American Fez

Penny Farthing For Your Thoughts

Apparently ignorant of the principles of kinetic energy and rudimentary mechanics, many adults fail to ride a bicycle efficiently. They pedal furiously along level surfaces in low gear. Their legs revolving at rates ten times faster than the wheels of the bike are actually moving. I'm reminded of the whirlwind feet of cartoon characters scrambling in thin air when the ground beneath them suddenly disappears. If it's possible to careen in slow-motion, that's how these floundering cyclists propel themselves forward, and I'm forced to cross my fingers they don't crash land like Daffy Duck always does. 

Of course, metaphorically speaking, wobbling uncertainly down the busy road is how most of us move through our daily lives. How foolish and decrepit we must appear to those A-type personality high-achievers on the fast track to success. 'Eat my dust loser!' You can see it in their eyes as they rush past. They are the winners who take all, including your pension. Whatever happened to the Tortoise and the Hare? Well, these days the tortoise gets kicked to the sidelines as soon as the starting pistol cracks, disqualified by his own prudence and sagacity. Don't think, just do it. There's no time for circumspection. And so we run as fast as we can in whatever direction we're told, sweating and grunting, trying to keep up with the pack, some of us capable of going through the gears, others not.

Poetic License

Reading an essay by Eliot Weinberger, I learn of numerous Plutarchs, (Plutarchi? Polyplutarch? Call this apparently Hydra-headed scribe from antiquity what you will), whereas before I'd only been aware of one.

There is the rather imperious-looking Greek Plutarch, who wrote engaging biographies of famous men and other, slightly less interesting books such as obviously tedious Moralia.

Then there is the faceless, so-called Pseudo Plutarch, author of many works originally attributed to the genuine Plutarch but later identified as the fabrications of mostly anonymous authors over a span of many centuries.

For some reason, probably innate facetiousness, I prefer the works of the Pseudo Plutarchs to those of the genuine Plutarch. On Rivers, for instance, and even Consolation to Apollonius, sound much more like my kind of read than the aforementioned Moralia, no matter how intellectually or artistically inferior the contents might be regarded after authorial reassignment.

In fact, I wish there was an equally prolific Pseudo Demosthenes, Pseudo Xenophon, Pseudo Hesiod, Pseudo Pliny, both elder and younger, Pseudo Catullus, Pseudo Suetonius, a Pseudo Cicero would be really nice, and so on.

There is a Polybius, of course, but alas I don't think his name means that there are many Biuses.

Anyway, I think I'm going to spend the next few days forging a text called On Actually Having Written What Scholars Don't Think I Did by Pseudo Juvenal. It's about time the Loeb Classical Library published some new material, don't you think?

Solstice Reflections

Consulting my calendar, I see it is the Summer Solstice. But looking out of my window at the weather, I'm surprised it's not the middle of March. Helios has apparently decided to leave his chariot at home, preferring to trudge across the sky instead, kicking the clouds around disconsolately as he goes. If Iracus had chosen an overcast, chilly day like today to fly close to the sun, the wax in his wings would not have melted, his cautionary tale would be unknown to mythology, and W. H. Auden's Collected Verse would be one poem shorter. It is the longest day and I am making it seem even longer with my idle, gloomy observations. So come on Helios, pick up the pace. Let's get that sun moving. I'll race you to Cocktail Hour along the Tropic Cancer. Loser has to buy the winner a Dark 'N' Stormy if the grey skies haven't turned blue.

The Team Meeting

Today, my colleagues and I are told to "keep the momentum going" yet also "find time to stop and smell the roses." Dueling directives issued by the same uninspired team leader during a pointless meeting of his apathetic team.

If we were landscape gardeners in the English style, I suppose this contradictory advice might make at least a little sense. But our labors occur exclusively indoors and involve the transportation of digital information from one place to another, an activity in which momentum depends entirely upon the capricious whim of networked computers. There is no odor of any kind, as far as I'm aware, floral or otherwise, unless there should be an electrical fire in the mainframe, and I very much doubt our boss would suggest we "stop and smell the burning data."

So we sit in the meeting wondering what to do. Maintain current workflow velocity, which certainly sounds like an acceptable management-speak agenda; or purchase a rose-scented air freshener for the office from the nearest pharmacy. Obviously, once an air freshener is successfully installed we can keep pace with required momentum while simultaneously inhaling its roseate bouquet. But the initial acquisition of an air freshener from the nearest pharmacy, a chore which will retard daily momentum by about twenty minutes assuming they have one in stock, leaves us in an existential quandary. Do we take the momentum hit now in order to smell roses today, or put off the rose smelling until tomorrow to maintain momentum today? Optimistically, I present a Venn diagram of concentric circles illustrating what I call "Work-Sniff Balance for the 21st century." Fortunately for me, no-one asks why no two circles intersect. 

The meeting ends with the team leader passing out a productivity chart displaying a prominent downward trend, the trajectory not dissimilar to that of a bird hit by a pellet in midflight and plummeting violently to earth. Apparently, our momentum, if we are to keep going in the same direction, will eventually see us fall so far vertically that we'll end up underground. And deep in the bowels of the planet, instead of roses, we can finally stop and smell the rotting core of all dead things.

No-one mentions this, of course. We return to our desks as if we have renewed purpose: momentum-o-meters to be synchronized, purchase orders for air fresheners to be printed. But we must check our emails first. Perhaps some charitable client has thrown us a bone, however meatless it might be, while we were in the team meeting. We can only hope.

Face Value

Resorting to self-aggrandizing contemporary slang in a desperate effort to boost my personal brand, I claim to be "money." Perhaps only a crumpled dollar bill, sure, one that's been forgotten in a back pocket and sent through the wash several times, but still acceptable currency. A good old dependable greenback. Take me to a cocktail bar, wave me in the air, and I'll be sure to catch the bartender's attention.

Yet there exist a few unkind and judgmental cynics surprised I even valued myself as high as a dollar. They were inclined to think of me as about as useful as a Canadian quarter. I was out of circulation as far as they were concerned. At best, their highest estimate of me might have been as a disposable penny inserted into one of those souvenir machines at tourist attractions, which are then stamped with an illegible design or unreadable motto. At least it's something, I suppose, to be a keepsake, albeit a keepsake that nobody really wanted to keep in the first place. 

So this personification of myself as cold hard cash is how I hope to bribe my way to relevancy again. Either under the table or neatly folded and slipped from palm to palm, you know it's taken care of when I'm being counted. Of course, I don't want to push it too hard and end up turning into "filthy lucre," or God forbid "spondulicks," but I do have to put on the big bucks show. Hence, I am announcing that I'm now available as legal tender for all your debts, public and private. Novus ordo seclorum.