Receipt

Late last evening I saw you handing out fliers
with the headline —What's in it for you?—
printed in heavy bold letters above a complex

diagram of dynamic, fluid relations and long,
elaborate paragraphs of explanatory narrative,
precision-tuned for my peculiar demographic.

Steps away, pale eyes of coyotes reflect in my
light, regarding me as raw hamburger before
melting into hemlocks as I move past on my

way to the oracle—where with dribbling gulps
I drink the fuming libation, lie down on stones,
slumber and dream the vision I'm meant to see.

Here now, I'm back, holding a transcript of a
pagan catechism I found frozen in petroglyphs
and bearing the message—What's in it for me?

 

Can I get equality?

We proud citizens of the world's preeminent democracy take profound satisfaction in the stubborn belief that our society is characterized by a condition of equality.  Fondly and in spite of evidence, we regard our social structure as a "level playing field," not a stratified hierarchy like the rigid British model from which our ancestors heroically disaffiliated themselves (and us).  Equality is a congenital American conceit, so ingrained in our cultural DNA that we're not always aware of how we express it in quotidian behavior and speech patterns.

One such pattern that seems almost trivial is ordering food.  When you are standing at the counter of a cafe or ordering a meal in a restaurant, how do you deal with the person who is standing in front of you and providing you with service?  What do you say?

Strangely but with remarkable consistency, what I nearly always hear in this circumstance is :

"Can I get a ... ?"

(coffee, cheeseburger, doughnut, whatever...)

It's an odd form of request, a strangely convoluted way to order something.  Note that the "I" is the active agent in the request.  The customer is the one who is getting the burger or the doughnut while the waiter's function in providing it is not acknowledged, which to my mind amounts to an outrageously offensive denial of the role of the waiter, who is the real active agent, the one who is actually doing something.

Idioms are murky things, but sophisticated semiotic analysis is not required to see that the reason for this denial is probably the customer's discomfort with the waiter's role as servant, as someone who is not regarded as an equal.  Since this particular expression is so utterly predominant in this very common scenario of ordering food, it looks as though a profound misgiving about inequality transforms a simple transaction into something that sounds more like a request for permission or a plea for forgiveness, and maybe it's just my contrarian perversity, but I prefer to say something like:

"Would you please get me a cheeseburger?"

because in the world I know, equality is a myth.  We actually live in a highly stratified society with a powerful class of wealthy people sitting at the top of a flattening pyramid with a pauperized middle that's sliding into penury and a permanent underclass that can't escape grim conditions.  Anyone from the nether regions who feels a twinge of discomfort when serviced by paupers is experiencing the more benign effects of a malignant structure of enduring inequality, and I don't eat cheeseburgers because the FDA is not protecting us from mad cow disease.

*  *  *  *

A (subjective) history of blogging

In the good old days, a few select people learned the secret art of writing longhand and spent their dreary days in cold chambers scribbling like Bartleby with quill pens on paper made from bleached rags.  What they scribbled was mostly legal documents and copies of Latin texts, but a few squalid individuals wrote other things on their own, and learned to exult in the creation of quiet linguistic music.

After Gutenberg, some members of the "noble" classes had the time and imagination to use writing as a tool for reflection and for creation of more silent music.  For everyone else of that era, life was nasty, brutish and short enough to preclude most opportunities for appreciation of what the scribblers had written.  Both the writing and reading of literature were the exclusive, leisurely pursuits of a wealthy class with time on its hands.  (Oblomov, the central character of Ivan Goncharov's novel of that name, requires the first hundred and fifty pages to get out of bed in the morning, and while Goncharov's intent may have been satirical, it only proves the point.)

Then along came Myron J. Qwertyuiop, the inventor of the mechanical typewriter, and everything changed.  Because of his invention, anyone could learn how to hammer away at the clacky keys, and the age of the dime novel and journalistic hack was begun.  Bound volumes of mediocre writing coagulated in libraries, and a new type of emporium called bookstores came into being.  As a result of all this proliferation, all sorts of printed matter started showing up on bedside tables, train platforms, public lavatories, and everywhere else.  Books propagated like rabbits, like coat hangers in the closet of human habitation.

When the computer age hit the big-time back in the early 1980's, the floodgates opened wider.  Some feindishly obsessed programmer who couldn't get a date (Dan Bricklin?) invented the word processor, which turned out to be so easy to use and so helpful for rearranging sentences and paragraphs (editing) that everybody who had previously been usefully employed in food preparation and shoe sales started cranking out poems, stories, screenplays and long-form novels.  Library shelves groaned under the weight of the massive new production, publishers stopped editing for literary quality, and the excess volume of printed output was offloaded to Barnes & Noble, which metastisized across the landscape like a fast-acting cancer.

The final stage occurred on the internet, when Dave Weiner (among others?) invented the weblog, and within a few short years, everybody on the planet became a "published author," including me.  I promised myself that I wasn't going to do this, but here I am only three days later, clacking away on keys whose labels are mostly worn away, blogging again.

*  *  *  *

Humor:

It may already be old hat to some folks, but blogging is still new enough that the French haven't invented their own word for it yet.

 

Be hopeless

Be an idiot

Wakened

In the morning I discovered that someone had
plugged my spinal cord into the wall socket
next to my bed.  So I start thinking—finally,
at least now I think I know what to expect.

Later I nursed a coffee on a park bench, waiting
to share fruit salad with my pretty therapist.  She
arrived smelling like her children's urine, made
gestures, held up a pocket mirror and traversed

a list of pertinent questions, then stood and swung
her foxy legs into a cab to catch a connecting
flight to another city—and I was free at last—to
set my course & destination.  I walked deep

inside the park to a tangled place avoided by cops
where homeless people rest easy and my friends
hang out—slouching beasts who don't bug me with
chatter because we speak in the language of flame.


 

Be hopeless

Middle-aged men who feel hopeless or think of themselves as failures may develop narrowing of the arteries faster than their more optimistic counterparts, researchers report. People who expressed high levels of despair had a 20 per cent greater increase over four years in the condition known as atherosclerosis, which leads to heart attacks and strokes, according to a report in the August issue of the American Heart Association journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis And Vascular Biology.

"This is the same magnitude of increased risk that one sees in comparing a pack-a-day smoker to a non-smoker," says lead author Susan Everson.





"People need to recognize this sense of giving up that many people feel has strong cardiovascular consequences," says Everson, an associate research scientist at the Human Population Laboratory of the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, California. "Steps should be taken to try to change their situation so they gain hope or become more optimistic."

Be an idiot.