I dream of ghosts

As an agnostic who sometimes strays over the line into the realm of atheism, only to cross back over into agnosticism (I really can't make up my mind what I don't believe), I don't put much stock in the supernatural. Tales of ghosts are interesting, but I don't expect to see one. Occasionally I dream of the dead, and my wife, Sally, tells me she believes that spirits of the dead visit us in dreams.

I find that a romantic thought. It conjures pictures in my mind of our dead loved ones or acquaintances wanting to say howdy. Unable to do so in the corporeal realm, they come to us through our dreams. It doesn't mean I necessarily believe what Sally believes, but let's just say I really like the idea.

I've been "visited" a couple of times by my late father-in-law, and several times by a deceased female coworker. Also my former boss, but I'll get to that.

Jan was the hardest working person I knew. I met her in about 1994 at the school district where we both worked. She was a rover, a custodian who was called on to fill in for regular school custodians when they were sick or on vacation. Jan was very slim and slight-looking, but she was strong. Many a healthy male custodian would leave jobs for her to do when they knew they were going on vacation. Like furniture moving, for example. They abused her in that fashion. But it was her willingness to work and work hard that eventually earned her the job as District Office custodian, which was the highest paid custodial job in the school district. Unfortunately, she worked too hard, and you might even say she worked herself to death. Because she was so tired after a really long day at work she made a fatal error driving home. She turned in front of a truck in an intersection. It broadsided her and killed her.

Jan has come to me in my dreams to ask me how things are going, how're my grandkids, everyday things like that. I've never asked her what she's doing in the afterlife. I have to assume that for the purposes of my dreams these visitors of mine are still in existence somewhere, but I never think to ask where. In the last dream I had of her Jan had started to tell me a dirty joke. Jan was famous for her raunchy jokes, which she told at the drop of a hat. For a woman Jan had a filthy mind, which of course endeared her to me. I don't remember what the joke was, but if you look back at some of my postings of "dumb jokes you can tell at a party," they were exactly the types of jokes she could reel off one after another. She was a sort of walking library of ribald humor. I'm still waiting for her next visit to me so I can ask her to finish the joke.

My father-in-law, Ray, was a curmudgeonly sort, but I liked him anyway. Ray had fought through the Battle of the Bulge, was one of the first soldiers across the river and into Germany where, he said, the Army was met by "old men and boys"charged with defense of the homeland in a futile attempt to repel the Allied invaders . Ray was never very talkative, and very seldom told a war story. The two dreams I've had of him are of him talking, though, and this last one he was talking to me from a balcony. Maybe next time I can get him to loosen up a little and tell me more about his time in the war.

Of course these are dreams, and many of my dreams just evaporate in the morning. Details I may remember clearly at the time have become fuzzy.

I've only dreamed of my deceased father a couple of times, and of my mother, who died in 2008, never. Maybe they are visitors whose visits leave me upon waking, or they just aren't interested in chatting.

The last ghostly visitor I got was the most unusual of all. My ex-boss, Phil. Phil and I worked together for over 20 years and we never got along. It was a shouting match with Phil in July, 2008 that made me announce to Sally, "I'm going to retire at the end of this year." And I did. I had often said that if my relationship to Phil had been a marriage I would have gotten a divorce long ago, but it was something more awful than a bad marriage...it was a bad supervisor/employee relationship, with neither of us willing to give an inch to the other.

Phil dropped dead on Labor Day, 2011. He had been dragging for a few months, felt ill, missed work, which according to his secretary, "he never did." He had taken his three granddaughters to a local state park. He felt ill, threw up in a garbage can, then sat on a bench and died. The troubles I had with Phil suddenly evaporated, although I still wrote about him. This post is a confession: I killed him with voodoo.

Since that post I had this dream of Phil: he's standing next to a white couch, and he's dressed all in white. White suit, white shirt, white tie, white shoes. He says to me, "So how are you doing? How's it going?" I tell him I'm a three-year cancer survivor. He says, "Good, good." I ask how he's doing, and he tells me, "I've never felt better." I remark he's never looked so good to me. He is much slimmer and has a huge smile on his face. I rarely saw him smile in real life. Phil turns and leaves the room. "Well, good luck to you," he says.

I'm left to think that if by some chance Sally is right and the dead visit us in dreams, that maybe I was a loose end in Phil's life, a conflict unresolved. He was that for me. I had a very peaceful feeling when I awoke that morning, and unlike most of my dreams, since it happened it's stayed fresh in my mind .

Phil was the reason I went into therapy in the mid-'90s, the reason I went on anti-depressant medication. Both helped me a lot, and of course at my current age I've mellowed quite a bit, anyway. Things that used to bother me a lot don't bother me as much now. Don't sweat the small stuff, the man said. But Phil and I would fight over small stuff all the time. We both sweated the small stuff. And now the small stuff is too small to worry about. It's true that since that dream of Phil I'm more inclined to think of him without bitterness; kindness, even. His "visit" had something of a healing effect on me.

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“An older man, past his prime, takes a walk amongst lovers, in the springtime...”

A pantomime in eight pictures, drawn by cartoonist Claude Smith.









Copyright © 1952, 2012 The New Yorker

Psycho Street

Copyright © 2011 The New Yorker

This might help explain the behavior of many people on Wall Street: according to CFA magazine and author Sherree DeCovny, one in ten people on Wall Street is a psycho.

Psycho is a strong word, although people misuse and overuse it. But according to the opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Sunday from March 4, 2012, writer Al Lewis talked to one ex-Wall Streeter (who refers to himself as a psychopath; takes one to know one, I guess) who says one in ten is too low. For Wall Street, according to Sam Antar, former chief financial officer of the infamous Crazy Eddie, an electronics firm engaged in stock fraud in the '90s, the number is more like eight out of ten. Wow, that's pretty amazing—or depressing, as the case may be—to think that the money in our retirement and investment portfolios is being managed by the same types of guys who, given a deadly weapon rather than a ledger book, could be Jeffrey Dahmer.

Psychopaths and sociopaths are those people who have no conscience. They're the ones who, when going after what they want, don't mind stepping on people, or even crushing them. They sleep just fine because they don't see other people as being human.

Perhaps all the wealth of this country was built by people without consciences. Perhaps all of the wealth in the world was built by the same psychos who sit on top of huge piles of cash on Wall Street. Can it really be that simple?

Copyright © 1953, 2012 The New Yorker

The Ronald Reagan trickle-down theory is right in one respect, the madness trickles down from those who have acquired the wealth by hook or crook, to those politicians who apologize for or protect them.

In a way knowing this makes me feel better about myself. I've never cared much about money beyond meeting my basic needs.* I don't have an all-consuming desire to accumulate riches. I've always wondered what it was in me that lacked that drive to get more $. I don't dislike rich people if they seem otherwise decent, but I've always looked at those with great power (i.e., money) as being an alien species, fascinating, but I wouldn't want to hobnob with them. Their values are just so different from mine. Now I know why. They're psychos and I'm not!

Maybe Wall Street is just one big mental hospital.

*Plus my HDTV and my high-speed Internet and my Netflix account, not thought of as luxuries but necessities (by me, anyway). As long as I'm going to live at or just below the poverty line, I might as well entertain myself.

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Less is more: Cartoons of Chon Day

Chauncey Addison Day, who drew cartoons for years under the name Chon Day, was an expert at drawing gags. His skill was in being able to tell a joke with economy, make it instantly recognizable as to place and setting, and then land a solid punch-line. I never saw a Day cartoon that didn't have tons of craft behind it, but still made it look easy.

Day, who was born in 1907 and died in 2000, was a master whose work appeared for decades in major American magazines. Nowadays the market for gag cartoons has shrunk to the point that I wonder if anyone but a select few can make a living at it. Just a few years ago there were many people who appeared regularly in many markets, but hardly any as consistently as Chon Day.

These cartoons are from The New Yorker. They are Copyright © 1953, 1954, 2012 The New Yorker.

More Day cartoons can be found at the excellent site, Mike Lynch Cartoons.

Time not kind to Time After Time

I watched Time After Time last night, after an interval of nearly 33 years, when I saw it first-run in a theater. I was struck by how little I remembered. I remembered the romance between characters H. G. Wells, played by Malcolm McDowell, and Mary Steenburgen's Amy Robbins. I recalled gossipy comments of the period made about the real-life romance between stars that occurred as the movie was filmed.

McDowell and Steenburgen were married for 10 years and had two children.

While billed as science fiction, it is first a romance, then a fish-out-of-water story, then a suspense story, and finally a fantasy, but not science fiction. Science fiction implies there is some science to it, which there is not. It takes Wells' character from his famous novel, the unnamed Time Traveller of The Time Machine, who becomes Wells in the movie. How does he invent his time machine, how does he build it? There is some hokum in an explanation proffered by Wells as to its operation, which only serves to drive parts of the plot that are totally unbelievable.

The fun part of Time After Time wasn't even considered at the time of its release, and that's the look of 1979. It was the end of an interesting decade, which still had remnants of the 1960s. Big cars. Big hair. Payphones in telephone booths. Do kids even know what those are nowadays? It is set in San Francisco, and some exteriors were shot there. San Francisco landmarks are prominent in the story. Why? There is some explanation as to "an eight hour time difference" from London, where Wells embarked on his time journey, but location probably had more to do with the movie's budget.

There's even an homage to Bullitt with a speeding car on a San Francisco hill.

My favorite character in the movie is David Warner's Jack the Ripper, who escapes from the London of 1893 in Wells' machine. While Wells remains dressed as a man of the Victorian era, Jack the Ripper revels in his new time, where evil abounds. He adapts to the look of a disco dandy. He says as a serial killer in 1893 he was a freak, but in 1979 he is right at home.

Special effects, even for 1979, seem cheap, mostly opticals, as shown in the departure of the time machine in Wells' laboratory. Studied shot by shot from the DVD, the optical effects were transposed over a still picture taken through the skylight of the laboratory set.

Comments on the Internet Movie Database have taken some shots at Mary Steenburgen, and specifically her speech. One thought she was trying to bury her Arkansas accent, another thought her slow speech was because she was playing someone stupid, even another that she was inexperienced at acting. Personally, I thought she sounded more like she was trying to sound like she had a New York accent. All the interpretations are interesting, but they leave no answer as to why she spoke as she did.

There are a few references in the movie to Wells' free-love philosophy. Wells was a star in his era, with plenty of girls and women. There's an interesting article on him in the October 17, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, with a great full-page caricature by Edward Sorel.

Nicholas Meyer, who directed the movie, had written the successful 1971 book, The Seven-Percent Solution, a Sherlock Holmes novel. It was filmed with Nicol Williamson (as highly regarded as Olivier in his day), and Robert Duvall (an odd choice for Watson). Meyer had a feeling for the Victorian era, but the budget of Time After Time didn't give him much room to show more during the scenes set in 1893. We are shown a foggy street exterior as a prostitute is murdered by Jack the Ripper, and the interior of Wells' home, both looking very much like sets on sound stages.

There's nothing really wrong with the movie, but it hasn't aged all that well. Time has not been particularly kind to Time After Time.



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Still more dumb jokes to tell at a party

When the rubber meets the…whatever.

Q: What's the difference between a tire and 365 used rubbers?

A: One's a Goodyear; the other's a great year.

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Redneck logic

Larry and Doug, two redneck good ol’ boys, are sitting around, drinking beer. Larry turns to Doug and says, “I'm tired of going through life without an education. Tomorrow I'm going to the community college and sign up for some classes.” Doug agrees that it's a good idea.

The next day, Larry goes to the college and meets the Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for four basic classes: Math, English, History, and Logic. “Logic?” Larry says. “What's that?”

The Dean says, “I'll give you an example. Do you own a Weed Eater?”

“Yeah.”

‘'Logically speaking,” says the Dean, “because you own a Weed Eater, I think that you would have a yard.”

“That's true, I do have a yard.”

The Dean says. “Because you have a yard, I think logically that you would have a house.”

“Yes, I do have a house.”

“And because you have a house, I think logically that you might have a family.”

“Yes, I have a family.”

The Dean continues. “I'm not done yet. Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife. And because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual.”

“Damn straight I'm a heterosexual! That's amazing you were able to find out all of that because I have a Weed Eater!”

Excited now to take the class, Larry shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to go meet Doug at the bar. He tells Doug about his classes, how he is signed up for Math, English, History, and Logic.

“Logic?” Doug says, “what's that?'”

“I'll give you an example,” says Larry. Do you have a Weed Eater?”

“No.”

“Then you're gay.”

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One word or two?

An elderly couple, both widowed, had been going out with each other for a long time. Urged on by their friends, they decided it was time to get married.

Before the wedding, they went out to dinner and had a long conversation regarding how their marriage might work. They discussed finances, living arrangements and so on. Finally, the old gentleman decided it was time to broach the subject of their physical relationship.

“How do you feel about sex?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, responding very carefully, “I’d have to say, I would like it infrequently.”

The old gentleman sat quietly for a moment, then asked, “Is that one word or two?”

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The old man and the hooker

It was Jim’s birthday, and he was considered to be an old man by his friends’ standards. So, to liven him up a bit, Jim’s friends decided to give him something special for his birthday. They bought him a hooker.

The hooker went to his house and knocked on the door. When Jim answered she said, “Hi, I’m your birthday present!”

Startled, he asked, “What am I supposed to do with you?”

“I’m yours for super sex,” she answered.

Jim replied, “Well, I’m 75-years-old. I’ll have the soup.”

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The Fuckit List

Everyone knows the Bucket List, the list of things you want to do before you die. What if you don't want to do anything before you die? What if you absolutely hate the things people want to do before they die? What if you hate lists, but you still have to make your own list? That's where the Fuckit List comes in.

For instance:

I do not want to skydive before I die. So, FUCKIT!

I have more:

I do not want to learn how to fly a plane.

I do not want to climb a mountain.

I do not want to drive in the Indianapolis 500.

I do not want to swim in a tank with sharks, octopi, piranhas or dolphins, and especially not on porpoise (yuk-yuk).

I do not want to go to exotic places on the globe.

I do not want to go to exotic places on the globe and eat exotic foods, whose origins I cannot determine.

I do not want to go to exotic places on the globe and hack my way through jungles, encounter huge spiders or lizards, or cannibal headhunters.

I do not want to spend any time in jail or prison.

I do not want to spend any time in jail or prison in Mexico, Iran, Turkey or ___________________ (fill in the blank).

I do not want to have dinner with a movie star.

I do not want to have sex with a movie star because no movie star would have sex with me.

I do not want to have dinner or sex with a famous politician.

I do not want to watch a snuff film. Even if it features a famous politician.

I do not want to be the snuffee in a snuff film.

I do not want to play chess.

I do not want to play any board games, like Monopoly.

I do not want to play any games at all, including mind games.

I do not want to buy an iPad. I want an iPad, I just don't want to have to buy it.

I do not want to take any illegal drugs.

I do not want to stand in lines at a pharmacy to buy legal drugs.

I do not want to take any legal drugs.

To all of these things I don't want to do (and the many more I will think of after I post this), so, FUCKIT!

Death by home invasion

Armando Rodriguez has a long criminal history. Springville, Utah, police believe he broke into a home a couple of weeks ago and stole a gun and a cellphone. He was at it again this past week. Early Thursday morning he broke into a duplex, where he woke a sleeping couple and told them he had a gun. He also told them to get their wallets and ATM cards, and to drive him to an ATM. While supposedly reaching for his card, the homeowner instead got his gun and shot Rodriguez in the chest, killing him.

Home invasions were once rare, now common. It worries me. Every night I make the rounds of my house, checking that all my doors are locked. I know no locks would keep out a determined individual. He could kick in a window, or even the door. But hearing such a ruckus I would have time to defend myself. On rare occasions I wake in the morning and realize my doors were unlocked all night. It upsets me to think of the what-ifs. Without diligence on my part, a thief could just walk in and take me by surprise.

Most home invasions are done because of, you guessed it, drugs. I never thought about it until my neighbor’s son got to be in his twenties, and now sits in his father’s garage all night across the street from me, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and weed with his fellow bum-buddies. They have spent the last couple of years at just such an activity. The neighbor is a lanky, muscular kid who does construction when he's working. Apparently the bad economy is affecting him, and he has become a bum. Another neighbor says the kid's dad, who owns the house, gives him money for cigarettes and beer, and the kid drinks up to a case of beer a night. That removes the urgency for him to find work. Sometimes I worry about him and his bum friends, after a night of getting stoned, getting the notion to bust into my house...so I keep an eye out.

I know that sounds paranoid. Okay. So I'm paranoid.

Because of these home invasions, and because of the most recent incident of the homeowner shooting and killing the invader, our legislature has introduced a bill which would take away any liability from someone shooting an intruder. In other words, in Utah if you shoot a burglar in your house and don't kill him, he can't sue you for pain and suffering. If you kill him, well then, according to the new law, that’s even better.

The new law has given me a devilish idea. This is all hypothetical, of course. It’s no admission of a plan or conspiracy. Say a homeowner was to lure someone he was worried about—like a neighborhood lout—from across the street by telling him he’d pay him to help with a small job moving some furniture in the basement. After working for a while the guy would offer the young man some beer. He’d drink a few beers, and when he was sufficiently mellow and off guard the homeowner would shoot him! He could then put a weapon, a big knife, perhaps, in the bum’s hand. The guy would then have committed the perfect murder, and removed the object of his paranoia, all with the law's blessing. Surely the cops would believe the homeowner when they saw a young guy with a knife in his hand, his still-warm body smelling of alcohol.

Of course that's just an idea. I mean, no one would do that, would they? I wouldn’t commit such an act, would I? I admit, though, looking out the window at the neighbor kid stirring in his garage, getting ready for a night of drinking with his friends, it's tempting.

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Uncle Elmo and my gullible grandma

My grandmother died at age 90 in 1986. She had lived in a small town in Central Utah all her life. She was a churchgoing Mormon and lived her life by church principles, never once straying over the line in word or deed. Grandma was honest to a fault, and to her way of thinking so was everyone else. She trusted everyone to tell the truth. I don't think she had the ability to tell when someone was lying.

I never met Uncle Elmo, and I'm not even sure where he fits into the family tree, but Grandma used to speak of him occasionally. Everyone, even Grandma, called him Uncle Elmo. I never heard any other appellation for him, not even a last name. Many years ago I saw a picture of Uncle Elmo, who was a small, wimpish-looking man. He reminded me of Caspar Milquetoast, a newspaper comic character from the first part of the Twentieth Century.

Uncle Elmo had been dead for decades when Grandma told a group of us this story about him. Grandma had spasmodic dysphonia, a medical condition of the vocal cords that gives the speaker a weak, quavery voice, so she didn't talk all the time, but when she told a story we listened.

"Years ago Uncle Elmo traveled to Chicago," she said. "He needed a haircut, so he went into a nearby barber shop. There was a big man in the other chair who asked Uncle Elmo where he was from."

"'I'm from Utah," Uncle Elmo said.

"'Utah!' The big man snorted. 'Isn't that the place where the Mormons live? How many wives do you have?' He then said some other awful, awful things about the Mormons, and he laughed at Elmo, loudly."

According to Grandma: "Uncle Elmo was so angry. He jumped right out of that barber chair and stood in front of that big man, and he waved his finger in his face. He said, 'Don't you dare say a word about the Mormons! They are a great people who live the commandments of God, and you have no right to say anything bad about them!'"

Grandma continued: "There was little Elmo, telling off this great big man. And he got the big man to apologize for saying anything about Mormons. And do you know who that big man was? It was Al Capone!" Grandma said the punchline with as much force as her weak little voice could muster.

With respect for my grandmother I didn't say anything, but I smelled the overpowering odor of bullshit in Uncle Elmo's story. What are the odds that a businessman walking into a barbershop in Chicago in the 1920s would run into the most famous crime lord of that time and place? Unlikely, I think. And why would he back down to a little guy like Elmo? I thought that Elmo, small and meek, would come back from his Chicago trip wanting to appear tough and brave. That's understandable, but to use Al Capone in his lie, well, that tipped me. Uncle Elmo was over-compensating.

My grandmother may have gone to her grave thinking that Uncle Elmo had bearded the lion by getting Al Capone to say he was sorry. I believe Grandma would have been easy pickings for a confidence game had one been pulled on her. She believed everything she heard.

Bullshit lies are all around us, and I should know because I've told a few in my time. I'm pretty sure everyone knew they were lies and just didn't challenge me, but on the rare occasions they did I knew I was busted, that someone wasn't fooled by my self-serving fiction.

On the other hand, there are stories that, even on their face might come off as tall tales, have more of the sound of truth to them. In the sixties I patronized a service station in an era when service meant something. An old man named Bud would come out to greet my brother and me and fill up the tank when we'd pull in for gas. "Hello, fellas," he'd say in a gravelly voice from fifty years of cigarette smoking. Once while we were waiting for the tank to fill he told my brother and me a story, which I'm reminded of after re-telling Uncle Elmo's fabrication. Bud's story sounded authentic to me.

"Back in '26 me and my friend hitchhiked and rode the rails on an adventure back east," he told us. "We was right out of high school and wanted to see some of the world before we had to go to work. We ended up in Chicago and decided to see if we could get into a speakeasy, see some of the night life. We walked into some joint and set down. We was the only ones there but one guy in a suit, settin' at another table."

Bud took a dramatic pause to recapture some of his breath. "The man looked at us, said, 'Boys,' then laid down a big ol' .45 automatic pistol on the table in front of him. 'You see that door over there,' and he pointed it out. 'In a few minutes there's a man a'goin' to come through that door and I'm gonna shoot him with this here gun. I strongly advise you leave now.'"

I asked, "What did you do?"

Bud looked at me like I was totally stupid. "We got the hell outta there! What did you think, we was gonna stick around and get shot, too?"

Had Bud told us he and his pal had jumped up and wrestled the gun away from the hitman I would have instantly known he was lying, but his answer let me know he was telling the truth. Sometimes there are shades of difference in the storytelling and the story, but I believe I've developed a pretty good ear for what's true and what isn't.

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"Nice day for a white wedding..."

I found this wedding picture a week ago. For $2.00 I bought someone else's memory.

It appears to be World War II vintage; a church wedding. A sailor and his best man, the bride and her bridesmaid, and the clergyman to marry them. The lighting on the photo is such that it doesn't show much detail, so I can't see rank on the men's uniforms. What I am able to tell at a glance is just the obvious: the handsome blond groom is very tall, his pretty dark-tressed bride is very short.

How did this picture, recording such a happy event, find its way in 2012 into a bowl in an antique shop, mixed in with various other snapshots from different eras? My guess is that it was bought from an estate sale. It's likely that all the people at this wedding are now deceased; perhaps if there are heirs the picture got away from them without their knowledge. Maybe it was tucked into a book or a scrapbook they didn't check before selling.

I can speculate until doomsday and never know anything about the people in this picture. A picture like this tells a story. But it's one we have to make up ourselves.

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Five degrees of separation

My wife and I...

...are parents of this young man, and in-laws of his wife...

...who are parents of these girls, our grandchildren...

...who attend this school...

...in a town in Western Pennsylvania, where this GOP Presidential candidate...

...graduated in 1971.

Only five degrees of separation between me and Rick Santorum. Holy crap. That's way too close for me.

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