey to the promised land of pantry snacks has proved a failure and I return to the TV lounge empty-handed and still hungry. The dog, meanwhile, no fan of Italian cinema, celebrates her good fortune by barking at the back door to go outside. After all, who knows what other wonders might have fallen from the sky while her foolish owner was staring at his screen.

Turning The Tables

I enjoy listening to recordings of great singers, but as I get older I have much less patience for listening to what they're actually singing about, which is often either profoundly vacuous or just plain moronic. For some reason, even when he was older and wiser enough to know better, Frank Sinatra was quite content to give voice to the insipid concerns of a callow youth, an embarrassment to himself and his audience. Surely a man in his seventies should be performing romantic ballads about sex after hip replacement surgery and the difficulty of delivering sweet nothings to a paramour who is deaf. Golden oldies like My Way, if truly golden, would contain details of how the balding singer pays his mortgage on a fixed income and how he hopes to cope with rising healthcare costs. "I planned for retirement and I did it my 401K waaaaay!"

In fact, my response to the lyrical content of the so-called Great American Songbook is invariably "act your age" and "pull yourself together," followed by the spine-chilling screech of a record-player needle being peremptorily removed from a vinyl surface. Consequently, my sensitively erudite ears no longer need to suffer through such auditory indignities as Moon River and Blue Moon: so many moons, so little emotional maturity. These days, my appreciation of music is strictly limited to songs in foreign languages I don't wholly understand, mostly heavily orchestrated French and Italian melodrama. Who knows, for example, what Gino Paoli or Charles Trenet are warbling about? It is probably more juvenile than the worst drivel of Rodgers and Hammerstein but I shall never know, so I can simply sit back and enjoy the swirling sounds without feeling like a cretin.

Formaggio & Function

Cheese, like flatulence, is an evergreen source of ribaldry. The mind immediately recalls the episode of the cheese in Three Men In A Boat. No doubt The Canterbury Tales contains an amusing anecdote about ripe Cheddar. Going that far back, you could possibly invoke Boccaccio also, although the Italians rarely find the subject of food funny. Mozzarella is a serious business and Parmesan a matter of life and death. So, on second thoughts, there are probably no cheese jokes in The Decameron. 

The same can be said of Dante, obviously: nobody is condemned to the Inferno for making inappropriate remarks about Gorgonzola, at least not in the translations I've read. And there are zero wry observations about Bel Paese in Pirandello, Calvino or even Umberto Eco (you'd think there might be). Only the filmmaker Pasolini attempts cheese humor, and it's gallows humor, literally, since the protagonist of La Ricotta dies on the cross from indigestion.

Similarly, French literature is devoid of laughs when it comes to cheese. Nothing in Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo or Flaubert. Proust chooses an item from his local boulangerie rather than the nearest fromagerie for the witty opening scene of Remembrance of Things Past, an English title I much prefer to the lugubrious In Search Of Lost Time. So once again it falls to a filmmaker, Jacques Tati, to raise a smile about cheese, and then only very briefly towards the end of Playtime.

As for the Dutch, well, the only thing funny about Gouda is the way they pronounce the word. Edam? You might as well present a block of cement as a stand-up comedian. Ditto Belgian Limburger. There are no cheese laughs at all in the low countries. Swiss cheese, I think it's safe to say, is straight-man neutral on the subject and blue cheese is obviously just sad but not in a sad clown kind of way.

But enough of my mirthcentric isolationism. I'm merely suggesting that certain Europeans authors might enhance their reputations by drawing inspiration from the coagulation of milk proteins rather than the missteps of callow youth on the boulevard of life. After all, we all want and need a little more levity in our bedside books these days. More thermophilic starter culture and less high culture, perhaps, is the fastest route to literary immortality in the current climate; and simply reading the word 'cheese' induces a seismic chuckle that can quickly erupt into a convulsing giggle.