American Fez

Grexit: A Parable

Taramasalata: the dish that put the "die" in diarrhea. At least it nearly killed me once during a sojourn on an otherwise paradisiacal Greek island. 

I won't name the island as I single-handedly destroyed its plumbing and sewage system; and in the current economic climate I wouldn't want the islanders to come seeking compensation. 

(Actually, considering the appalling damage, my obligation can probably be more accurately defined as reparations than compensation.)

At any rate, the Greeks were nice people, as I recall, and would only encounter profound disappointment with my own parlous financial situation and inability to pay the required sum, so let's just keep that story between you and I.

Anyway, the following year, sightseeing in Aachen, I entered a bank to ask if I might use their toilet, public restrooms being hard to find in Germany because the Germans preach strict bladder control discipline. 

Toilets are for customers only, I was told: unless you are making deposits of one hundred Euro, please leave immediately. 

A uniformed security guard then escorted me from the building. Outside, he pointed to a down-at-heel tapas bar across the street. They have urinal screwed to wall, the guard said, ask them.

So the moral of this story is, I suppose: it's a rich man's world when you need to relieve yourself.

For those readers expecting a proper parable with revelatory meaning, I apologize: you've been shortchanged. 

Jawbone of an Ass

Had the celestial sculptor given me a choice, I would've liked to boast a lantern jaw. Alas, as it is, I am encumbered with more of a itty-bitty bedside lamp kind of jaw.

It's not as impressive as the Desperate Dan physiognomy of my dreams, requiring the bushiest of beards to endow its pitiful surface area with even the merest hint of masculine authority.

Unfortunately,when combined with my relentlessly receding hairline, a bushy beard gives me the unwelcome mien of miserable old Saint Jerome (without the consolation of bedevilment by dancing girls). So that jaw enhancing option is completely out of the question.

Shorter, trimmer facial hair, meanwhile, makes me look like an unsuccessful provincial stage magician whose wretched career is entirely based on an excruciatingly tedious hypnosis act and a black turtleneck sweater.

My other recourse, to forgo a beard and seize the mantle of chinless wonder, won't work for me either. I'm neither rich enough nor aristocratic enough to be a chinless wonder.

Which leaves me as just plain chinless. Perhaps I can get my forehead reduced to create a more prominent jaw instead?

Selfie In Sepia

If blogging is like communicating with the world via smoke signals sent from between the cooling towers of a Romanian power plant, and I think we can safely claim blogging is exactly like that, then communication with the world through Twitter is akin to flicking eye drops into the sea spray of an angry Atlantic ocean on an especially stormy day.

A mere one-hundred-and-forty characters? I suppose most conventional tombstones use less, but still ...

A friend of mine boasts a Twitter account, although he rarely employs even a single one of those one-hundred and forty characters at his disposal to record any thoughts there. Indeed, he has issued a paltry four Tweets in five years. Yet his Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard of an account has more followers than my blog has readers. Six times as many. 

Perhaps I should open a Twitter account, if only to contrive short, non sequitur sentences containing semi-colons, ellipses and the so-called 'special characters' of the computer keyboard.

Alas, I too much love the verbose, the labyrinthine and the deepest of purple prose to shift allegiance from the blasted heath of my blog to social media's bouncy castle. After a decade of Internetting, my chosen medium is already irredeemably old-fashioned; as outmoded as a rotary landline in the age of smartphones. So it's no wonder my calls don't go through.

The Instrument Not Taken

A bluesy saxophone sound sucked down a plughole; final gurgle of the late night jazzman. Even the alley fire escape from where he blew his horn collapses in a cloud of rust red dust.

Battered trilby; cracked Raybans; his pocket square stained with forehead sweat and spittle, fluttering like a white flag above this heap of failed cool. 

Life might have turned out differently had he chosen the tuba instead. I'm told the Fates look kindly upon a gloomy oompah band. Just ask Aeschylus and His Bierkeller Kneeslappers.

Difficulties With Problems

A problem. A problem so insoluble that it's cracked my brain like an egg on the opaque edge of a saucepan of inscrutability.

Pity my poor egg. It was neither fresh nor Grade A to begin with; and now too many cooks have turned what was supposed be soft-boiled into a bottomless tureen of scrambled. How can a poor egg cope?

To paraphrase the prophet Isaiah: the egg's burden is not removed from my shoulders and its yolk not from my neck, and the yolk is not broken because of fatness.

Although that doesn't help. Fatness? Eh? Different yolks for different folks, I expect. That's usually the case.

Olympiad; Jeremiad; Pipe Dream I Had

Boston, Massachusetts, that popped collar of the Eastern seaboard, once famous for its combustible molasses industry, is among the aspirant cities bidding to stage the Olympics in 2024.

The excited phantom of Crispus Attucks is already practicing hurdling the Granary Burying Ground gravestones in preparation; the wraiths of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Robert Paine and Paul Revere are training for their relay race by passing the left femur of a redcoat up and down Tremont Street. Poor Cotton Mather, alas, is already disqualified on suspicion of taking performance enhancing inoculations. 

Much as a provincial backwater like Waterloo was capable of hosting one of the bloodiest and ultimately decisive battles of the Napoleonic era, you would think quaint old cobbled Beantown is surely capable of hosting an infrastructurally-significant international jamboree like the summer Olympics.

Naysaying Brahmins, however, will no doubt claim that erecting an Olympic Village in Boston is folly akin to swarms of giant wasps colonizing an old fashioned flea circus; that if even a lick of flame from the Olympic torch should singe the grass in the Public Garden then the torch should be carried aboard the Tea Party ship and doused in the harbor.

Personally speaking, I'm not bothered. I hope to be retired in Hawaii by 2024 (although, realistically, there's as much chance of that happening as me winning gold in the women's pole vault competition.)