American Fez

The Idiot

I came across a paperback copy of The Portable Dostoyevsky abandoned beside the garbage bins, its many pages fluttering noisily in the west wind, as if pleading to be read one last time before being pulped.

The front cover was missing, apparently torn off, revealing a yellowed title page decorated with two Venn-diagrammish coffee mug rings and their satellite drips. Then, thumbed by speed-reading Zephyrus, the book flipped opened to a page from Notes From The Underground, then The Brothers Karamazov, then back to being closed again.

Which of my lowbrow neighbors, I wondered, secretly reads Russian literature. More to the point, I suppose, which one rips the cover of Russian literature, uses it as a beverage coaster, then tosses it unceremoniously (and inaccurately) into a trash receptacle.

But it takes one to know one, as they say; and I considered my own plastic barrel of recyclables, wherein, amid the empty glass bottles and flattened cardboard boxes, nestled last April's Scientific American, dog-eared but shamefully unread.

I thought I was interested in neutrino physics and the mechanics of human memory. I thought so for nearly a year but it turns out not be the case. Apparently I couldn't give a Quark's fart about breakthroughs in quantum reality or whatever. 

No, give me interminable tales of nineteenth-century absurdity in St Petersburg anytime. Myshkin, Oblomov and Akaky are more my speed. I'd rather read about Dead Souls than Dark Matter when all is said and done.

A poor, two-dimensional pastiche of the Renaissance man I'd like to be, then. I might claim academic letters after my name but they are definitely lower-case and expressed in a ludicrous font: possibly Comic Sans or even Zapt Dingbats are good candidates.

And so I removed Scientific American from my recyclables, placing it beneath the heavy volume of Dostoyevsky so it wouldn't get blown down the street. Who knows, I thought, perhaps some nerdy lab rat neighbor might want to read it while sneering at the dreamy dilettante who couldn't cope with the hard facts it contains. 

Disney Politics

Ted Cruz: a man who could best serve the world by attaching hairs to his face and accepting the role of Weasel #3 in an amateur production of The Wind In The Willows, preferably in an internationally touring company famous for treading the boards at the furthest points of the compass.

But then Cruz is an actor with pretensions, so perhaps the eponymous role in a live action film of Tarka the Otter would be more appealing to his ego.

Either way, I feel an opportunity will be lost if Cruz snubs the stage in favor of a Presidential run. After all, any old fool can stand at a podium and repeatedly patronize to the American people, but only a true ferret face can convincingly play an anthropomorphic mustelid.

The Principle

My colleague Peter is highly methodical: observe him hunched over his labors like a soliloquizing actor learning his lines.

Unfortunately, his method is similar to that employed by a monkey attempting to type Shakespeare's Hamlet on an ancient Olivetti with a faulty ribbon and a stuck "e" key.

Indeed, one is tempted to invert the opinion of Polonius: "Though this be method there is madness in it." He is the prince of turning simplicity into complication and efficiency into inertia.

Peter's is a blank verse with the emphasis on blank. Suffice it say, Peter decided long ago that, in the workplace, it is better not to be than to be. I know this because he is always hiding behind the arras of his cubicle wall, transferring our Powerpoint presentation into overhead projector slides.

Peter is the sort of technophobic throwback who prints out his emails before he reads them. He makes triplicate copies of insignificant documents: one to get coffee-stained at his desk, one to misfile in the catacombs of his filing cabinet, and another to leave behind in the photocopying machine.

It would not surprise me to see him wandering by the water cooler, an empty stapler held before him, mumbling "Alas, poor office supplies ..."

But what does surprise me is that Peter is my boss. 

Business Class

My daily schedule is so up in the air it requires its own air traffic controller.

My desk diary has become a busy airport with multiple runways, surly TSA officials, fast food franchises, excessively long walk to the departure gates and a broken baggage retrieval system. Alas, there is no duty-free shopping.

I should probably wear a bright orange windsock on my head.

I definitely need to resolve that ongoing industrial dispute with my ground crew union. 

Most of my appointments are little twin-engine, puddle-jumper things buzzing around aimlessly. A few old, fixed wing cargo planes crawl across the tarmac from hangar to hangar. But it's those two or three jumbo jets circling in an apparently endless holding pattern that cause the delays, cancellations and backlogs. Those carbon footprint implanting behemoths burning up all my precious fuel by going nowhere and back every day.

This is your captain speaking: we were supposed to land at Jinx Corporation today for a early morning sales meeting. Unfortunately the people at Jinx are experiencing a problem with their conference room air conditioning, so it looks like we won't be leaving until noon tomorrow. But we are third in line for take off.

That's fine. I'll sit and wait for the chance of a contract with Jinx Corporation.

I'd just feel more confident if someone else hadn't already done the inflight magazine crossword.

WBAD FM

WBAD radio - "the new alternative" - is providing today's noise pollution in the company cafeteria.

Here is the very latest from Stud Muffin, shrieks the disc jockey, like a drooling banshee issuing a mating call from darkest swamps of Neverland.

Clanging, atonal guitars punctuated with cracks of snare drum; the singer moans vaguely about his sensitivities to the inscrutability of girls; then, triggered by a slight variation in drum patterns, a melodramatic crescendo of synthesized strings erupts and everything gets louder.

Standard fare, surely, for commercial radio: so to what kind of sound does it supply an alternative? Beats me. Perhaps, for the sake of accuracy, WBAD should describe itself as 'the new equivalent.'

In these days of canned sonic mush, when musicians sound like they're being pistol whipped while they perform, oh how the listener longs for a tune that's as simple and inspired as the hymnal.

Now that would be a true alternative.

Restaurant Recividism

I'm always told that small, local restaurants need my 'support,' as if they are non-profit charities rather than regular businesses. The Blue Onion will go bankrupt without my patronage, they claim. Franco's will be stacking its chairs on tables for the last time unless I book one of those tables. It's like a soup kitchen in reverse: do-gooder diners making donations to mendicant cooks.

Alas, as with the bums on the street, such down-on-their luck restaurants are their own worst enemies. Just take a look at their menus: inedible amalgams of pan-seared farro, kale chips, nouveau gelatin and widdershins-strangled ostrich. Meanwhile, the waitstaff are either off-puttingly obsequious, downright aloof or completely non-existent. And I don't relish paying nine dollars for an unknown beer from darkest Oregon or twelve for a dribble of wine from an industrial strength vineyard. 

Temples of food? More like Bible-bashing hucksters on a street corner with a burnt-out grill and whatever they found in some locally-sourced dumpsters. Is it any wonder such establishments find themselves on the chopping block?

Tales of Mysterious New England #5492

Behold the sleepy Taxachusetts village of Penurie, snoring dreamily in the bosom of the Brokeshire hills.

By the old mill pond be the ducking stool. On the village green be the stocks. Just across the street from the ruins of the Blacksmith's cottage be old man Redundant's Glue Factory. Atop the hillock be the Merrill Lynch Wealth Management & Twenty-Four Banking Center, right next to the self-service gallows from which the Merrill's took their name.

It was here, long ago, that Decrease Mather first emptied out his pockets and discovered there was nothing in them. Many locals claim his restless spirit still haunts his house at 401 K Street, wailing "I thought I had money for retirement" into the cold Penurie night.

Further down the road, at 1099 R Street, is the Federalist Refund Graveyard. The tombstones here go back many years into the foggy past and are mostly unintelligible. 

Nature's Revenge

News comes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary is uprooting many words associated with the countryside and replanting its lexicographical fields with definitions of new-fangled inventions: "mp3 player" and "broadband" and the like.

Bucolic words being superseded include acorn, willow, heather, dandelion, lark and newt.

Such vandalism to our vocabulary means that art lovers of the future will no longer be able to understand many great works of the past. Any P. G. Wodehouse story featuring Gussie Fink-Nottle, for example, will be incomprehensible to any young person unable to consult his or her dictionary for a definition of newt.

Similarly, the following exchange will occur in music rooms in schools across the globe:

"This piece of music is called The Lark Ascending."

"What's a lark?"

"I don't know. Look it up in the dictionary."

"Oh ... it doesn't say."

"That's too bad. I guess it must've been some old time supersonic rocket or something."

"Yes, that's sounds about right."

 Of course, the Oxford Junior Dictionary is making a (golden)rod for its own back. The modern, technological ephemera it is currently defining might be obsolete as soon as next year. The mp3 player will quickly be retired in favor of the X3boom player, which will then be scrapped in favor of the Virtual Speaker, and so on. I doubt the OJD will be able to keep up with the pace of ever-evolving devices and their names, so eventually the dictionary itself will become as irrelevant as it thinks kingfishers, otters, hazels and ferns are today.

Meanwhile, in a computer graveyard somewhere, the plastic remains of abandoned broadband modem are slowly strangled by creeping ivy, their cases mottled with a lark and heron droppings. A newt passes by in the dark and chuckles to itself.