9.15.2023 – we still check the mail

we still check the mail
everyday and there are times
the mail is for us

They call it the sloooow country.

Everything seems to run at a different pace down here.

Even the mail.

You can tell we are old.

We walk to our mail box and check it every day.

But if we mail something to one of our kids, we have learned to give them a heads up to ‘check their mailbox’, because if we didn’t, they wouldn’t.

We often get mail.

I should say we often get mail in our mail box.

I remember the times when mail came everyday and there was a lot of it.

Even in college we got a lot of mail.

One of my roommates subscribed to Sports Illustrated.

We all looked forward to the day it got delivered though I have to say, with that time honored tradition, my roommate wanted to be the one who read it first.

When the magazine was nice and fresh and unread.

Something I could relate to and really understood.

Especially on those odd days I was home and got the mail and got to read it first.

We all knew that the edition of Sports Illustrated that came out AFTER the Super Bowl edition would be the famous swimsuit edition.

My roommate was determined to be the first one to read it that magazine so when he left for the day that day, he took the mailbox key with him.

I noticed the mail box key was missing from its hook that morning and as we all knew what day Sports Illustrated was delivered, I put it all together.

My first thought was that it had been well played and I silent applauded my roommate’s aforethought.

Then I accepted the challenge.

I would be the first one to read that magazine.

I knew that from the window in my room I could see up the street.

I got my books and parked on the window seat and after a bit I caught sight of our mail person working his way towards our apartment building.

Timing it just right I got down the steps with a another key in my fist and got to the mailbox at just as the mail person unlocked the boxes.

“Anything for 811?,” I asked, all innocence, just being helpful.

The guy looks at his cart, grabs a pile of envelopes and Sports Illustrated and handed it over without a question.

The look on my roommate’s face when he came in to see the magazine open on the coffee table was worth the price of tuition that semester.

With the magic of the low country, sometimes that mail in our mail box is for us.

More often than not, if there is more than one piece of mail in the mailbox, one of those pieces of mail will be for someone else in the complex, the neighborhood or at least, the same state.

I once ordered something from Amazon and got a text message that it had been delivered.

The email I got said, ‘Package left in mail box.’

There was no package in our mail box and I knew what happened.

Someone else got my package.

I wanted to post a note at the mailbox box that said, WHO EVER GOT MY MAIL, PLEASE GIVE IT BACK and sign it with my name and address.

I have to say that in an age when you can count on everyone owning a gun, my desire to leave such a note, with my name and address on it, takes more courage than I got right now.

I just got mad.

But it turned out that someone didn’t take my package.

They just put it back in the outbox.

It did arrive.

And it only took three months.

We still check the mail everyday.

And there are times, the mail is for us.

9.14.2023 – timeless nostalgic

timeless nostalgic
at the same time be a bit
sad to see them go

What else might any one be talking about but the, Generations in the making, the new, sleeker receptacles will soon replace the iconic green mesh bins, trash cans in New York City.

According to the article, Behold: New York City’s Trash Can of the Future, by Dodai Stewart, “The wire litter baskets are iconic, but they are well past their useful life in New York City,” said Jessica Tisch, the city’s sanitation commissioner. “They are vestiges of a different time.”

There are 22,000 litter baskets on the streets of New York City and the plan is, over time, to replace all of them with what Ms. Tisch calls “this new, more modern litter basket of the future.”

And there are those who will miss the iconic green mesh bins.

“I will be a bit sad to see them go,” Micah Belamarich, 38, the co-founder and creative director of OnlyNY, wrote in an email. The company, an independent clothing brand offering New York City-inspired apparel, sells a tiny version of the green mesh litter basket that can be used as a pen holder. It is one of the company’s top-selling products.

Mr. Belamarich, who was born and raised in Morningside Heights, added that the mesh basket’s design “feels timeless and nostalgic at the same time.

You know what the man said?

Politicians, public buildings and prostitutes all gain respectability with age.

Timeless, nostalgic!

Guess you can include iconic green mesh bins.

Recently the maintenance AND office staff at my apartment complex walked off the job.

At the same time the trash compacter broke.

Well, not totally broke but you have to have lived here long enough to know that you can use this long pole by the compacter to reach out press the button and turn the thing on.

I train someone as often as I can but it is a losing battle and the trash is piling up.

It is kind of scary down here in South Carolina to approach a pile of trash in the dark as I guess it is anywhere.

Still the last time a raccoon jumped out at me, I was thinking ‘alligator’ and I said see you later without sticking around too long.

The trash is piling up and all the strategically placed green canisters that are set out for the convenience of dog owners are filled to overflowing.

Seems that some how dogs and dog stuff was handled without being gift wrapped back when I was a kid but I read recently that dog ownership (and the population) is at an all time high.

I also read recently that if meat-eaters were a nation, American pets would be the 5th largest country on earth, just behind Germany.

I believe it and I bet the Germans don’t bag up their German stuff and leave it outside.

Did I mention it is still in the 90’s down here?

Let’s go to the thesaurus.

Start with just plain on smelly.

I could also also say that the air down here is foul-smelling, evil-smelling, stinking, stinking to high heaven, reeking, fetid, malodorous, pungent, acrid, rank, putrid, noxious, off, gamy, high, musty, fusty, frowsty, fresh, stinky, reeky, niffing, niffy, pongy, whiffy, humming, funky, noisome, mephitic, olid, miasmic, miasmal.

I like frowsty the best.

When we go out for a walk later tonight I will work it into our conversation.

“It just seems so frowsty out here tonight. You know, the atmosphere is so stale, warm, and stuffy.“

That spell check is tossing out frowsty is frosting on the cake!

Timeless!

Nostalgic!

9.13.2023 – could do anything

could do anything
wanted to do but found there
was nothing to do

Live oaks and Spanish Moss – over the ancient shell ring on Hilton Head island …

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider — those in actual destitution or physical suffering — this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone.

But at three o’clock in — the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — ; and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

At that hour the tendency is — to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into — an infantile dream — but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world.

One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza.

But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza — one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality …

So there was not an ‘I’ any more — not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect — save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do –

And in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

As Big Bill put it, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.

(From The crack-up with other pieces and stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945, James Laughlin, New York.)

9.12.2023 – its own nodule

its own nodule
of permanent rage at the
root of consciousness

The death of his sister at nineteen in an auto crash with his father was still unacceptable fifty years later.

It had created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness. It was ultimately the cause of his becoming a writer.

If this can happen to those you love you may as well follow your heart’s wishes in your time on earth.

So writes Jim Harrison in short story The Ancient Minstrel published in the book by the same name, The Ancient Minstrel, Grove Press: (2017).

… created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness may be one of the most honest lines of words in the English language.

So many of us have a nodule of permanent rage at the roots of our consciousness.

But how many of us can pin the source of the rage down.

Mr. Thoreau described it as a life of quiet desperation.

But Mr. Thurber pointed out that most of us live lives of noisy desperation as well.

Enraged, infuriated, beside himself, seeing red and thinking black, creating its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness.

The Grizzly and the Gadgets

A grizzly bear who had been on a bender for several weeks following a Christmas party in his home at which his brother-in-law had set the Christmas tree on fire, his children had driven the family car through the front door and out the back, and all the attractive female bears had gone into hibernation before sunset returned home prepared to forgive, and live and let live. He found, to his mild annoyance, that the doorbell had been replaced by an ornamental knocker. When he lifted the knocker, he was startled to hear it play two bars of “Silent Night.”

When nobody answered his knock, he turned the doorknob, which said “Happy New Year” in a metallic voice, and a two-tone gong rang “Hello” somewhere deep within the house.

He called to his mate, who was always the first to lay the old aside, as well as the first by whom the new was tried, and got no answer. This was because the walls of his house had been soundproofed by a soundproofer who had soundproofed them so well nobody could hear anybody say anything six feet away. Inside the living room the grizzly bear turned on the light switch, and the lights went on all right, but the turning of the switch had also released an odor of pine cones, which this particular bear had always found offensive. The head of the house, now becoming almost as angry as he had been on Christmas Day, sank into an easy chair and began bouncing up and down and up and down, for it was a brand-new contraption called “Sitpretty” which made you bounce up and down and up and down when you sat on it. Now thoroughly exasperated, the bear jumped up from the chair and began searching for a cigarette. He found a cigarette box, a new-fangled cigarette box he had never seen before, which was made of metal and plastic in the shape of a castle, complete with portal and drawbridge and tower. The trouble was that the bear couldn’t get the thing open. Then he made out, in tiny raised letters on the portal, a legend in rhyme: “You can have a cigarette on me If you can find the castle key.” The bear could not find the castle key, and he threw the trick cigarette box through a windowpane out into the front yard, letting in a blast of cold air, and he howled when it hit the back of his neck. He was a little mollified when he found that he had a cigar in his pocket, but no matches, and so he began looking around the living room for a matchbox. At last he saw one on a shelf. There were matches in it, all right, but no scratching surface on which to scratch them. On the bottom of the box, however, there was a neat legend explaining this lack. The message on the box read: “Safety safety matches are doubly safe because there is no dangerous dangerous sandpaper surface to scratch them on. Strike them on a windowpane or on the seat of your pants.”

Enraged, infuriated, beside himself, seeing red and thinking black, the grizzly bear began taking the living room apart. He pounded the matchbox into splinters, knocked over lamps, pulled pictures off the wall, threw rugs out of the broken window, swept vases and a clock off the mantelpiece, and overturned chairs and tables, growling and howling and roaring, shouting and bawling and cursing, until his wife was aroused from a deep dream of marrying a panda, neighbors appeared from blocks around, and the attractive female bears who had gone into hibernation began coming out of it to see what was going on.

The bear, deaf to the pleas of his mate, heedless of his neighbors’ advice, and unafraid of the police, kicked over whatever was still standing in the house, and went roaring away for good, taking the most attractive of the attractive female bears, one named Honey, with him.

MORAL: Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

From Further Fables for Our Time by James Thurber (Illustrated by the Author) First published in Great Britain 1956, by Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 90 Great Russell Street London W.C.1.

9.11.2023 – you have to be there …

you have to be there …
to be there when the bread comes
out of the oven

Interesting that the feller who is supposed to have said this, you have to be there when the bread comes out of the oven, film maker Rene Clair, also said, “The film is ready, the shooting is all that remains to be done.“

Maybe you have to be there when the bread comes out of the oven because all that remains to be done is to eat the bread.

Good to keep in mind as well that the bread only comes out of the oven once.

A microwave is quick and cheap but it isn’t fresh baked bread.

Maybe it was the clouds yesterday that put me in mind of bread out of the oven.

And you had to be there on Port Royal sound to see them.

You also had to look up.