American Fez

Infra Dig Infrastructure

Summer in the city is the season of construction sites.

As long as the sun shines there is no old warehouse than cannot be demolished and redeveloped as condominiums with ground floor retail space, no empty plot that cannot be filled with the foundations for new-fangled office buildings, no roadway that cannot be ripped up and repaved, no bridge that cannot have its troll evicted by men with scaffolding and structural supports. 

Alas, the hot weather must dissipate all architectural inspiration. For behold the ugly, box-shaped horrors rising into the sky, hounded by the ear-splitting commands of pneumatic drilling and the relentless hammering of cheap steel, the bullying roar of the diggers, the ungrateful whine of cement mixers, and the inchoate directives of hard-hatted workers dressed in Day-Glo yellow and orange bibs. 

It's not surprising Autumn is considered to be the time for contemplation: you cannot hear yourself think from June through August; and neither can the city planners and their builders, judging by the concrete and glass horrors they erect. 

Thirty Deaths Hath September

My everyday wristwatch is a beautiful leather-banded Laco aviator, made in Germany.

Besides the Arabic hour and minute numerals common to most watches, it features a small window showing calendar information: the day of the month rendered as another Arabic numeral alongside an abbreviation of the German name for the particular day of the week.

For example, today is 25th and it's a Tuesday, Dienstag in German, which my watch displays as '25 DIE.'

Every Tuesday there is a different death toll.

The month begins with only a handful of deaths but the body count grows remorselessly as the weeks pass. Fortunately, the fatalities never exceed thirty-one. I don't know how I could cope with the horror if there were eighty days in September, April, June, and November, and eight-one in the all the rest except February.

Of course, I still dread any leap year Tuesday. You think the killing spree is over in the low-twenties, but then, boom, another grave needs to be dug: Rest in peace the Tuesday twenty-nine. 

I don't know. Perhaps I should just buy a basic Timex with a nylon NATO band. Wearing such a simple watch I could check to see if it's lunchtime without being confronted by a list of the fallen.

So auf wiedersehen classy German timepiece, but only on Tuesdays.

A Foot In The Past

Some years ago, goaded by delusions of sartorial elegance, I tiptoed into an intimidating, oak-paneled, uptown boutique selling luxurious cashmere socks in exact foot sizes. There were no cotton-blend, vaguely fitted packs of three in neutral colors for sale in this store. 

In fact, it was more of a sock showroom than a store. An array of shimmering, lustrous socks were draped elegantly upon sculptured display plinths, as if seductively discarded by lithe figures from a Maxfield Parrish painting before skipping off into the golden forest behind the counter. There were no price tags on the merchandise, obviously, and I was the only customer. 

"Are these sweat-wicking by any chance?" I asked the lugubrious sales clerk. My query sounded a trifle foolish, even to my callow, overawed ears. But what else was I going to say in the circumstances? "Can I try these mauve and fuchsia argyles on, in a size eight-and-a-half?" seemed equally as strange and oafish.

I carefully fingered several pairs of the socks like they might somehow shatter if I manhandled them too roughly. Yes, these are very nice socks and make no mistake, I thought. But they are surely more expensive than even my finest pair of dress shoes. Wearing such magnificent socks inside my scuffed-up leather Oxfords would be like pulling a grubby plastic hairnet over an Olympian laurel wreath.

Then there was the question of my neglected twenty-four year-old male feet. Did my untrimmed toenailed feet deserve to be swaddled in socks as beautiful as those socks? Clearly the answer was in the negative. Somewhere in the bowels of the bank down the street, my checking account rolled its eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief. 

I thanked the sales clerk with all the dignity of the most obsequious of forelock-tugging sycophants and left without buying anything.

The fancy sock store is long gone, of course, and the space is currently occupied by a purveyor of gourmet burritos. I don't buy anything there, either. 

Extra Virgin Snake Oil

Had I been an eighteenth-century venture capitalist, a wealthy and bewigged cynic, I would most certainly have funded inventions promising to prevent premature burial. The irrational horror of vivisepulture, after all, kept many Georgian and early Victorian paranoids awake all night. Nobody wanted to wake up in a coffin, their screams for help unheard by those passing by six feet above. 

So there was easy cash to be made by smart investors willing and able to exploit the mania of the age. I can imagine myself in the counting house, ruffle-sleeve deep in golden coins, toasting the fearful suckers with a yard of finest ale and another slice of squirrel pie.

But knowing me, of course, it's more likely I'd have been the frock-coated nineteenth-century chump actually buying the anti-vivisepulture apparatus, rather than its grinning salesman with silver-buckled shoes.

This weekend, for example, I am spending a few sun-soaked summer days in a log cabin beside the lake. Bliss, surely. But all I can think about is flesh-eating bacteria in the water.

Flesh-eating bacteria is in the news a lot these days. I believe the experts call it Necrotizing fasciitis, which sounds as ghoulish irresistible as vivisepulture. Yet have I plowed my life's savings into marketing a highly profitable anti-necrotizing fasciitis ointment?

No, I haven't. But I'd definitely buy a tube if such a product were for sale in my local pharmacy, especially if it was combined with insect repellant into powerful, two-for-one, all-day protection from ravenous microbes and blood-thirsty bugs.

I write this after grudgingly spending $120.00 for prescribed "heart-health" medication, thinking that it's about time I included AstraZeneca, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline in my 401(k) portfolio. If I was so invested at least I'd feel like I was buying my own health instead of just renting. 

Meanwhile, I sit up at night worrying that those blood-pressure pills and beta-blockers might slow my heart rate so much that my top-hatted, side-whiskered doctor might think I'm really dead ...

A Book And Its Cover

About thirty years ago, when I was as impressionable as Silly Putty and as pretentious as paisley patterned lining in a navy blazer, I bought a paperback copy of The Sailor From Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras. It had a beautiful cover of airbrushed periwinkle blue.

For some reason, I presumed the novel chronicled a louche matelot who haunts the quayside cafes, smoking endless Gauloises, drinking bottomless Pastis, flaunting an irrepressible sardonic wit, deliberately involving himself with various femme fatales. Alas, it wasn't about such an estimable person. 

In fact, I can't recall exactly what the book was about. Was there perhaps a hint of the Flying Dutchman as reimagined as a Harlequin Romance by Simone de Beauvoir? Something like that at any rate. All I know for certain is that I enjoyed being seen with the book more than I enjoyed reading the words it contained. Page twenty was roughly the limit of my progression through its, to my mind, unpalatable story.

Nevertheless, The Sailor From Gibraltar remains in my possession to this very day, and, like the island rock itself, is an object of some dispute.

I shelve my books by the "moods" they exude. There are shelves of serious academic endeavor, a shelf of biting satire and a shelf of witty ephemera, shelves of melancholy memoirs and shelves of inspiring biographies. There are shelves for highbrow novels, middlebrow novels, and lowbrow novels. Evelyn Waugh's novels are all over the place. I have a shelf of cartoons and a shelf of artist monographs. I even had a shelf of classic children's books but I outgrew that phase.  

Suffice it to say, this organizing system makes no sense to anyone but me, and I am often bemused by its admittedly dubious logical structure, especially when it comes to the question of where to put The Sailor From Gibraltar

You see, since I didn't finish reading the book I've no idea of its mood. Should it be shelved alongside Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities or Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or the The Layman's Guide To Chiropractic Relief (Revised Edition)? So hard to know, despite trying to discern clues from the extensive blurb on the back cover.

At the moment, it's ignominiously sandwiched between a lavishly illustrated guide to gilded-age ocean liners and the left side of the bookshelf, where the book's only attractive feature, it's periwinkle blue cover, cannot be seen. The spine, unfortunately, is nothing to write home about.

But I suppose, ultimately, the mood The Sailor From Gibraltar evokes in me is nostalgia. Nostalgia for distant, halcyon days when a callow me thought gadding around the Mediterranean with only easily resolvable, self-manufactured troubles was a still an achievable destiny; a time when I bought books solely because I wanted to be on their covers.

I should probably donate it to the local library. Or better yet, list the thing on eBay. After all, you don't see that cover very often; it might fetch a pretty penny or two. You never know.