A Boy And His Bog

Yes, that kind of bog: for those of the non-UK persuasion, the restroom, the little boys’ room, the john.

There was something about my Brit ex-fiance that not only our relationship but his mind never seemed to get out of the lavatory, resulting in the kind of jokes that are funny the first time and mislead you into thinking a person has an amusing rough side when he is really just a case of arrested development. He got points for creativity though.

One day over the transatlantic cable he told me how he had been having some sort of phone conversation about aquatic life and the subject of dogfish came up. His interlocutor, mishearing a dental as a labial, said “What’s a bogfish?” And, he said, “…I thought, well, what do you find swimming around in the bog — if you’re not careful?”

It was funny the first few times he said “Bogfish!” instead of “Shite!” but then he sort of turned it into a religion (supposedly the bogfish were all going to rise against their oppressors and cause chaos by clogging the plumbing and it was the Coming Peril; well, Britain hasn’t had a good plumber since the Romans left) and he wrote an anthem and everything, and having an invincible musical bent I found myself humming a spirited march tune to go with the lines and to this day the phantom piccolo riffs and brass columns come back to haunt me.

You bogfish of the world, UNITE!
Fight the good fight with all your might!
Rise up! rise up! Don’t be a load of shite!

Bogfish unite! Don’t loaf there in the can,
Come forth to meet your destiny,
Rise up and hit the fan…

This is what happens when a person lives too close to the flight-path from Heathrow, I think. I can’t even reconstruct what I saw in him anymore but that damn tune runs in my head.

I hope he found true love with someone.

Butt Woman (IV): or, No Pressure

I was in the gym next to the sled press I love so dearly, doing the Plough pose as part of my warmup and stretch, something I do with my glasses off because right before that I usually do a back bridge with my weight on my feet and forehead. So I was blind with my butt uppermost when one of the gym owners loomed into my hazy field of view and said “I need to talk to you.”

What the fuck did I do now? I thought, imagining this was the moment when someone would brace me for grunting or hanging upside down by my insteps.

“My back is killing me,” he says. This is the Purple Camo Guy.

So I booked him. Of course the problem turned out to be in his butt.

I can’t get away from it.

Alma Mahler, or, Falling Short Of Ideals

Every so often I catch myself reviewing my credentials as a femme d’un certain age with a checkered past and wish I had executed certain turns with more polish. It is funny how when you are past fifty you can be said to have a history, yet when you cast your mind back, mostly what you see is dumbshit predicaments. I have dated a guy who could neck while playing the Goldberg Variations, one who produced  an annotated edition of the Oera Linda Book, one who owned two businesses by the time he was twenty-six. I have been married to a man who could go toe to toe with eminent musicologists in the matter of identifying obscure pieces. But somehow, I end up in places like a midnight showing of the Mad Max movies with one of them on each side of me, grimly sticking it out to the last credits rather than go home and leave me with the other.

Once during the five years I dated my Albino Ex — the summer of 2000, it was — we found ourselves arranging to see the National Mall fireworks on July 4 with the Goldberg Variation guy, who still lives around here and had crossed our paths at the County Fair the year before. He was married by then (though, come to find out, his wife was out of town). Their addresses turned out to be a short walk apart, so the Albino Ex and I hoofed over to pick up Goldberg Guy, who in turn lived only a quick saunter from a popular viewpoint on the Virginia side of the river.

Because the July evening was breathlessly hot, convection currents billowing up from the baked sidewalks, Albino Ex, who tends to sweat freely, tied a bandanna around his head. He looked like a cross between the Man From Glad and Rambo, especially when — thinking like the ex-cop he is — he loaded his cargo pants with an emergency-channel scanner, a pepper spray, and a leaded sap, in case anyone in the crowd made trouble. There was already some concern about terrorism, one of the reasons I absolutely vetoed actually going downtown, so the channel scanner struck even me as prudent.

Goldberg Guy, who was always so cheap he squeaked, was trying to get by without air conditioning and sitting on his porch in a liberally perforated strappy men’s A-shirt, looking like an old fart in training. (He was always a very pretty boy, with a lush head of wavy blue-black hair and flawless dusky skin, about 5′7″ and 120 dripping wet, but he had this invincible Inner Old Fart always screaming to get out, and would wear plaid pants and shirts of a color not found in nature, with the cuffs frayed off.) I was rapidly draining my water bottle in the heat and when I suggested he bring one of his own, we discovered he didn’t own any such receptacle. He cast about the kitchen, found a pitcher and filled it up, proposing to carry it open all the way to the vantage point a mile off. Off we went, an odd parade, me in my running gear, the Albino Ex with his pants crackling out police calls, and Goldberg Guy walking along behind us holding his pitcher, like Ganymede on a constrained budget.

We got halfway down the hill to the best point of view, surrounded by teenagers, families with strollers, and obese couples in beach chairs, when the Albino Ex put his foot in a gopher hole and went sprawling, the scanner going one way and the sap another. “Sabotage!” he snarled. “Fuck you, Osama bin Laden, you’re going to have to do better than that!” (It took a while after 9/11 before we were able to laugh about this.) Goldberg Guy stood there with his pitcher pretending he didn’t know the guy in the Rambo bandanna. I pretended I didn’t know either of them.

I have known interesting, not to mention talented, guys, but there are times when I feel like Alma Mahler as played by Flip Wilson.

Epidemic Of Fat Dumb Young Crooks Crashes Combat Readiness

Well, I saw this coming.

Fifty years ago Adelle Davis pointed to the cholesterol plaques in ther arteries of young men killed in Korea (I don’t mean personally with a pointer or anything, but she referenced the matter in one of her books) and predicted an increasingly unfit America whose kids would be ever sicker and more sluggish the more agribusiness-manufactured crap they ate.

We be here.

People 17-24 seeking to enlist are being rejected in record numbers because they’re obese, can’t pass the military entrance exam or have been convicted of a violent crime. (Since British studies have raised student test scores and reduced violence in the prison population by mandating an enhanced prison diet, we can also infer that eating crap makes you act crappy.)

There are some folks who still bag on Davis as a quack, mostly on the strength of cases where people carried some of her recommendations to bizarre lengths (after recommending blackstrap molasses as a source of iron, she once encountered a kid whose teeth were decayed to the gum line because his parents had been feeding it to him from a spoon in prodigious, daily quantities). Since I have fixed myself with her advice when doctors could not, my tendency is to say tu quoque, considering how long it has taken the medical faculty to notice that it matters what you eat and considering how many people get killed by their prescriptions. It’s a caveat emptor world out there.

But failed exams and physically useless 20-year-olds are hard to talk your way around. Is there some higher court that will rule on the culpability of feeding sugar to kids in licensed-character boxes and cups till they get dumb and burst their jeans?

Dream Men

I always thought I would enjoy a date with Benjamin Franklin, myself. I love passing the time with talk about scientific particulars that haven’t stuck in my brain like I wanted them to (the last time I had breakfast with my engineer friend I got him to explain succinctly why no object can move faster than light, unless you are in Coblenz). The guy could compose string quartets, play chess, grind eyeglass lenses. We could argue about religion, in a friendly and sparring way. What’s not to like?

This fantasy crossed my mind because the Two Lumps strip, which I enjoy, drove me to look up Franklin’s essay on Moral Perfection. At one point he aimed for it. Then he decided that “such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.”

If only the moral crusaders of the modern age had Franklin’s sense of just moderation.

In the Museum of American Art collections here in DC, the Hiram Powers statue of Franklin — a man notably fond of female society –  was on exhibit for a number of years, in a small room filled with several other sculptural likenesses. One represented a callipygous nymphet devoid of attire, and for as long as the grouping was on view, the statues were arranged so that Ben’s thoughtful gaze seemed to be directed admiringly at her bare arse. I miss that.

T-Shirt Friday, October, 2009: It’s Friday Somewhere On The Globe

I find Nursemyra’s custom of T-Shirt Friday entirely charming and  I hate to think I almost missed it, but it has been the kind of week that turns your brain into a tangle of fried relays. I know Friday is over at Nursemyra’s digs but I’ve still got a few hours to go on the Atlantic seaboard.

I still miss my kitty, and will for some time, but I have mostly been reflecting on how good it was to have him. I realized I had never worn this shirt, which I bought over fourteen years ago, at a cat show I attended with the object of picking up a couple of carpeted cat trees for the newly bought and still-chaotic house. It looked more like my big boy than any cat shirt I ever saw, though there was no real variation in his fur color and his eyes were bronze. He did have that warming ability though. One imagines a huge vibration heard over the Great Plains, or at least I do.

I remember that one of the cat trees was kind of cumbersome and they held it for me to pick up later, but the other was very basic and since the cat show was literally just over the hill at the local high school — where we’d walked — I carried it home on my shoulders, out of bravado. I’ve gotten out of the habit of trying to prove things like that.

Go forth and scratch the ears of someone you love.

Spiritual Development

Brillo-Head, I mean Dino, approached me while I was hanging upside down on the Smith Machine again.

“You probably don’t know this,” he said as I dismounted and retrieved my visor (I always wear it in the gym to keep my face from scaring people when I max out) “but the people who are in contact with UFOs say that doing that, hanging upside down and doing moves like that, is how you get spiritual power and development.”

“Next UFO I see I’ll find out more about it,” I said.

I try to just act natural.

(OK, I lied about the visor. It’s because the fluorescents hurt my eyes. But it makes good copy.)

Autumn Landscape With Cranes

It has been raining almost continuously for the past couple of weeks, occasionally saturating some junction box or other involved with my Internet connection, and battering down entire trees full of leaves. From my desk I can see the cranes moving against the treetops.

No, not nice cranes from a Hokusai painting or wildlife photo, alas.

In the few days since I stepped out to shoot that picture from the corner, most of those leaves have been pounded down. I’m just glad I don’t live in the little house next to the Federal campus across the road, where they are still banging away after nearly a year, shoehorning in yet another building. The noise level is no longer the Anvil Chorus, but it gives me vertigo just to see that thing swinging around; if it were swinging right overhead I’d be chewing through the leather straps by now.

The Best Cat In The World, II: or, Urlicht

Some time ago I wrote about the Best Cat In The World.

We said goodbye last night. Even when you know it’s going to happen, it’s always a knife edge between too late and too soon, because most often you assume the honor and godawful responsibility of deciding when to do something. So I write to you with the assistance of several grams (and counting) of tetracycline, because I wanted to hold Apricat Houdini Mitzvah Valjean Beezler (his full name — at 16 pounds plus explosively fluffy coat, it took a long name to wrap around him).  While they were setting the IV in his forepaw he bit me. Yowch.

He bit me when I took him in, so this is symmetry. I don’ t hold it against him. We all have done worse out of fear, pain or panic. He gave me something to remember him.

It was about the most ginger he’d shown since Tuesday. He was nowhere to be found yesterday morning. I finally discovered him standing stockstill behind the refrigerator with his head pushed into the corner — a performance he would repeat in various locations over the next couple of days. Something had happened overnight. He was no longer just slow and drowsy; he really didn’t seem to know what he was doing or where he was.

Anyone who has animals knows about the hours and days after seeing a change like that. Certainty came easier when he was just lethargic and didn’t react to handling; when a cat who has acted that way gets up again and starts tottering around the room, you once again don’t know what to expect or do. But finally he didn’t eat when I put down food. He didn’t even recognize there was food in front of him. That settled it. No one loved food more than that cat.

When I wrote about him before, he could still see a little; several weeks ago, he went from grazing and near-missing to walking dead into things. He could still navigate by ear and whisker, but he couldn’t see his cat family, or me, or anyone; he drifted, his encounters with the world increasingly clumsy, accidental, but not yet so devoid of small feline joys that I felt I needed to cut them short. Until he simply put his head down.

It has been almost eighteen years since I found him starving in that storm sewer. He was the pinkest cat in all creation — literally, in some lights, peach pink. He had silky tufts between his toes, and a tail like a gigantic plume (when he hadn’t licked it bald from his annual bout of allergies). He never exactly ran after he was two years old or so — he sort of stumped — and cat toys, we joked, chased him. But he knew how to be imperial. He had to have a complete sex change surgery  because his plumbing kept stopping up, and he never (because the surgery hurt his hind end so much) used the box again, preferring bath mats. I own more bath mats than you want to know about. He outlived two younger cats and the husband I had. My late and ex used to fret that his many ailments and frailties would mean a short life; I said “We all know people like that. They live forever.” I was right.

He used to stand on my back with his amazingly big paws when I did Yoga, and I would rely on him, in his porch-sitting dotage, to enjoy the sunny days that I never have time to breathe in. All cats do that, but he did it best.

All his life he was comical, yet grand.

My onetime husband was firmly agnostic as to humans but chose wilfully to believe in a divinity that watched over cats. I would like to think of some sort of light coming back to him.

O Röschen rot!
Der Mensch liegt in größter Not!
Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein!
Je lieber möcht ich im Himmel sein!

Da kamm ich auf einer breiten Weg;
Da kam ein Engelein und wollt mich abweisen.
Ach nein! Ich ließ mich nicht abweisen!
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis an das ewig selig Leben!

O little red rose!
One languishes in need,
One lingers in great pain.
So dearly would I rather be in Heaven.

So came I there to a broad road,
And an angel stood and made to prevent me:
“Ah, no, you shall not prevent my passing:
I am from God, and will go forth again to God,
the loving God, the beloved God,
will give me a light:
will light me to the everlasting, blessed life.”

Grey Riesling

A respectable lifetime ago, when I was at college in a historically peculiar little place in medium-upstate New York, I blundered — one of those friend-of-a-friend things — into a fraught situation.  Joe — close but no cigar, and  a tidily anonymous moniker — had decided to stay up all night, playing board-and-marker war games (yes, there was an era before video combat) while waiting to hear how his father, a lifetime smoker with laryngeal cancer, had survived surgery. It was a matter, from one perspective, of wondering whether he would ever hear his father’s voice again. From another, since Joe had already developed a handsome smoking habit of his own — baby cigars preferred — there was a whiff of his attending his own wake, while refighting WWII in the European theater.

Joe had, in addition to tobacco, already staked out his favorite wines and whiskies. That night was the first time I ever tasted a single malt whisky, a corrupting influence for which I remain grateful. Somewhere along the line he also uncorked a Grey Riesling, from which vineyard I can’t remember. He had recently tasted it, rejoiced in it, ordered a case of it.

I think we killed two bottles of the Grey Riesling, and most of a fifth of The Famous Grouse, after a couple of bonding shots of Laphroiag. The friend who’d occasioned this night watch fought Joe to a standoff in the Mediterranean theater toward morning, when a call came through — the single number in the dorm; before cell phones, you had to stay awake — to the effect that Joe’s dad had made it through the surgery, was awake now, could talk (hoarsely).

I managed to clamber my way to breakfast in the dining hall a few hours later, and when asked how I was, answered “Drunk.” “Already?” “No, still.”

Joe lived a short drive from me when at the family home, and we stayed friends, for a few years. He went in for being a high-wide-and-handsome drunkard, goddammit, in these days of “recovery” and whatsall we have lost the swing and fiery frenzy of drunkards and rakehells, and more’s the pity. Oh, yeah, his Dad died before I could ever meet him. Joe piled up his car in a construction zone and called me for a ride at five in the morning. The best guess I have, God love the Internet, is that he sobered up and stayed sober and is writing cautious reviews on Amazon.com, Jesus save us and Loki deprave us.

I never drank so goddam much in a night or double brace of nights again, myself.

But something just made me look up Grey Riesling, because I wondered if any of that night might still be alive somewhere.