American Fez

Modern City Planning

Behold, a bicycle-shaped stencil is sprayed in the middle of a narrow, busy street. "Share the road" a nearby sign admonishes the long lines of frustrated commuter traffic.

Around the corner, on a wider street, a green streak of actual 'bike lane' appears running parallel to the curb. Alas, it abruptly disappears and becomes a bus stop, before magically reappearing again thirty feet further on.

This is municipal lip service of the most collagen-injected kind paid to idealistic notions of contemporary urban living. See how bike friendly we are! Observe our advanced sustainable living policy in action! Naturally, such cynically expedient efforts create more problems than they solve.

Meanwhile, an incautious hipster cyclist - look, no hands! no helmet! - zips past a tired and nervous motorist at a red light and slaloms through the intersection, barely avoiding a pedestrian in the crosswalk. 

A traffic cop, hiding in his car, devours another doughnut. I don't get paid enough to deal with that mess, he thinks. And who can blame him?

What's In A Name?

Surnames are often derived from ancestral occupations, family homestead locations, clan or tribe affiliations and even from the forenames of forebears. Here are a few examples of common surnames that are still around today, although the holders may no longer perform those specific labors, live in those areas, belong to those clans or acknowledge their paternity.

Cooper: a barrel maker; people with this surname are usually descended from a single medieval barrel maker who got around a lot.

Smith: perennial ne'er do-well who fails to keep up with his neighbors.

Coopersmith: ne'er do-well daredevil who has failed in his attempt to sail over Niagra Falls in a barrel..

Baker: one who refuses to make cakes for those of a different sexual orientation from himself.

Colonic-Irrigator: a compound surname formed when someone called Colonic marries someone called Irrigator. (Often confused with Colonicirrigator, which is a rare surname derived from a person whose profession was to pump water through someone else's colon.)

Osbourne: someone born in Australia

Blogger: a surname of zero distinction describing one who compiles five stupid items in a list for the sole purpose of itemizing the sixth, which he thinks is funny.

Another Cog In The Machine

At work, Paul is a 'has-been': he has been replaced by a clockwork mouse. 

Never mind, I said to him, knowing us we'll probably lose the winding-up key and then we'll have to hire you back as a freelance.

Valerie has organized a going-away party for him. No cheese on the food platter, I remind her. That would just add insult to injury. Also, let's remove all the mice from people's workstations, just in case that gets him thinking about his usurper and he gets depressed.

But what if he notices the mice are missing and puts two and two together? 

Well, I've never known him to put two and two together in the six years he's been working here, that's why he's being replaced by a clockwork mouse, so I shouldn't think he will.

A pause, then Valerie says: I wonder if I'll be replaced by a clockwork mouse.

A clockwork mother hen, maybe, I tell her. But I don't think they're shipping those just yet. Your job is safe until they build a robot that can indiscriminately empathize with even its most worthless colleagues. I should imagine your kind of inane sentimental input will be required until all humans have been removed from the office environment.

Are you a robot? Valerie asks me.

Not yet, I tell her. Not completely. Although most of my professional brain has been replaced by one.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

The first time I saw George Caleb Bingham's Fir Traders Descending the Missouri, over thirty years ago, poorly reproduced in a cheap book about American art, it lacked the vivid coloring the actual painting possesses, being almost black and white by comparison to the real thing. But that's no excuse for not thinking much of the work, as I did back then.

No doubt I quickly flipped the page in my book, searching for Edward Hopper or any artist who did pictures of lonely flappers hanging out in automats. Landscapes - yawn - were required to be depictions of places I knew or countries I wanted to visit. Suffice it to say, the Missouri river wasn't one of them.

The older me, of course, realizes the picture is actually pretty interesting: weird, almost, at least at first glance. There is the Mr Punch figure with his paddle stave; his male model half-breed man-child son; the ominous black cat that's really a bear cub; and what I like to think is a the upturned face of a drowned man in the foreground but is only pareidoliac flotsam. 

This is the bizarre beauty of the old frontier captured in oil and canvas. Nature, red in shirt and trousers. A luminous document of a darkling past. I can't imagine why my younger, idiot, urbanized brain never noticed these qualities before. I suppose I'll just blame the nineteen-eighties and their general philistine malaise.

I'm not saying I'd have taped it to my dorm room wall, as I did with that reasonably priced print of Hopper's Chop Suey I bought at the Harvard Coop. Nevertheless, a wiser me would surely buy a postcard to keep in my ring-binder Archive of Inspirations.

Who knows? Perhaps I might have written a speculative story called 'Fur Traders In the Automat' or - even better - 'Nighthawks on the Missouri River.'