American Fez

Hallows and Goodbyes

Many, many years ago, while attending a Hallowe'en party pretending to be Karr from Theophile Gautier's classic short story "The Opium Smoker" - an unwisely obscure choice of outfit requiring much tedious explanation - I witnessed a young woman in a sexy witch costume trip over her own broomstick and tumble headfirst into a metal beer keg. "Ding dong! The witch is dead!" some callous soul sang out loud.

But the sexy witch, now considerably less sexy, was merely stunned. Rising slowly from the beer stained floor, she managed to seize the keg's tap at the third attempt and unsteadily began pouring herself a foamy drink. "Can you pump this thing for me?" she said to a blank space on the wall. 

She was either addressing a phantom Hallowe'en party-goer, invisible to the rest of us, or was suffering from double vision and was actually talking to me. I had to make a decision. "You've had a nasty fall,"  I told her. "You should probably go to the emergency room as soon as possible."

The witch stopped pouring, shook the overflow from the top of her cup and drank a long draught of foam. "Your friend is kind of a wuss," she said to the blank wall, before stalking off into another room.

I never saw her again but found myself staring nervously at the wall for the rest of the night. What if the keg was indeed haunted by the restless Hallowe'en spirit of some unlucky drinker whose ghostly appearance heralded the end of the beer?

It's a mystery I will never solve since I only drink wine these days and don't get invited to parties anymore. At least not Hallowe'en parties anyway.

Literary Heroines Reimagined

Oafelia: a fat, awkward and clumsy Danish girl who stumbles into a river and drowns.

Scarlett O'Horror: Southern belle made from body parts of other Southern belles scavenged from local cemetries by Igor, deformed son of Dr. Rhettbutler.

Emma Woodlouse: Jane Austen arthropod with long exoskeleton and fourteen jointed limbs. Females are capable of reproducing asexually. 

Madame Ovary: bon-bon munching brood-mare who repeatedly gets pregnant to pass the time in a boring provincial French town.

The Girl With The Stick-on Tattoo: Obstreprous pre-pubescent brat with a temporary tattoo of a pastel unicorn cantering beneath a rainbow on her left arm that fools nobody.

Daisy Bukkake: Long Island flapper who ... oh, I'm not going there. Use your own filthy imagination you pervert.

Sonic Boom

Broadening my musical horizons, I discovered an Internet radio station broadcasting tunes performed by virtuosos of the Armenian duduk, a sort of sombre sounding clarinet. 

One of these tunes seemed vaguely familiar to me, so I glanced at its title: Tari Katvi - wondering what this phonetic phrase could mean, I looked it up: "The Year of the Cat."

Ah, that's why I felt I'd heard the tune before. It was an instrumental version of Al Stewart's hit song from 1976, albeit a mournfully slow instrumental version from which most listeners might conclude that the titular cat had actually died that year.

The next song was called Ts’ankanum yek’ k’num indz het yereko . I looked it up. The translation meant nothing to me in English, but translated into French it became Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir, another popular song from the nineteen-seventies. 

"Would you sleep with me tonight?" Not if we're going to be serenaded by a bloody miserable duduk until the wee hours, that's for sure. I'd rather sit at home in bed by myself with a mechanical glockenspiel.

As it turned out, all the so-called Armenian music on this Internet radio station was their version of American pop songs rendered on the duduk and other traditional woodwinds and stringed horrors: Black Magic Woman, Do That To Me One More Time, Bridge Over Troubled Water and all the rest of your most embarrassing aunt's favorite cacophonies.

So much for broadening my musical horizons. I think they were considerably narrowed. So this afternoon I'm returning to an ancient playlist of Monteverdi's lute music. The puffy sleeves of the west triumph over the puffy trousers of the east once again.  

If Dogs Had Money

I could earn a fortune performing the simplest tasks, if dogs had money. Throwing a stick, playing tug of war with an old piece of rope: I would charge premium for these services and the stupid mutts would pay through their cold, damp noses. And if lazy dogs had money? They're going to get ripped off six ways to Sunday by unscrupulous veterinary snake-oil salesmen: "Take two tablespoonfuls of this patent elixir to promote energy and prevent the quick, brown fox from jumping over you."

So, of course, being notoriously prone to acting on instinct, dogs are eventually going to rack up enormous debts and lose all their money. Just think of all the rawhide chew impulse purchases they would make in pet stores. Then there's all the fines they'd be required to pay for pooping on prohibited sections of the sidewalk. Cash would drain from dog bank accounts like so much flea and tick shampoo disappearing down a plughole. This would leave me hanging around outside the kennels with sheaves of unpaid stick-throwing invoices in my hands.

Going Viral

eBola virus: transferable over wi-fi or just from coming into contact with spam? Makes you think, doesn't it, about all those junk email offers from African officials with frozen assets in Liberian banks. Never mind the toilet seat, perhaps you can catch it from a smart-phone touch-screen? Who knows what hackers can encode in the data these days. Perhaps haz-mat cases for your handheld device will be available before too long.   

But on a less facetious note, oh how I wish the namers of Internet phenomena had not employed the phrase "going viral" to label popular YouTube nonsense. "Pestilential" is surely a more accurate description of the many grinning idiots lip-syncing to pop songs who currently choke that web site with wasted time and wasted brain cells.

Out, Damn Spot

Of all the words in the English lexicon, encountering the verb "besmirch" is most likely to elicit a cringe and a wince from me. It evokes so many ugly mental images: brown stains streaked across otherwise pristine linen and silken handkerchiefs blotted with greeny-yellow blobs. Unmentionables caked with unknowables.

That which besmirches is a purity defiling, violent and sordid filth. I would not be surprised to learn that H. P. Lovecraft's most spine-chilling tale of terror was entitled The Foul Beast That Besmirched The Walls of Arkham Mental Hospital, or that Ingmar Bergmann filmed a two-hundred-and-seventy minute, monotone study of human alienation and disgust called The Besmirchment.

The reason I bring this up is because one of my favorite shirts has recently acquired a purplish smudge on the elbow of its left sleeve, as if I had unwittingly rested my arm on a table where someone had earlier spilt a globular booby-trap of raspberry jam. Alas, this unsightly smudge is impervious to the rigors of both dry cleaning solvents and repeated scrubbing with spot remover. In other words, my shirt has been besmirched by another's careless breakfasting. 

This offending mark can obviously be concealed beneath a jacket or crew-neck sweater, I suppose, but I will always know it's there, even though whatever leprous microbes the mark harbored have long since been washed away. I can never feel wholly clean while it teases and torments the innocent hairs on my blameless elbow.

Over The Hill

Seven human bobbleheads fidgeting around a conference table. Our notepads are out, our pens are poised, but our eyes are blank. The cumulus cloud of apathy has formed above our heads and is raining down a waste of time upon us; an absolute downpour.

'We've got to learn from our mistakes and move on," says the chief bobblehead.

But he can't actually describe what the mistakes were, nor can he elucidate the lessons learned from them. It's just the sort of thing you're supposed to say in these sorts of situations.

Banality of banalities, all is banality around the conference table.

The truth is: we are faced with younger competitors who can do work faster and cheaper than we can. I doubt they sit around a conference table with notepads, for instance. They probably Skype each other from fancy New York City coffee shops. 

Our mistakes were getting old and losing touch, and the lesson learned is that we should have saved enough money to retire to the Bahamas already, where we could sit and be apathetic bobbleheads in the sun without a care in the world.