George Lois asks: Can you do better?

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George Lois was a real Madison Avenue adman from the 1950s and 1960s, and after. He wrote a book some years ago called DAMN GOOD ADVICE, which is a memoir / self-accolade / idea book.

It’s a good read, and a funny one. I recommend it.

(Incidentally: if you watch “Mad Men,” you will be interested to know that George Lois is rumored to be the model for Don Draper, the main character in the series. George, in his book, hotly denies it. “And besides,” he says, “I was more attractive!”, and shows this picture:

(So what do you think of someone who says: “That’s not me! And besides, I was more attractive than that!”? Hmm. I know what I think.)

Anyway: the book is full of good stories.

This one nags at me frequently:

A bigwig goes into a bar and says to the bartender, “Give me the best Manhattan you can make.”

Bartender does so, and gives it to Bigwig. Bigwig tastes it. “It’s good,” he says. “Can you do better?”

Bartender tries again. This goes on for several repetitions. Finally, after sampling Manhattan #5 or so, Bigwig says: “This is excellent!”, and then he glares at Bartender. “Why the fuck didn’t you make it like this the first time I asked?”

I have no answer to that.

What does “best” mean?

And why don’t we do it all the time?

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For Sunday: Tim Tebow reads "Green Eggs and Ham"

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Sometimes we need a relief from the difficulties of our everyday lives. We need something deeply silly to help us escape.

So: here’s Tim Tebow, who is Christian but delectably cute, doing a dramatic reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.”

With hand gestures, yet!

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Play

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I’ve written twice before about Lynda Barry, the inspired writer / artist whom I was privileged to hear speak at the Rhode Island School of Design last spring.

She talked about so much that I could hardly take it all in. I made notes when I got home, and tried to remember everything, because it was all interesting and funny and new.

She talked about the way children play. She described a game her brother used to play: he’d draw random dots on a sheet of paper, very methodically; then he’d eat a bowl of cereal, staring at the sheet of paper; then he’d take a pen and play dive-bomber on the sheet of paper, crossing out dots. The last dot won.

Now that’s play.

But play is not something you can just do. How many times did your parents say: “Why don’t you just go play?” And did you wonder: “What does that mean?”

Play is a state of mind. Go think about Lynda Barry’s brother staring at that sheet of paper, eating his cereal, and consider what’s going on in his mind.

Best story of all: Lynda was in a restaurant, watching a mother and son at a nearby table. Mother was talking on her cellphone. Son, about six years old, was talking to his bacon. “I’m gonna eat you!” he said to his bacon. Then he made the bacon talk: “No no no! Don’t eat me!” This went on for some time. Lynda was spellbound. This was real play.

Until the mother suddenly saw her son playing with his food. “What are you doing?” she snapped at him.

The little boy dropped the bacon as if awakened from a dream. “Nothing,” he said.

Playing. Just playing.

People don’t play enough. Adults don’t play enough.

Partner and I play with our stuffed animals: we make them talk, and argue, and fight, and even make out.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, it’s quite the reverse. I think it helps keep us both sane.

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Feeding tube

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I’m having a feeding tube installed next Friday. It’s a tube going directly into my stomach, which will enable me to “eat” if/when I’m not able to swallow anymore.

Ew!

The procedure, my gastroenterologist informs me, is very simple. (He’s a cutie – short, paunchy, salt-and-pepper, very bouncy). It involves passing a wire from my mouth through my stomach, and – oh, you don’t want to know.

Anyway, I’ll have a little tube going directly into my stomach. I will be able to introduce food directly into my stomach via the tube and some sort of syringe-type device. (The cancer treatments will burn my throat, and it may be too painful for me to swallow – or I may lose the ability to swallow altogether. Again, kids: ew!)

What do I feed myself with? According to Partner’s sister: meatballs. According to Cute Gastroenterologist – “Oh, you know, like Ensure, or Envive, or something else.”

Ensure is good, but expensive; twenty-four cans cost more than a dollar apiece in BJs.

Carnation Breakfast Solutions (which was once called “Carnation Instant Breakfast”) is much cheaper, and has all the same ingredients – protein, vitamins, etc. I checked it out down at the local grocery. Ten packets were five dollars and change, and weighed maybe half a pound. A bulk container of the stuff, with almost a kilo of the powder, cost the same.

So I think I know what I’ll be buying.

How do I know it’s powder? I dropped the container while I was checking out the contents. It went all over the place, and exploded like a bomb on the floor in Aisle 10.

I got away from there as fast as I could.

Don’t worry: they overcharge, and we shop there regularly. We get our money back.

But I felt like a silly old man as I legged it away from there, rather than summoning a store employee and apologizing meekly.

Oh, who cares? They clean up messes all the time.

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Losing weight and gaining weight

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Back in 2006 Partner and I went on a weight-loss regime. I went from 215 pounds to about 180 in a year or so; within another year I was 170; a year later, I reached my fighting weight of 160 pounds.

I’d had no idea that I was overweight before; when you gain weight gradually, you see very little change in the mirror from day to day. I look at photos of myself from the early 2000s, however, and I see a stuffed sausage:

After I lost weight, I felt much better. I felt smaller, for one thing. When you lose weight, you literally take up less room than before. Stairs are easier to climb. When you eat, you get full more quickly, and overeating can be positively painful.

I joined a health club in 2008, which also helped me keep my weight down. But my kidney stones began to irk me more and more, and I found that thirty minutes on the treadmill made me ache, and I was dreading it more and more from day to day. So I quit the club in early 2013.

Within a month I’d gained ten pounds.

This doesn’t seem like much, and it didn’t show too much – I didn’t have to buy new clothes – but when you’ve lost 55 pounds, it seems a shame to put any of it back on. So, when a friend told me in June about Mimi Spencer’s “Fast Diet,” I was all ears. It’s very simple: two days a week (mine were Monday and Thursday), you eat only 500 or 600 calories; the other days you eat normally. Most people lose a pound a week. I cheated a bit, but by August I was back down to 163 or so, which was fine with me.

Then, around Labor Day, I discovered that I had cancer.

What a nice time I’d chosen to lose weight!

So now I am on the opposite of the Fast Diet. I am cramming a candy bar down my gullet as I write this. I need to gain weight – as much as possible – before the worst of the treatment begins. Almost everyone loses weight while undergoing chemo and radiation, and if you have a few extra pounds – well, hallelujah.

Pass the butter, please. And the gravy. And the ham. And pour a little olive oil over everything.

I’m fattening up.

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Lent and Mardi Gras

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When my various treatments begin, I will have to give up a lot of things. I’ll have to give up hot/spicy food when I’m on chemo, because it will upset my stomach. Also caffeinated coffee. Also fatty foods. Most of all I will have to give up alcohol, because it would both irritate my throat (which will be irradiated five days a week) and interfere with some of the medications. One of the Comprehensive Cancer Center people told me the other day: “We’ve tried accommodating people with alcohol, and it just doesn’t work.”

Good goddamn!

My friend Joanne said, in response to this: “Pretend it’s Lent.”

This is excellent advice. Lent is forty days (not counting Sundays), roughly the period of my chemo/radiation therapy. People generally give up silly things for Lent, like chocolate and popcorn. I will be giving up my beloved curries, and hot sauce (which I put on pretty much everything!), and my evening drinks (which calm me tremendously).

But the treatments haven’t begun yet. I probably won’t start them until mid-October, once my feeding tube has been installed and my dental work is done and my facial swelling has subsided. (When you undergo radiation for throat cancer, they make a mask to hold your head in exactly the right position. If they make the mask before my dental work, or while I’m swollen, the radiation won’t be directed accurately.)

So I now have approximately three weeks of no rules at all, before the treatments begin. Three weeks of Mardi Gras.

And what happens during Mardi Gras?

All hell breaks loose.

I have had curry three days in a row now. I drink nightly. I’m eating ice cream as I write this.

When I begin the treatments, I hope they prescribe me a lot of soothing medication, for Partner’s sake and my own.

Remember what Bette Midler said to Kramer on “Seinfeld,” when she wanted her black-and-white cookie:

BETTE: Get me one of those Black and White cookies.

KRAMER: Yeah, all right, yeah…. (hangs up) They don't have any. But don't worry I'm going to get you one somewhere.

BETTE: Good. Because if I don't get a Black and White cookie I'm not going to be very pleasant to be around.

KRAMER: Now that's impossible.

O I assure you it’s possible.

Happy Mardi Gras!

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Doctor Pearl

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Pearl is Partner’s sister, who lives about forty miles north of us, in a suburb of Boston. She is a very Technicolor person. She is short and pugnacious, and she always lets you know what she thinks about everything. She has occasionally smacked me in the back of the head when she can’t stand listening to my nonsense anymore. “Jesus Christ!” she yelled at Partner. “How the hell can you stand to listen to his goddamned babbling all day long?”

Pearl has been very supportive during these early days of my diagnosis and treatment. This summer, when I was first telling her that I had a strange pain in my throat and was having it checked out, her advice was: “Don’t ask for trouble. If you go to a doctor, they’ll just tell you it’s something serious. You probably don’t want to know.”

“But what if it really is something serious?” I said.

“Then you especially don’t want to know,” she said.

She has a point. Not knowing is much more peaceful. Knowing is a little upsetting.

After my diagnosis, however, she became very pragmatic. When I told her I was having a feeding tube put into my midsection, she was very thoughtful. “How big?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Small, I assume.”

“Big enough to fit a meatball through?” she said hopefully. “Meatballs are good for you.”

“Maybe liquefied,” I said.

I love Pearl. I know that she wants me to get well, which is best of all. And her best medical advice came in the form of a threat: “If you don’t fight this,” she said in her tough Massachusetts voice, “I will come down there to Rhode Island and goddamn kill you.”

And she means it.

So I’d better goddamned well survive.

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Purple socks

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In Graham Greene’s novel “Monsignor Quixote,” we meet an elderly innocent Spanish Catholic priest, who learns that he’s been promoted to Monsignor. He is very excited about this, because he now gets to wear purple socks.

You know I love purple. I have a couple of purple shirts, ranging in color from Concord grape to light lavender, with several shades in between. A long time ago I bought a lavender enamel star to wear on my lapel, and I told people it was a symbol for gay rights (this was before we had any kind of established symbols, so you could tell people anything and they’d believe you).

But never before did I have a pair of purple socks (see above). They’re pale lilac, with little nubs. Naturally they’re Italian.

Story: there’s a nice little men’s-clothing shop in our neighborhood called Milan. The clothes are beautiful, but they are far too highly-priced for my dollar-store lifestyle. Though their window I could see a lovely display of socks: lemon-yellow, pale lime-green, pale lilac. I have admired them out loud to Partner many times.

The other night Partner surprised me with a pair of lovely purple socks. He pretended that our little stuffed dog Blot Malloy bought them for me. This is Blot:

I ask you, does he look like he has the money to buy Italian socks?

Partner finally confessed that he’d bought them for me. I asked them how much they cost, and he wouldn’t tell me. “I’ll admit,” he said, “that they were more expensive than any socks I ever bought before.”

I wore them to work the very next day, in combination with black pants and a pale-lavender shirt. I showed them to a number of people, and they were dazzled. One even said: “And look! You’re wearing a purple shirt too!”

To which I replied: “Did you think that was a coincidence?”

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For Sunday: Buck Owens sings "Cigarettes and Whiskey and WIld Wild Women"

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There was a television show called “Hee Haw” back when I was a kid. It was a real breakthrough: the country/western world went prime-time / nationwide with a variety program, with stupid sketches and lots of music.

The hosts were Buck Owens and Roy Clark.

Buck Owens, bless his steely Republican heart, was a classic C&W performer. This song of his still goes through my head sometimes. Don’t ask me why.

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Slightly better news

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Good news, first of all: my PET scan results have come in, and my cancer is confined to the left side of my throat; it hasn’t spread anywhere else in my body. (My hematologist / oncologist was actually giggling with excitement when she told me this. I think I love her.) This means that the radiotherapy can be focused very precisely in the area of the tumor, and I’m not so far along as to be incurable.

It’s barely two  weeks since I learned I have cancer, and I have learned so much!

For example:

·        One of the most effective chemotherapy drugs, cisplatin, is very dangerous for people (like me) with hearing loss. It can make us lose our hearing entirely, or cause lifelong tinnitus. I’ll be taking the milder carboplatin instead. (Imagine having a platinum-based drug infused into your body! I’ll be worth a fortune!)

·        Another, taxol (which I’ll be taking in low doses) causes hair loss and some neuropathy (mostly numbness and tingling) in some patients. I’ll be sure to take pictures of myself during the process, if I become especially shaky and peculiar-looking. You can all have a good laugh.

·        Radiation to the throat makes the whole area sore. I won’t be able to drink for the duration; it will sting too much, and probably also interfere with the various treatments and medications I’ll be taking. Bugger!

But mostly I have learned that this whole thing is ridiculous.

I look over my doctors’ scribbed notes and I see things like “tonsillar cancer.” I have tonsil cancer!

Ridiculous.

Feeding tube? Ridiculous.

No drinking for the duration of the war? Double ridiculous.

I think of Professor Remus Lupin in the “Harry Potter” books – one of my favorite characters – who taught his students to fight off boggarts (which take the shape of your most secret fear) with this spell: “Riddikulus!”

And he was right. Most of our fears are really ridiculous.

If I can just keep repeating that particular spell for the next three months or so, I’ll be just fine.

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The cormorant and the mayflower

I was walking across the Point Street Bridge recently, here in Providence. There’s an ancient wooden piling / dock beneath the bridge, which is now terribly rickety and unsafe.

But the birds love it. There are always gulls and ducks there, and sometimes egrets and swans. And almost always there are cormorants: lithe delicate birds with slender curving necks and broad wings, which fly low over the water’s surface and dive quickly to snap up fish with their sharp little beaks.

The cormorants were resting that day. It was warm and humid, but there was a pleasant quiet breeze blowing off the land toward the ocean; I could feel it up on the bridge, and the birds on the piling could feel it too.

One cormorant was facing into the breeze, its winds outstretched as if it were flying. It stood and rocked gently in the cool breeze.  I took some pictures, but I’m not very good with my phone’s camera, so you can barely see it:

“He was pretending to fly in the breeze,” I said to my friend Cathleen later, showing her the photo. “He looked so serene and happy.”

“He was drying his wings,” she said soberly. “It’s just instinct.”

Maybe Cathleen is right. But I prefer to think that the cormorant was dreaming about flying.

It does my heart good to see things like this. Not very many things make me truly happy, now that I’m a sour old codger. Partner makes me happy, and once in a while Apollonia or Cathleen says something that makes me laugh.

But seeing that bird in imaginary flight made me happy. Sometimes small things – a flower, a tree, a bird – take us out of ourselves; they make us realize that life isn’t as difficult as it might be, and that sometimes there are moments of pure unconsidered joy.

Which brings me to Elinor Wylie.

Elinor’s poetry is mostly forgotten nowadays. She was active in the 1910s and 1920s, and died in 1929. She’s a minor poet, but (I think) an important one. I have bits and pieces of her verse rattling around in my head all the time.

This is the last stanza of her poem “As I Went Down by Havre de Grace”:

As I went out by Prettymarsh

I saw the mayflower under the leaves:

Life (I said) is rough and harsh

And fretted by a hundred griefs:

Yet were it more than I could face,

Who have faced out a hundred dooms,

Had I been born in any place

Where this small flower never blooms.

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Teddy bears

A Tumblr acquaintance, Wooferstl, posted recently that his childhood teddy bear was lost sometime in the 1990s. In its memory, he bought alife-size Costco teddy bear. He posted this photo of himself with CostcoBearrecently:

I know the feeling.

I had a hideously ugly teddy bear when I was a kid. He was stout and had a strange just-been-strangled expression, but I loved him beyond measure.

He lived in my mother’s house for a long time after I left home in the 1970s, but I brought him back to live with me again after her death, and now he sits high up on a bookshelf in my bedroom (with his very own stuffed animal to play with), looking down on the passing scene:

He spent a lot of years in my mother’s basement, seeing nothing but her doing the laundry once in a while. Now he sees me getting ready for work, and coming home and changing clothes. This is at least more interesting for him, I hope.

He is full of something like sawdust. He is not cuddly. But he’s my childhood friend. (I think he belonged to one of my siblings, but I’m not sure. He certainly looks ancient.) He was with me in my childhood – he played with me and slept with me – and now he’s with me again, in my twilight years.

I’d like to pass him along to another child, but he’s not much of a toy; he smells funny, and he’s not cuddly (as I said).

He’s aging, just as I am.

I hope that, when my time comes (not anytime soon, I hope), he'll want to go with me.

I’d like to have him along for the ride.

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Thus the name

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When I created this blog three years ago, the name “Futureworld” came to me right away. I had a dim realization that the title wouldn’t be as meaningful to others as it was to me, but that didn’t matter very much: it was my brand-new beautiful little baby blog, and I was determined to call it whatever I pleased.

But my thoughts ran something like this:

I was born in July 1957, just a few months before the official beginning of the Space Age. My childhood was full of astronauts and science fiction. Soon, we thought, we’d be living in an unimaginably advanced world; no one would suffer or be hungry, and everyone would have a flying car, and everything would be utterly futuristic and wonderful.

Well, you know what? Some of that stuff came true. The Internet is still a miracle to those of us who remember the primitive 1950s and 1960s. Partner and I comment almost daily on the fact that we can pick up a mobile device at a moment’s notice and summon up the weather report, or the news, or the cast of a 1944 movie, or Skype someone on another continent, or do any number of other bizarrely futuristic things.

So: Partner and I are living in the “future” that we were promised back in the 1950s and 1950s.

Except that we’re not. People are still stupid and retrograde. There are still politicians who want to restrict voting rights and immigration. Just like the 1920s and 1930s! The world is still at war. Just as in 500 BCE!

That’s what I meant by “Futureworld.” Here we are, in 2013, and we should be living on space stations and speaking Esperanto, but in many ways we’re still primitives, attacking and killing one another over trifles.

Ah me. The farther we go into the future, the more firmly we remain stuck in the past.

In Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America,” there’s a scene in which two ghosts – a medieval one and a 17^th-century one – appear in the 1980s to speak to their descendant, a gay Manhattanite with AIDS. The medieval ancestor doesn’t like the 1980s, and leaves as quickly as he can. The other sighs and looks around himself. “The Twentieth Century,” he says sadly. "Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly terribly old."

Brother, was he right.

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Nicknames

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I’ve spoken before about nicknames in my family. My mother Tosca was “Shim,” and her brother Primo was “Bud,” et cetera.

Well, my friend Apollonia has taken this to new heights.

Every day she comes up with a new name for me. Today it was “Gort.” (Klaatu barada nikto!) The other day it was “vigliacco,” which is the Italian word for someone beneath contempt.

I, on the other hand, give her only lovely reverent names, like “Principessa,” and “Miss Kim Novak,” and “Mother Nature,” and “Reverend Mother,” and “Great Old One.”

You can tell that we plan these ahead. I think about it in the morning, and I can tell she’s planned hers too.

It demonstrates that we care for one another.

For tomorrow: what do you think about “Ursula the Sea Witch”?

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The Old Man of the Mountain

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In 2000, the US Mint issued the New Hampshire quarter. The image on the back shows the Old Man of the Mountain: a cliff hanging off Cannon Mountain that looked like a bearded man’s profile:

Well, on May 3, 2003, the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.

What now? Naturally a state committee was formed to decide.

Did they decide to reassemble it? No. (Wise decision.)

Did they decide to commemorate it? Yes, of course. They’ve put up viewscopes that show what it looks like now (not much), and what it used to look like. (Excellent decision.)

But the stupid thing persists. New Hampshire uses it on its highway signs; if you’re on a state road, you see something like this:

And it’s still on all those quarters, which will be in circulation until Doomsday.

There’s a lesson here somewhere.

Washington is “the evergreen state.” Probably there will be evergreens growing there – some of them, somewhere – even if there’s a catastrophic event. Rhode Island is “the ocean state,” and the ocean ain’t going anywhere.

Here’s an old song (sung by Frank Sinatra) which should have been heeded by the state leaders of New Hampshire:

In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

They’re only made of clay . . . .

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For Sunday: "You Are My Friend," sung by Mister Rogers

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I think Mister Rogers was a modern saint. His television show – a gentle slowly-paced production, with puppets and people speaking quietly – was distinctly different from all the other children’s television shows of his time.

Fred Rogers wrote almost all of his own material. This song I still know by heart, and I will sing it at the drop of a hat.

But Mister Rogers sings it better 



Click this link if you don't believe me.

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Bad news, part two

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It’s hard, having to tell the same story over and over again. I knew at the outset, when I was diagnosed with cancer (a whole entire week ago!), that I didn’t want to keep it a secret. People (especially people you know and care about) need to know when you’re sick, and they also need to know that cancer isn’t necessarily always a death sentence. (Also, I knew people would gossip, and, since I’m gay, I assumed they’d assume this had something to do with AIDS, and I wanted to give them the correct information, just in case.)

I understand a little better now, however, why some people keep this kind of information a secret.

It’s very tiring to tell people every day how you’re doing. It’s also very time-consuming. I appreciate the consideration, but – my goodness! One day is much like the day after. If I was okay yesterday, probably I’m still relatively okay today. If I was miserable yesterday, well, probably you’d be doing yourself a favor not to ask me how I’m doing today.

And we’ve barely begun this process yet!

My friend Cathleen suggested a code system: putting up something on my office door that would tell people how I’m feeling. This made me think of these faces:

I may resort to something like this in a month or two, when I’m in treatment and am feeling tired and hopeless.

But for now I can tell you with my own words how I feel.

I feel okay. I have a little pain in my throat – nothing more than a mild soreness – where the tumor is located. I’m depressed, of course, and I’m trying very hard not to project too far ahead.

I’ve decided that every day without serious discomfort is a good day.

So today is a good day.

Thank Buddha / Allah / Jehovah / whomever you prefer.

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Lucky

 

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Now that I have an inconvenient medical condition, I think about what I did to cause it. I smoked for fourteen years, knowing that it was a terrible thing for me, knowing that Dad died of lung cancer, as did several of his brothers and sisters. I think about eating badly, and exposure to all kinds of pesticides and chemicals and god knows what over the years.

Also, being superstitious, I think about all the taboos I’ve broken: all the salt I’ve spilled without throwing a few grains over my shoulder, all the ladders I’ve walked under.

Mostly I think guiltily of all the people I've been unpleasant to, or actually hurt, either accidentally or on purpose. (Of course I have. You have too. But we’re talking about me, not you.)

But I have had very much happiness in this life – more than I deserve, really. Partner is largely responsible for much of that. But I was lucky to grow up in a place that was as beautiful as Washington state; lucky to go to a funky Catholic-liberal college like Gonzaga in the crazy 1970s; lucky that my first city was Spokane, an easy-to-navigate place that wasn’t at all threatening; lucky to get into Brown for grad school (though I threw it over after a year); lucky to find my way to Providence, my dear dowdy hometown for thirty-five years now; lucky to get into the Peace Corps, and meet all kinds of interesting people, American and Moroccan and British and Tunisian, some of whom still keep in touch with me; lucky after that to work at Brown University, in a job that has mostly been very good for me, and to work alongside people whom I have grown to love and respect.

And then there’s Partner.

I cannot even tell you what he means to me. We met in 1995, and I knew as soon as I saw him that I probably loved him. Does that sound silly? He tells me that he felt the same way, and I respect him too much to tell him that I have a hard time believing that anyone could ever love me at first sight. At any rate, we were living together within a few years. We moved to our present residence in 2002 – a nice little apartment, just right for the two of us. I’ve grown to love Partner’s family – his two sisters and their families – and I think of them and love them as my family, just as I feel about my own family back in Washington.

Partner and I have grown older together. We’ve traveled together. We’ve been angry with each other, and reconciled. We’ve been sick, and taken care of each other. We shop for groceries together, and go to work together in the morning.

I’d be lost without him.

To paraphrase Frank Herbert: My life has been mostly (undeservedly) sweet. But Partner has been the sweetest thing in it.

No matter what happens from here on, I consider myself very lucky.

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H. P. Lovecraft

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As soon as I moved to Rhode Island, I discovered Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He was a local author, who died back in 1937; he wrote fantasy and horror stories and novels, often with Rhode Island / New England settings. Sometimes he used real locations (there are a couple of stories set in Providence); in other stories, he used New England settings, but gave them assumed names. (If you’re a follower of the Batman saga, and the “Arkham Sanitarium” means anything to you, you should know that Arkham was Lovecraft’s alias for Salem, Massachusetts – “witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham.”

In Lovecraft’s story “The Haunter of the Dark,” a man on the East Side of Providence (where I live) sees an oddly-shaped building on Federal Hill in the distance. He walks over to see it – and awful things ensue.

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a New Englander takes a bus to a little Massachusetts coastal town and finds that its inhabitants are not quite human.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” some professors from Miskatonic University (whose campus is, of course, in witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham) seek out a horrible invisible presence somewhere in central/western Massachusetts.

Lovecraft believed in something he called “cosmicism.” In brief: the universe is utterly incomprehensible to human beings, and is in fact mostly inimical to them. Almost all of his stories show human beings as foolish pawns, always on the verge of total destruction.

My favorite Lovecraft stories involve the Great Old Ones. They’re kind of hard to explain, because they’re supposed to be mysterious, but anyway: the Great Old Ones are extra-dimensional beings lingering right off to one side of our reality. They are very powerful, and they are just waiting to get back into our world. One is Cthulhu, a gigantic horrible octopoid god-monster; another is Yog-Sothoth, a mass of glowing lights. There are many others, like Hastur and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth (who “blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”). It’s only a matter of time before they reassert themselves here, and once they do – that’s all, folks.

So, kids, repeat after me, before it’s too late:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

(It probably won’t help, but it couldn’t hurt.)

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Texting while driving

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I adore my mobile devices, but I like to think I’m reasonable about using them. I do not walk blindly down the sidewalk like a zombie while texting, my eyes fixed on my screen. (An acquaintance recently had her phone stolen from her in the open street; she was walking down the street in a quiet neighborhood, texting all the while, and a kid ran up and snatched it out of her hand. She was very indignant about this, because she didn’t think she’d done anything out of the ordinary.)

But it still amazes me (as an older person) how people drop into trances while using their phones and their tablets. Three-quarters of the people I see on the bus are texting or using their phones. At least half of the people I pass on the sidewalk are deep in contemplation of their devices, completely unaware of their surroundings.

Not to mention people driving cars.

I hate to think about it. I’m a pedestrian – I don’t drive a car – so I’m largely at the mercy of people driving big ugly dangerous vehicles, and I continually hope and pray that they look up often enough to stop at intersections and yield at crosswalks. Because, you know, sometimes they don’t. (Once, a couple of years ago in downtown Providence, I was in a crosswalk with a couple of other people when a driver actually speeded up toward us. I ran like hell toward the sidewalk; another guy, braver than me, stood his ground and yelled obscenities at the driver.)

But it’s the entranced drivers – the ones who are talking and texting – who worry me.

Follow this link to find an interactive test posted by the New York Times a few years ago. It’s very simple: you have to drive and text at the same time.

I failed it within seconds.

Try it, and see how you do.

You’ll be horrified.

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Bees

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My sister Susan was deathly allergic to bees. She swelled up terribly when she was stung, and came close to death several times. Once in the early 1960s, she was mowing the lawn and ran over a hive of ground-burrowing bees (yes, there are such things, at least in the Pacific Northwest), and they stung her all at once, and we had to put her in the bathtub and pack her in ice to keep her from swelling to death.

Our father was allergic to bees too, but not as badly as Susan was. Evidently he passed his allergy to poor Susan. None of the rest of us got the bee-allergy gene.

But I think Susan may have saved my life once.

It’s a very early childhood memory of mine. It was a nice sunny day, and she and I were sitting on the grass outside our house, playing. This is rare and memorable in itself, because she usually hated playing with me. I think we were playing school, or store, or some such thing.  Anyway, we were having a very nice time.

And suddenly she grabbed my head and shoved me face-down into the grass and held me there.

I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was part of the game, but I was also mildly irritated at her. And, at the same time, I could hear a peculiar thrilling hum over my head, louder and louder, then softer again.

It turns out that she saw a swarm of bees suddenly fly out of a nearby tree and come sailing toward us, only a few feet above the ground. She grabbed me and pushed me down to protect me, and crouched down herself to protect herself.

Bees swarm when they’re looking for a new home. They’re not especially dangerous when they’re swarming, but they generally land on the first thing they encounter. If that thing had been me at the age of five years, I would have shrieked and screamed and rolled around, and the bees would have been – hmm – alarmed.

And I probably would have been in bad shape after that.

Susan also.

But we lived past that day. Susan died in 1995, sadly, of aggressive ovarian cancer. I’m still here.

But at least the bees didn’t get us.

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Bad news

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I wrote a while ago about the lump in my throat.

Well, guess what? It turned out to be serious after all.

I will be starting various kinds of treatment soon: radiation almost certainly, and probably also chemotherapy.

It’s only been a few days, and already Partner and I have been through a whirlwind of emotions. You probably know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages? We’ve done them all three times over, in two days: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

I hate this, kids.

I have an indicator on the wall of my office that indicates I’ll be retiring in the year 2040, and I point it out to new employees, just to show them that I’m not going anywhere.

I hope that I’m telling them the truth.

I am going to try very hard to beat this, kids. I already have four doctors – a GP, an ENT, an oncologist, and a hematologist. And heaven knows what I’ll go through, between radiation and chemotherapy and the illness itself.

Heaven only knows.

I know only a few of you personally, but (just so you know): I love you all very much.

(I’m trying to be pragmatic.)

Let’s get on with this silly treatment stuff (over the next six months or so), and then let’s get on with normal life again.

For my sake, and for Partner’s sake, most of all.

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For Sunday: Erik Satie's Fourth Nocturne

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I have a liking for the music of Erik Satie. When Partner and I were in France last October, we visited Satie's childhood home in Honfleur, and one of his residences in the Montmartre district of Paris. He’s one of my favorite composers. He was a complex personality: he could be disagreeable and angry, and was a determined loner for much of his life, making and losing friends (among them Claude Debussy).

He wrote this small piece, his Fourth Nocturne, during the last years of his life. Rollo Myers, who wrote the first English-language biography of Satie, says of this nocturne: “Is there not something Chopinesque about the flowing arpeggios in the left hand which provide, as it were, so reassuring a support for the bare consecutive fifths which outline the melody above?”

Enjoy.

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I hate David Brooks

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I’ve written about David Brooks before. He is a toffee-nosed middle-of-the-road sort-of-conservative social commentator for the New York Times. He is priggish and frequently clucks his tongue over our decadent society. His preferred society would, I think, be a cartoonish Eisenhower-era America, with everyone living in a little white house and going to church every Sunday, in a rocket car (because David Brooks is a great believer in progress).

Seriously, people like this kill me. They long for the days of Big Religion, when everyone went to church except the really bad people. People like Brooks often whine about how society has suffered without Religion as a Unifying Force.

O yes indeedy, it’s a unifying force, all right. Go ask all the Lutherans and Catholics who died in the Thirty Years War, back in the seventeenth century, about how powerfully they felt about their religion as a unifying force.

But religion is also a civilizing force! the David Brookses cry. Music! Poetry! Art!

(They overlook all the music and poetry and art that’s been created without benefit of religion.)

Which is why this passage, from a recent Brooks NYTimes.com editorial in which he describes Charles Taylor’s book “A Secular Age”, drives me batty:

“. . . What I most appreciate is [Taylor’s] vision of a “secular” future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.”

This gives me a splitting headache. First of all: “pockets of spiritual rigor”? Does Christian fundamentalism, or Muslim fundamentalism for that matter, constitute a “pocket of spiritual rigor”? If so, in what way do they add to the value of their respective cultures?

And why would a “secular” future be “propelled” by “religious motivation”? This baffles me completely. I’m a non-believer myself. Can I somehow “propel” myself with “religious motivation” that doesn’t involve believing in a particular religion? Or do I just sideline myself, and allow my culture to be “propelled”?

I don’t know why people read Brooks seriously. I only read him to reassure myself what a completely fatuous bore he is.

Now excuse me while I propel myself into the secular future.

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