Hammer of the Chipmunks

Well, it was too hot to walk outside yesterday, so Dr. Theresa and I headed over to the gym. Afterward, we thought we'd grab our famous favorite grilled chicken salad from Proud Larry's. But there was unexpected roadwork in our way! So we had to get back on the highway and go the long way around. Inconvenient? Maybe! But we got to drive behind this truck (pictured, above) for a while. As you can see, the company logo is a chipmunk holding a hammer. I know what you're thinking! You're thinking "That's a squirrel holding a hammer." Look, I don't blame you. I said the same thing to Dr. Theresa at the time. Perhaps you and I both have been overly influenced by the time McNeil saw a real-life squirrel brandishing a stick ("click" here for more details, or visit your local library). But when I got home, I hit the "internet" for a closer look. The back of the truck treats us only to the top half of the industrious chipmunk. (I say industrious, but he's not really holding the hammer in a useful way, in my opinion.) When you see the whole logo, it is obvious that the tail is not a squirrel's tail. But I'll tell you something else: God knows where I got the energy, but I looked at some photos of actual chipmunks, and their tails were closer to squirrel tails, if not quite as lush, than the little stub I saw on this cartoon chipmunk holding the hammer. And I said to myself, "Well," I said, "I don't think the Disney characters Chip and Dale, who are chipmunks to my way of understanding, have this kind of realistic chipmunk tail either. Maybe, then, in this way, the hammer-wielding chipmunk was influenced by great cartoon chipmunks of the past." So I scrolled through several images of Chip and Dale before I found one in which their tails were prominently displayed. I was right, at least in the sense that the tails of the unfortunate Chip and Dale appear to have been snipped off to nub length. And then I thought, "Huh, I guess the people who invented Chip and Dale were like, 'Hey, we can't give them realistic chipmunk tails. They'll look too much like rats! Besides, longer tails are harder to animate.' And so on." At this point, my spirit died inside my body and I was no longer capable of human thought.

Old Guys

The most important thing is that Sonny Rollins died. My hero! It's no exaggeration to call him my hero. At the bottom of this "post" I'll put a playlist I made based on the massive biography of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy, which Megan and I read for the Million Dollar Book Club. One of our most monumental undertakings. If he's not your hero already, maybe you'll read it and Sonny Rollins can be your hero too. Or just listen to him! Also valid. The playlist is not all Sonny Rollins. It's also music that is important to him or has a special place in the book. But it's somewhere to start. Now to turn to lighter matters. Remember that Virginia Woolf book I was going to read on the airplane but then I started OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH instead? Well, now Virgina Woolf's BETWEEN THE ACTS is my "nighttime book," in which last night I read "She became, of a sudden, solemn as an owl" and that is why it is going on the list I began in 2011 of books I read with owls in them, no one knows why. Well, soon I'll temporarily put aside either Virginia Woolf or - more likely, because the adventure will be easier to take up again when the time comes - my "daytime book" (the aforementioned OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH) because the Million Dollar Book Club has finally recovered from the DIARY of Witold Gombrowicz. We're going to read Charlton Heston's journals from 1956-1976, because we think that's the book Wallace Shawn talks about reading in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, and I believe ever since the Million Dollar Book Club read Andre Gregory's autobiography some years ago we've been circling around Charlton Heston... and for whatever reason, Wallace Shawn has been calling to us more and more as the years go by. Literally! Not literally. It was Charlton Heston or a book about William Shawn (Wallace Shawn's father) by Lillian Ross, a Million Dollar Book Club favorite author. But our ways, moods, and instincts are oblique and terrifying.

We Shall See

Let's cover a variety of topics! We have nowhere to go. 1. I was reading the New York Times on my phone just like a teenager and I saw they have made a list of the 30 greatest living songwriters. And I raged silently to myself, "I thought I solved this problem years ago!" The problem, that is, of people making lists of things. The year was 1999. People started making lists of everything. I think it was the upcoming century that had them in a panic. They thought if they made lists of things, they could stave off the death of the universe. That's just a theory. After a decade or so, I got really sick of reading lists. So I struck! Like a mighty panther! My hilarious anti-lists would put an end to all this listmania... ha ha, remember when Ken Russell made a movie called LISZTOMANIA? I enjoy peppering my interesting observations with pointless crap like that. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah! So I made my anti-lists, like "The 50 Greatest Things That Just Popped Into My Head" for THE BELIEVER magazine... and after PASTE did their own "Greatest Living Songwriters" (to which I admit I contributed a blurb on Chuck Berry, who was, it may amaze you to learn, alive at the time), I sent them a joke list, which they published, of "The Greatest Dead Song Writers"... I included, for example, King David from the Bible. You remember him! And then, at the top of the list of dead songwriters, I put Bob Dylan, who was alive, and still is, as of this writing, as far as I know. But I'm about to go on a walk around the neighborhood with Ace Atkins (so I was wrong about having nowhere to go, if you consider walking in a circle somewhere to go), and who knows what might happen by the time I come back to finish this "post"? I make no promises. Anyway! The exciting thing was that a USA Today interviewer told Bob Dylan that PASTE had called him the greatest dead songwriter, and he laughed! That's the main thing I wanted to say. I just wanted to remind you about the time I made Bob Dylan laugh. 2. Yesterday, I filled you in on what's going on in my nighttime book (horses are crying, natch) but I neglected to mention my daytime book, ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC. Well, I'll tell you. Mostly it just says "In Chapter 6, we shall see" this and "In Chapter 6, we shall see" that. I've been hearing about how great Chapter 6 is going to be since the introduction! Something better happen in Chapter 6, that's all I can say. Because not much has happened so far, unless you count "more study is needed" as something. I checked the Table of Contents and Chapter 6 is the last chapter in the book. Well played, Gideon Bohak! 3. McNeil emailed me about Charles Fort. That was exciting! Nobody ever emails me about Charles Fort. McNeil called Charles Fort "Mark Twain's nutty cousin." As evidence, McNeil cites the lines that Fort sticks in about "once a page" (according to McNeil) as he catalogs various inexplicable phenomena: "In my own mind there is distinguishment between a good watchdog and the fleas on him".... "To have any opinion, one must overlook something." That's a great one! McNeil deduces imaginatively: "Fort found these on crumpled up pieces of paper in Twain's drawer" and concludes with a Fortean memory of a cloudburst he, McNeil, once witnessed, approximately 24 inches in diameter. 4. I told Ace I would give him three guesses which Elvis movie I had been watching this morning, and if he got it right I would give him a million dollars. His second guess was TICKLE ME. Anyway, now I owe Ace a million dollars. Unless... to quote Megan after she was informed of the incident, "Are you sure he just didn't want you to tickle him?"

Sleeping and Dreaming of Dreaming and Sleeping

You know, and these are the words you've been longing to hear, I believe I will tell you something about McNeil's dream of Dolores Hope after all. To wit, in McNeil's dream, Dolores Hope was concerned about her napping habits. And that brings up something important for everyone to ponder. It seems to me that McNeil is always dreaming about sleeping and dreaming. To be clear, people in McNeil's dreams themselves sleep and dream. Is that "normal"? I mean, do you dream about sleeping? Do you dream about dreaming? I don't think I do. Do I? I need some reliable statistics. My friend Mevelyn has described the "blog" itself as being like "a dream within a dream," but she was referring to its intentional ouroboros-based design as a byzantine labyrinth of frustration and woe. What I'm talking about here, though, is real sleep! Real dreams! Within real sleep! And real dreams! My use of the word "real" bothers me a little, but isn't a dream inside a dream just a dream? That is, as "real" as the dream within which it... aw, screw it. Pardon my bold use of the vernacular! Do I even have evidence to back up my analysis of McNeil's dream content? You bet I don't! I tried corroboration for a few seconds, but do you know how many hundreds of thousands of times the word "McNeil" appears on this "blog"? It stymies both research and sanity. All I can offer is the anecdotal scrap that in December of 2021, McNeil dreamed about Carol Channing having a dream. Are you happy now? Can I get on with my life? Ace and I are supposed to walk around the neighborhood when he finishes his cereal. Do you know how long it takes Ace to finish his cereal? It's like Waiting for Godot around here. One day I want to see this magical cereal bowl that never empties.

I Really Shouldn't Do This

Hey! So, you know, I'm reading THE ILIAD last night, because I'm the biggest egghead going, and Helen says "my dog-face self." And I'm like, "Whoa!" I'm like, "What's going on here?" I'm like, "Be nice to yourself, Helen! What can I do to help?" Also, I vaguely recall reading something about Helen comparing herself to a dog... where could it have been? In Emily Wilson's introduction to her translation of THE ODYSSEY? So I get up this morning and take THE ODYSSEY off the shelf and open to the exact page I was thinking of! Because I'm some kind of miracle man, everyone says so. Anyway, last night, I flipped to THE ILIAD's endnotes to see what "dog-face" was all about. Appended to the explanation was an incidental remark about Athena's usual designation as "owl-eyed." We all knew about that, didn't we? (See also.) So I said to myself, I said, "Hey! Are you going to put THE ILIAD on your famous list of books you've read with owls in them? Which consists of every book you have ever read? Because every book has an owl in it? It's just a fact of science!" And then I was like, "Hey! But that's only an endnote! So far, in the actual part of this translation you've read, Athena's eyes have been 'bright' and 'flashing' but not owl-like. So what's the plan? You're going to put THE ILIAD on your list WITH AN ASTERISK?" Because I was like "That seems crazy! You know Athena is going to be owl-eyed sooner or later! You would be a fool to put an asterisk on THE ILIAD. Why, you'd look like the biggest jerk alive! Nobody puts an asterisk on THE ILIAD, as Patrick Swayze famously said in DIRTY DANCING." So I'm going to go ahead and... look. This could easily cost me my "blogging" license. But I'm going to go ahead and put THE ILIAD on the list, without an asterisk. I know I'm taking a risk here. This is like betting the house on a spin of the roulette wheel! Oh my God! I can't believe how tense I am all the time! I live on the edge! And the taste of fear is delicious.

You Go Uruguay

The title of this "post" alludes to a Groucho Marx joke which I will not explain or contextualize because I know you don't care. And you know what? It hurts. Another thing you don't care about is a certain kind of coincidence I like. "Like" is a strong word. Anyway, I'm going to tell you about it. So, I was reading in this Witold Gombrowicz book about his reaction to the works of Simone Weil, and I was thinking, I don't know anything about Simone Weil. And then I watched a Godard movie the same day and a character repeatedly brought up Simone Weil! When I emailed Megan with this exciting news, I put an extra L in Weil... that's just how little I know about Simone Weil, which is just a bonus detail especially for you not to care about. Later that day, or maybe it was the next day, my brother told me that he had purchased one of my books from a used book store, and he texted me a photo of the inscription, in which I had praised the previous owner of the book to the high heavens. You wouldn't believe how lovingly I inscribed this book. My brother was incensed that the guy had ditched it. Though the the book was inscribed to him using his first name alone, I am almost 100% sure I know who the guy is, though I was surprised by how seemingly devoted I was to him at one time, or maybe I just tend to gush. I wondered to myself with my simple childlike brain, gee, where is that guy now? Whatever happened to him? So I looked him up, and he moved to Uruguay some years ago. I wasn't mad to begin with, but if I had been, how could I have stayed that way? I wouldn't pack up any books by me if I were moving to Uruguay! Okay. We're not to the end of this story yet! So then I picked up Gombrowicz again and he's taking a little trip on a boat, during which (from the translation by Lillian Vallee) "we practically reach the green shores of Uruguay." Now, I bet you think those are all the things you're not going to care about. But there's more! Here's where the ouroboros comes in. So! As you may not care about recalling, the diary of Witold Gombrowicz is an official Million Dollar Book Club selection. All right! Here's the thing... the guy who unceremoniously (I assume... or maybe there was a ceremony!) dumped my lushly inscribed book before moving to Uruguay is the editor of one of our future Million Dollar Book Club selections! (We have a list.) Or I should say he was the editor of one of our former future Million Dollar Book Club selections, for I immediately made a motion, which was seconded and passed (as there are just two of us) for him to be crossed off all of our lists until the end of time. I wasn't mad, but it was what Witold Gombrowicz would have done. Half his diary consists of taking stuff like that personally!

No One Is Talking

Well, it was back in December when my enormously popular yet mysteriously obscure feature ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, on the "web" site Flaming Hydra, came to its gently burbling conclusion. I can't say that I was inundated with cards and letters asking me what might come next. In fact, the query was raised by no one, nor was the finale itself a source of rueful celebration. The subject of the column in question, of course, was my friend and neighbor Ace Atkins, in particular his work on the Pauly Shore film JURY DUTY. And something did come next! That something was, and is, KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD, the thrilling story of how Kent Osborne got cast in the starmaking Brendan Fraser vehicle SCHOOL TIES, which I believe came out within a year of Pauly Shore's JURY DUTY. We're already on Episode 3 of KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD! Which I only mention because Kent talks about eating chicken in Episode 3 and, as you know, I have kept a careful tally here on the "blog" of Kent's chicken-eating activities, insofar as they relate to me personally... it would not be within the scope of even our mightiest computer systems to maintain a record of every time Kent eats chicken, which he does with neither remorse nor surcease. He's probably eating a chicken right now! If one were to "click" on the proper "hyperlink" shortly to come, one would find that the chicken in Episode 3 of KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD is Chicken Française... a spoiler in which I do not mind indulging as I thought you might like to know that Chicken Française is the same thing as Chicken French, to which I was introduced by James Whorton in Brockport, NY, a stone's throw from Chicken French's place of origin, Rochester. If I recall correctly, Jim told me that he had originally (and wrongly) assumed the name "Chicken French" had something to do with French's brand mustard, the French's Mustard company, it may shock and delight you to learn, having historical ties to Rochester! What a world. On that same trip, Jim fed me something called a "garbage plate," an incident fictionalized in a story of which I could not remember the title as I tossed and turned last night, contemplating "blogging" about it upon awakening, which, as you can see, I have done. Anyhow, the story about the garbage plate appeared in the Hingston & Olsen SHORT STORY ADVENT CALENDAR for 2019 and it was titled, as I just confirmed, "The Wild Man of Mississippi." Who cares? Nobody! Which was my original point. For example, I have also heard literally nothing about Frowny 'n' Smiley, my big hit characters who made their debut on Adult Swim around the same time that ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD came to its sputtering halt. I was told recently - without asking! - that Frowny 'n' Smiley are "in rotation," but the only true evidence I have for their existence is in the commercial breaks for the BEHIND THE ELEPHANT special that I recorded off the TV one morning some hours before sunrise. I have had no verification of a Frowny 'n' Smiley sighting from any independent source, and the chances are good everything is a delusion. Yes, everything.

Oh My Goodness

My current "nighttime book" is a Penguin paperback of the Apocryphal Gospels, translated by Simon Gathercole. I finished reading the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus goes to school at about age five. Anyway, the teacher starts to teach him the alphabet and Jesus isn't having it. He says (I paraphrase, sorry, Lord!), "Just tell me about the letter A. Then I'll see whether I think you can handle B." Naturally, the teacher does a terrible job explaining the letter A. So Jesus says (I'm quoting directly now) "Pay attention, sir, and understand the arrangement of the first letter. Notice here how it has diagonal lines and a stroke in the middle, and then you can see the alpha's lines pointing and straddling, joining together and parting, leading off and going up, circling and darting, tripartite and double-edged, of similar shape and thickness and kind, rectilinear, equilibrious, isometric and isomeric." All right! And here's the part I identified with: the teacher goes (quoting again) "Oh my goodness, my goodness, I am a befuddled wreck of a man!" which is exactly what I used to say every day when I was a teacher. Weirdly, you know what this reminds me of? So, when we were working on the ADVENTURE TIME episode "Diamonds and Lemons," which was a Minecraft tie-in, few of us knew enough about Minecraft. Taking myself as an example, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that it existed. That was it for me. So we had one member of the team (I think it was Cole Sanchez) who knew everything about Minecraft, and he gave us a crash course in its intricacies. Also, we watched people playing Minecraft on YouTube. And I remember there was one guy in particular who just played Minecraft and said "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness" over and over. "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness" fifty times in a row as he played Minecraft. "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness," he said, thereby racking up millions upon millions of "views." And that's when I knew writing was dead. That was the moment! I was like "I have no future." Because you don't need to hire somebody to write down "Oh my goodness" fifty times in a row for you. Though I bet Samuel Beckett might have tried it out! We may also recall the time I read an online reviewer who was persnickety in an unintentionally amusing way, and I thought, you know, I try to write characters who talk like this all the time, but why? Here they are already existing in real life for the world to enjoy. Anyway, when Jesus is eight years old, he kills an especially mean teacher. Kills him dead! Once again, the point of contention is the alphabet. At the end of that episode, Joseph takes Jesus home and tells Mary to keep an eye on him, quote, "in case people who provoked him ended up dead." That was the first time I ever laughed out loud at any Gospel, apocryphal or otherwise. Cole teaching us about Minecraft reminds me that we had a bee expert come in and tell us all about bees on SUMMER CAMP ISLAND. But my memory is that everything we learned about bees was too depressing to use.

Animal Friends

I know what you're asking. Did we spend part of our 30th anniversary celebration as you might expect, revisiting the grim site of the miserable death of Meriwether Lewis, which we accidentally discovered on a prior anniversary trip? Yes and no. We paid tribute to it as we drove by, sending good wishes aloud to Meriwether Lewis's ghost, but we were too busy thinking about how we hadn't eaten all day, and we were eager to reach our destination. Sorry, Meriwether Lewis! Now I'll fill you in on the rest of our trip in a massive, unreadable, unbroken chunk of text, such as has been a "blog" tradition for more than 19 years, God help us all. We saw lots of cool animals, including a donkey and a goat who seemed to be good friends. At one point we were stopped at a traffic light behind a huge tanker truck, and printed on the rear of the tank were the words - and only these words - THE WORLD'S BEST COFFEE. "Is that full of coffee?" I blurted idiotically, causing Dr. Theresa to laugh for the next 10 miles. In the instant, I meant it! You may recall that my brain was famously stunned into a stupor at a not entirely distant point in the past. You'd think it would have fixed itself by now! The truck was full of fuel, of course, which it was carrying, no doubt, to a convenience store/gas station purporting to serve THE WORLD'S BEST COFFEE. There is no conceivable reason to fill a tanker truck with coffee. One night we had a great dinner and walked back to the hotel, where, on the previous evening, we had sat in the lobby bar and gazed across at an elegant recess filled with a different kind of furniture, and upon that furniture there sat a man who Dr. Theresa swore was the late Truman Capote. Anyway, we vowed at the time that we would go sit in that elegant recess with the nice furniture on a future evening. Well! I thought it was time. Dr. Theresa wasn't so sure. I kept saying how much fun it would be to sit in the elegant recess and "people watch." Finally, I talked her into it. She sat there grudgingly sipping a ranch water as I tried out a towering wingback chair such as Mr. Burns might use on THE SIMPSONS. Anyway, we were sitting there like that when a woman in leather pants walked by and did a double take. Then she came back and - Dr. Theresa reenacted this gesture often in the aftermath - sort of displayed her palms and circled them in the air as if trying to encompass her wondrous vision (me). "You look regal!" she informed me from across the lobby. So I looked at Dr. Theresa like, "Huh? Huh? I guess 'people watching' was the greatest idea ever!" She laughed and we realized we were feeling pretty great, so we went up to the room and ordered an after-dinner pizza. That's right! We decided we were even because recently the guy who was restocking the greeting cards at Walmart tried to pick up Dr. Theresa. I don't think he was wearing leather pants. In the morning, Dr. Theresa had a few things to take care of, so I went downstairs before her to get some coffee and wait for her to join me for breakfast. As I would be alone for a short time, I brought along my anniversary reading material, Seneca's version of OEDIPUS, translated by Emily Wilson, because I know how to have a good time. A guy got on the elevator with me and said, "You a stoic fan?" I didn't know what the hell he was talking about until I looked down and recollected the Seneca book in my hand. I said, "Sure." He said something about admiring Seneca's letters and I replied, and I think this is an exact quotation, "Yeah, well, the plays are nasty." Thus ended our discussion of stoicism. Sitting there with my coffee, I started thinking about that book I read about ancient Greece not too long ago, from which I learned that the hyper-masculine bros of the "manosphere" are really into the Stoics these days. I wondered, was that guy a "manosphere" guy? Did he think I was part of his special "manosphere"? Well, it's my own fault for carrying around a collection of Seneca tragedies like some kind of secret handshake. As Oedipus says in Emily Wilson's translation, "The guilt of my times is mine." On the way back home, Jon Langford called, and I answered Dr. Theresa's cellphone because she was driving. See, Dr. Theresa is bringing Jon here (to Oxford, Mississippi) for some events soon, including a concert on Saturday the 25th, which you should really attend, though I know you don't exist. But anyway, please "click" on this "link" and get informed! I know you won't. So I kept getting disconnected and finally had to give up because we were tooling down the Natchez Trace, and for the first time in my life, I felt I was in that contrived horror-movie situation... as you know, in a contemporary setting, there must always be a reason for the protagonist's phone not to work. That seemed interesting when I started typing it. As we continued our journey home, the satellite radio with which our rental car came equipped began to play a song I could have sworn was called "Everybody Dance Now," but, as I learned from the accompanying dashboard display, is actually called "Gonna Make You Sweat," which I guess everyone knew but me. Dr. Theresa was very concerned when she believed she heard the narrator of the song declaring that he would make us, the listeners, "sweat until [we] bleed." Sweating until He bled is what the Savior did in the Garden of Gethsemane, as you probably know from Luke 22:44. Well, I looked it up when we got home and yes, the guy in that song wants people to sweat until they bleed. Is this a good way to end this "post"?

Frivolity When the Earth Is Swallowed Up

This is where I tell you about my trip to Burbank. 1. On the flight out, my seatmate had a sweet dog companion seemingly smuggled under his hoodie. I don't know about dogs. I believe this one was a boxer. But I just don't know. I can't swear to it in a court of law! The dog had one blue eye and one brown eye. It would arise from the neck hole of the hoodie and look at me with a nice expression. Sometimes, due to the angle of its owner, it looked like a human with a dog's head! When the guy got up to go to the restroom, he stuffed the dog into a duffel bag. The dog was fine. 2. Layover at the Salt Lake City airport! This story just gets better and better, doesn't it? So, a booming voice on the public address system repeatedly gave out the first, middle, and last name of a guy who had walked out on his check at an airport restaurant. It was an old-school public shaming... Cotton Mather style! I realize that by mentioning Cotton Mather, I may have confused you geographically. I don't know enough about Brigham Young to know whether he would have made an appropriate replacement in my already shaky allusion. 3. Okay, on the next airplane, a guy across the aisle was scrolling through pictures on his phone and narrating to his friend: "This is a salad bar... that's another salad bar..." Ha ha, anyway, I thought that was funny. They were looking at photos of salad bars! It's a crazy world! 4. BURBANK! Kent was in town, too, and we were both staying in the same hotel. As we rode back to the hotel from Dan Tana's, Kent spied a DeLorean pulling into traffic behind us. He was pretty stoked, I don't mind telling you! He kept saying, "It's a DeLorean! Look, it's a DeLorean! It's right behind us. The DeLorean is right behind us!" But I don't know why, I never turned around to look at the DeLorean. It was just like when Kent begged me to watch Mark McGwire break a home run record and I coldly refused. We'll never know what's wrong with me. 5. On one menu, I briefly misread "scallion" as "sea lion." 6. Kate Tsang and I spent a good part of one afternoon just wandering around in the impossibly vast Warner Brothers prop department. People were working, loading props on carts to be taken to various sets. We just stayed out of their way. No one hassled us. In fact, one man cheerfully asked if we needed anything. We said we were just looking. Then we ended up in some odd corners, such as a section containing many kinds of animals who had been subjected to taxidermy. I have never enjoyed the thought of taxidermy. But here's Kate. She notices that some of the animals are falling apart. She dates them for me to the time "when Theodore Roosevelt was shooting animals" because they were stuffed with straw... a discontinued practice, Kate gave me to understand. I was standing there thinking, like, "Wow, Kate sure knows a lot about taxidermy!" Which reminds me of something: 7. I ran into Steve Wolfhard completely unexpectedly! Somehow we got to talking about the movie THE SEA HAWK and I mentioned how much I enjoyed the monkey's performance in that film. Steve said the monkey made him sad. I got it! I feel the same way about taxidermy. I said, "Were you thinking about the monkey's home life?" And Steve said... I think I have this right... "I was thinking, 'That could have been me!'" Trying to show Steve that I was on his side about being sad concerning monkeys, I said I didn't like it when monkeys were made to ride dogs. Steve said, "Maybe the monkey likes it. Maybe he likes going fast." 8. Oh! Before I get back to the prop department, I should say that when I arrived at the gate into Warner Brothers, I was greeted by a young, groovy guard, not an irascible old guard of the type the movies have trained me to expect. So, when Kate and I entered the parking garage over near the prop department, an irascible old guard really didn't want to let us in. At last, he asked us for identification, and that's when I discovered MY DRIVER'S LICENSE WAS MISSING! I bet you didn't know you were in for thrills like this. Anyhow, it turned out the groovy young guard forgot to include it when he handed me back everything I had taken out of my pockets for him. And I didn't notice! So I'm not blaming the hipsters of today for falling down on the job! BUT! If that hardboiled old-school guard hadn't been so stereotypically irascible, I might never have been allowed to leave Burbank! I might be sitting in a small room at the Burbank airport right now! So, thank you, hateful old guard. 9. Well, I can't really describe how satisfying it was to wander around the prop department with Kate. I don't know - though I suspect there's a Warholian element - why it is so wonderful to look at, just for example, a wall full of rotary phones arranged by color, or a shelf of hundreds of miniature Statues of Liberty, or boxes and boxes of beauty products from the 40s and 50s, or the long row of toilets, of which (the toilets) I sent a photo to just one person: Ace Atkins. Kate and I stayed in the prop department so long that they were closing up. We didn't know it. We just kept trying to get out and finding nothing but locked doors. We could have been trapped forever! Who was going to help us? Not the irascible guard! He would probably think we were getting what we deserved. Then we found a different kind of door: a door that was not locked. 10. Kate and I walked a few short steps from the Warner Brothers lot to the Smoke House, where we dined with one Adam Muto. Now that I can't eat steak anymore because of wanting to stay alive, I was excited to order the chicken pot pie. You know the one! The one that Pen and I saw once! The one as big around as a manhole cover! But friends, I am here to inform you they have taken it off the menu. The server told me that one time... just one time... they had put it back on the menu for a special occasion. But that time is gone forever. We live in new times now. He was very nice, and couldn't have known he was breaking my heart. 11. Reading Seneca's NATURAL QUESTIONS while taking my blood pressure in my hotel room, I laughed when he observed, "Frivolity when the earth is swallowed up shows a lack of serious-mindedness." He was angry at Ovid for beautifully describing an apocalyptic flood but then adding the image of wolves and sheep and lions swimming around in it. "Come on, Ovid! Get real! As if!" Such seemed to be the contents of Seneca's objections. 12. Quinn took me to a place that featured on its menu something called a "Good Ass Salad." Such language! Is that how you get your kicks? Forcing someone's great-grandmother to say the words "good ass salad"? This great-grandmother I'm imagining can't silently point at the item on the menu with her quaking, palsied finger! Thoughts along these lines led me to confess to Quinn that I have been saying "ass" on the "blog" a lot lately. Quinn said, "Oh, Jack, Bart Simpson could say 'ass' in the 90s." She might not have said "Oh, Jack." 13. It was raining the morning I left for home. Kate had said just a day or two before, "It never rains here." But there it was, falling from the sky, the tears of the gods as I like to call it. At a stoplight on the way to the airport, I saw a driver sticking his hand out the window, eager to discover for himself what this thing they call a raindrop must feel like. His beaming grin indicated that he was pleased with the result!

Sunny and Red

The book (see yesterday’s “post”) did inform me that Nelson Eddy had a bodyguard named Red Boyles, which I found hilarious for reasons requiring, I believe, no explanation. Furthermore, Jeanette MacDonald, later in life, enjoyed the company of a regular “escort” named Sunny Griffin, which is not a significantly funny name. But Sunny Griffin’s day job? Makeup man at a mortuary! I guess it is, if not funny, something... for a mortuary makeup man to go by a cheerful moniker like Sunny. But maybe I don’t know enough about mortuaries. One time Dr. Theresa and I were in a bar in Decatur, Georgia, I think, and a guy there was like... wait, his girlfriend was writing a big old grimoire by hand at another table. And this guy was like, “Did you know you can just walk in and get a job in a mortuary with no qualifications? That’s what I did!” And he was really happy about it. Now, we don’t have to take his word for everything. Then, as I recall, he said some weird stuff about remembering a photo he had seen on someone’s refrigerator of Dr. Theresa in the gloves she wore at our wedding, and something else weird about what she had done with her hair that day, which I think may have been his job? Fixing up hair at a mortuary? Or maybe I got that from an X-FILES episode. Then he said something funny about his hometown, or he said it in a funny way, which, though I can’t or won’t explain it right now, became the basis of a long-running inside joke between Dr. Theresa and myself. I hasten to add that the joke was not at the fellow’s expense, as you may be forgiven for thinking after he had made startling personal remarks about a photo of Dr. Theresa he had seen once and never forgotten, like he was Dana Andrews in LAURA, while his girlfriend scrawled evil runes in a big, black book (the latter being a detail I drew on, if loosely, for my 2016 story collection MOVIE STARS) but no, it had to do with the musical intonation he struck while saying the name of his hometown, that’s all, a very innocent bit of japery indeed. This little walk down memory lane has reminded me of a song by Bill Taft’s current band. I’ve gone to the trouble of making it the number one selection on the following very manageable 10-song playlist (for you to experience as you read this “post” over and over again) of bands featuring Bill and the cellist Brian Halloran, though another of their bands, Hubcap City, seems to have been scrubbed from the music streaming service entirely, just like Jerry Clower before it. (Hey, just to bring it full circle, which I don’t think I’m actually doing, Bill and Brian were both in our wedding! Brian played his cello as Dr. Theresa, before she was a Dr., came wafting down the aisle on the wings of love, one assumes.)

Didn't Mean to Be So Hilarious All the Time

Hey, remember when I said I was going to "go out on a limb" and call something a "viola da gamba"? You were probably chuckling wisely that I had spouted a real mouthful, like something right out of a Frasier script! Because, of course, as the OED tells us, "viola da gamba" means "literally, 'leg viol.'" Yes, I left the final "a" off on purpose, just like the makers of the OED. Hey, man, if you don't know what a viol is, I just feel sorry for you. Anyway, as I am sure you put together long before I did (just minutes ago), a leg is a "limb" of the body. Ha ha ha, wonderful. Mine is such a waggish wit. It hurts! This reminds me, in a roundabout fashion, of the time Kent asked if I wanted to see the stoop from SEX AND THE CITY and I replied with an astonishing swiftness worthy of Churchill, "That's no way to talk about Sarah Jessica Parker!" My witticism in that case, while demonstrably unfair to Ms. Parker, was based on the word "stupe," as I am sure you will recall will fondness, which I felt called for explanation at the time, thus ruining the joke, such as it was. The OED tells us that "stupe" goes back as far as 1722, and provides this example: "Leaving this Old Stupe, the Keeper conducted me to a Gentleman, who was not so far advanc'd in Years," proving that ageism, among other things, was alive and well in 1722! I think my wonderful twinkling humor has taught us a thing or two today. POSTSCRIPT: My records reveal that it was Tom Herpich, not Kent Osborne, who offered to show us the stoop from SEX AND THE CITY. And here I was just yesterday, getting on McNeil's case for misplacing a bellhop. We're still learning and growing as people! And it's all thanks to the miracle of jesting and humorousness which is such a balm in our trying times of nowadays we've been enjoying lately.

Of Mice and Dogs

Yesterday, when I was telling you the shameful story of how McNeil's grandfather stole a copy of PAL JOEY, I was looking for something to "link" via "hyperlink" to the words "PAL JOEY." You know how I love to "link" to things! Indeed, if you examine the "blog" with the eye of a scholar, you will soon realize that it is designed in a secret way to be nothing more than a never-ending loop of "hyperlinks" that an immortal person could enjoy forever. (And, as I have emphasized repeatedly, it works much better on your laptop than on your phone, due to the extra bells and whistles. But I'm not the boss of you! Also, you may not exist.) Anyhow, I could have sworn that I had mentioned PAL JOEY on the "blog" before. But as far as I could tell, I had not. So I went ahead and "posted" the damn thing. Pardon my salty language! Later on, I thought, wait a minute, I could swear I "posted" at least a photo of the time when Laraine Newman and I went to William Faulkner's house and one of us (I couldn't remember which) held up, whilst being photographed, Faulkner's own personal copy of PAL JOEY... presumably purchased legally. Turned out I had not "posted" that either... until now! (See above.) Meanwhile, McNeil has been emailing me his thoughts as he begins to read his grandfather's stolen copy of PAL JOEY: "On page 35 of Pal Joey and so far only a dog has shown up. Joey mentions 'mouse' a lot, but that's just when referring to a female human." To be clear, McNeil brings up the dog because he was hoping for an owl. He also learned, from the eponymous Joey, the term "one-arm joint," which he passed along, and I looked it up in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG, which cites, in clarifying the definition, PAL JOEY itself, as I was thrilled beyond measure to report back to McNeil. Just another endless loop.

Nestled Together

I'm rusty at the old jotting game. As you know, it used to be that when I went on a trip, I jotted everything for you in one of my dear old jotting books. Everybody was simply crazy about that! But then I stopped "blogging," and the last time I went to Los Angeles, why, I hardly even mentioned it. But since then, I quit social media, and as a result, I no longer have anything to do aside from the ocassional jot. Bearing that in mind, I shall now attempt to make you one of those lists that I used to make that everyone adored so much. 1. I asked a question at the front desk of the hotel and the desk clerk said he knew my voice! He said, "Are you Root Beer Guy?" I screamed back in his face, "YES!" That has never happened to me before (being recognized as Root Beer Guy, I mean; I have screamed enthusiastically into many faces), and, I dare say, never will again. (Full disclosure: on a later date, I overheard him telling a coworker "Did you know that guy is the King of Root Beer?" So maybe he didn't have the solid grasp on my character that I thought.) 2. I don't usually use conditioner on my hair. In fact, I would almost go so far as to say I never do. BUT! I figured, what the hell, this hotel conditioner is free. I'm going to put it on my hair! What's the worst than can happen? I also cleaned out my wallet. 3. Rode around with Richard, the chillest Uber driver in the world. If you're ever in California and need a ride, ask for Richard! 4. Remember the drugstore where I famously bought my expensive brush? And, let me double check, did I buy an expensive comb there? Once again, I scream, "YES!" Anyway, that drugstore is gone now! It's just not there. How could they have gone out of business? They must have been raking in a fortune on brushes and combs alone! All kidding aside, I miss you, fancy drugstore. Go with God! 5. I had steak Sinatra two nights in a row, once at Dan Tana's and once at The Smoke House. (I think I have erroneously called it "The Smokehouse" a few times in the past, but their official signage separates the smoke from the house.) I may have formerly insisted that Dan Tana's steak Sinatra is superior to the steak Sinatra at The Smoke House. On this ocassion, however, I must advance the opposite claim! The old Smoke House waiter stood and mixed the spaghetti in with the steak and peppers right at the table, but not with showy theatricality, no, just in the background, in a workmanlike fashion, getting the job done without undue fuss, which, of course, did not add to or subtract from the toothsome nature of the dish in question... OR DID IT? The result, in any case, was delectable. 5. I had stars in my eyes whilst consuming my steak Sinatra that night, for across the table from me sat Jesse Moynihan and his brother! Now, I have never met Jesse's brother before, and, as I have often boasted (most recently a few seconds ago), I quit social media. The only thing I miss about social media is "Pickle Minute," a thing that Jesse and his brother and some of their friends do on Instagram. I'm a big "Pickle Minute" fan! And there, at The Smoke House, I felt I was in a live episode of "Pickle Minute," as Jesse's brother took a photo of me pointing at a fried pickle. For, yes, having spotted fried pickles on the menu, how could two of the hosts of "Pickle Minute" resist placing that order? They could not. 6. Also at dinner, a guy named Joe I met at a party in 2012 and haven't seen or talked to since, but I remembered him, because you meet so few people you can talk about Anthony Braxton with! 7. Had a meeting scheduled at the Bob's Big Boy restaurant where David Lynch used to go every day. It turned out that Bob's Big Boy was too crowded to host the meeting, to my deep chagrin, as I thought it a wonderful coincidence that Lynchian muse Laura Dern was at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, whence I had come, at the very same time! 8. After the meeting, I walked around the neighborhood with a person who had been in the meeting with me. We wandered about, talking about the meeting, and what it meant, and sharing our regrets about the salad place across the street from Bob's Big Boy, where we had ended up. Finally, in our circular perambulations, we saw Bob's Big Boy looming before us. "Should we?" said the person. To which I again screamed, "YES!" By now, its lunchtime rush concluded, Bob's Big Boy was quite accommodating. The person ordered a slice of strawberry pie, because the Bob's Big Boy menu stated that the strawberries were "nestled together." When the pie came out, this person observed joyfully, "They ARE nestled together!" The person went on to declare the strawberry pie at Bob's Big Boy "maybe my favorite piece of pie." 9. I brought some Henry James to read on the airplane. I always found him tough going in the past. Anyway, this time, his characters were making lots of wisecracks and I was getting into it. 10. Well, I have left out many of the nice people I saw on the trip, and interesting events, but my jotting is not what it used to be. Special mention must be made of Hanna K Nystrom, who was flying in from Sweden just as I was about to fly back to Mississippi. She thoughtfully made time for breakfast in the brief Sweden-Mississippi overlap we enjoyed. We talked about how cold and gray it was. (Los Angeles was chilly and gray for the whole of my stay, once again lending some weight to the Lorenz Hart lyric.) Hanna said it was colder than Sweden!

Here Comes the Kicker

Yesterday, while Dr. Theresa was out doing some errands, I watched MADADAYO, Kurosawa's final movie, a surprisingly (and gratifyingly) lengthy portion of which was taken up with the protagonist looking for his lost cat. During that section, the shamisen was mentioned a few times, as something - and I hate to say this - made partly from cats, and the man and his wife and all his friends were hoping that no one had made a shamisen out of his cat. I confess that in my ignorance, I did not know what a shamisen was, nor, in my obstinance, did I look it up. Okay! The next thing you need to know is that Dr. Theresa routinely dismissed the show GILMORE GIRLS when it was on the air. "Too girly," she said on more than one occasion as I sat there watching it. But somehow or another, she recently got the idea to give it another try. Maybe she's mellowing out! So, when she got home, we watched an episode in which a kitten appeared. "Is something going to happen to the kitten?" Dr. Theresa asked (something happened to a cat several episodes earlier). "I don't think so!" I said, reminding her, however, that it has been many years since I watched the series, and I did not remember every detail. Or any detail. Or anything. So check this out! The kitten got lost! Just like the cat in MADADAYO. Please do not concern youself: the matter was swiftly and successfully resolved by the eponymous Gilmore Girls. Later, of course, Dr. Theresa and I retired for the evening. As we often do, we set the bedroom TV to Frasier, whose soothing tones have lulled us into a peaceful slumber on many a winter's night. He's a human white-noise machine! We half-listened to two episodes. In the first, Frasier's radio listeners called in to describe their lost cats, much to Frasier's displeasure! Ha ha, that's not what Frasier's radio show is about, or so Frasier seemed to muse as he fumed. But he grudgingly let them describe their lost cats. This, you will note, was the third bit of entertainment I had consumed in one day concerning lost cats. Okay. Get ready. Here comes the kicker! Now, in the next, entirely different episode of Frasier, having nothing to do with cats, he mentions, of all things (are you sitting down?), the shamisen! His less educated friends, much like myself, don't know what a shamisen is, so Frasier somewhat smugly explains that it is "a kind of Japanese guitar." I did not have to look up the shamisen. It came to me. And with that, the circle of the day was complete. Well, I did have to look it up, because I didn't entirely trust Frasier, and you, by doing your own research, may judge in what ways the shamisen resembles a guitar, and in what ways it does not. The preceding has been adapted freely from an email I sent to McNeil.

Invisible Obelisk

I don't "blog" anymore, but by no means did I want you to think that McNeil has stopped looking for obelisks. He sent me the above photo (seemingly from a television show called UFO) and requested a glowing orb to put on his desk. He also told me to "note the obelisk." Friends, I looked all over and didn't see the obelisk! I communicated my alarm to McNeil! I concluded - too hastily - that the thing resembling a crystal ball was the "glowing orb," not the white circle, which, as I examined it, looked so flat and artificial that I decided McNeil has placed it there through computer wizardry, in order to mark the obelisk in question. I furthermore concluded, on the basis of zero evidence, that McNeil had meant to draw a red circle (or suchlike) around the obelisk but had, instead, made an opaque white circle by mistake. Confronted with my theory, McNeil was appalled. The flat white circle was indeed the object of McNeil's admiration, a supposed "glowing orb" original to the work as televised. The obelisk, he said, was on the left front corner of the desk (from the POV of someone sitting behind it). Then I saw it! And if you look, you can see it too. Maybe you have already seen it with your fresh young eyes that are not yet old and weak like mine. In conclusion, I mentioned to McNeil that the white dot looked like something that may have been placed there by censors to cover a large hole in the seat of the man's pants. Yes, McNeil replied facetiously, that would explain the slide whistle sound effect when the man turned around. And now you know why I don't "blog" anymore.

Helpful Thoughts

Back before I stopped "blogging," I would use this space, among other things, to collect many quotations that felt creatively helpful to me... a commonplace book, of sorts... once I even printed them all out and handed them to a classroom full of bewildered students, back when I had students. A few examples spring to mind, like Sun Ra's advice (I'll paraphrase) to eat peach pie every day, and one day you'll discover that it tastes like something other than peach pie. Or the Maine antiques dealer who said, "I think I'm becoming more and more attracted to things that aren't worth anything." There were many, many more, now scattered to the winds. Well, I still run across helpful thoughts, but I have no place to put them. Like, there was a New York Times article about a plant that lives for a thousand years, and a scientist was quoted as saying, "From weird things, you discover weird things that help you understand things that you didn’t know you didn’t understand." I jotted that in a manuscript I had started in which the protagonist tells the stories of the knights of the round table to his cats. Yeah, I got about two paragraphs into that one before stopping. And just yesterday, I was reading another celebrity biography, as part of my continuing program of adult education with Megan Abbott. It's a Lee Grant memoir, which came highly recommended by Bill Boyle. Anyway, Martha Graham just told Lee Grant, "Ugly is better than pretty!" Exclamation point original to the text.

The Long Road to Owl Town

Am I "blogging" again? I honestly can't tell. But I know one thing! I do "blog" every time I read a book with an owl in it, because I have to add it to my long list of books I have read with owls in them, which I started keeping for reasons that are lost to history. Anyhow! This time we have a book with a book with an owl in it in it, which I think we've had before, but I'm tired. Maybe I'll try to look that up one day. It's a long way to our latest owl! It's complicated. Get yourself a drink. Get comfortable! Here we go. So! You know that Megan Abbott and I have formed between ourselves a little club, in which we read what I will loosely call celebrity biographies. Well! Now we are reading one about Louise Fitzhugh, the author who created Harriet the Spy. Everyone is in her circle, or in her circle's circle. To present just one small example, the last person I was forced to "blog" about, for entirely different reasons, was George Segal, and then his brother, of all people, pops up in this book! That's nothing. But I'm not here to talk about the exciting things. All I want to tell you is that one of Louise Fitzhugh's girlfriends was friends with a woman who dated Patricia Highsmith. So, after these two (Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh's girlfriend's friend) broke up, they both wrote books in which they murdered characters based on each other! Patricia Highsmith's ex-girlfriend murdered her (figuratively) with a hammer, and Patricia Highsmith returned the favor (by other literary means) in a book titled THE CRY OF THE OWL. Hey! As long as I'm here, I'll tell you something else. What the hell. Louise Fitzhugh lights Janet Gaynor's cigarette, which transaction produces much the same magical benediction as when someone lights William Holden's cigarette in THE MOVIEGOER, the latter incident covered almost too thoroughly in my lamented nonfiction book about cigarette lighters.

Golf Buddy

So I was watching CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM the other night, and one of Larry David's golf buddies reminded me of something. I was like, "Hey! Isn't that the standup comedian who sat in the car so we never met him? We were having dinner with Rhonda Shear and her manager more than twenty years ago, and her manager wrote the authorized biography of Harry Ritz, which no one would publish, even though it was authorized, and her boyfriend at the time, who is this guy I am seeing on CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM right now, sat and waited in the car while Rhonda Shear and her manager ate dinner with us?" That's what I was like. So I emailed Ward McCarthy, who was the other person in this story, and asked him if I were crazy. He wrote back, "That is pretty much how I remember the story. However, I thought Bobby Slayton was driving the car around and around the block because they couldn't find (or didn't want to pay for) parking. Or maybe I just made that up when telling the story later to make the guy seem even sadder." This is just the kind of wayward memory I used to "blog" about. Now, I don't "blog" anymore, but... I don't know. The evidence would suggest otherwise, maybe.

A Very Important Announcement

I can't believe it took me so long to watch the ending of THREE RING CIRCUS. I just got around to finishing it last night. So Jerry does a clown act with a tiny monkey. This is one tiny monkey, believe me. And it runs over and starts riding around in the sawdust on a tiny scooter and I was like, "Gee! They really found a tiny scooter to fit that tiny monkey. Look at him go!" This isn't the important part, but it was pretty great to see that tiny monkey really booking it on that tiny scooter. And he's wearing like a red silk diaper. Suddenly he's off the scooter and posing Burt Reynolds style in his red silk diaper. We haven't gotten to the important part. Now Jerry, for reasons I can't quite recall, picks up something like a bazooka and starts shooting something - maybe they're long foam tubes? - at the reclining monkey. It's all real harmless and Jerry misses by a mile anyway. Don't make me swear to what it is coming out of that bazooka. But one thing is for sure: that monkey needs to escape, and pronto. So he jumps up and hops on the back of a convenient dog we haven't seen before and rides away to freedom. That's the important part: THREE RING CIRCUS has A MONKEY RIDING A DOG IN IT! As I'm sure you will recall, I have mixed feelings about monkeys riding dogs. They (the feelings, and the monkeys riding dogs) even come up in one of the stories in my most recent short story collection MOVIE STARS, in which they (the monkeys riding dogs) symbolize... the futility of existence or something? I can't remember. But in this case I was okay. I even laughed! The dog seemed into it.