Man Martin's Blog, page 156

Chicago

I believe Chicago is the most distinctive American city.  The line "I'm writing this in a hotel room in Chicago" calls to mind images of a seedy dump with the letters -T-E-L flashing on a neon sign outside the window.  A gunshot from the street below, a woman's scream from the stairwell.  Actually ,of course, it's quite nice, like any decent chain hotel.

Certain philistines will say that honor goes to New Orleans, but in truth Chicago is more Chicago than New Orleans is New Orleans.  New Orleans is a city of music, but the Blues Brothers could never have been filmed there.  You need that great scene with Elwood and Jake in that seedy apartment with one L-Train after another going by outside.  Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, but he moved to Chicago.  New Orleans has wonderful food, and in this one area may outshine even the mighty Chicago, but Chicago has its own distinct regional cuisine as well.
Chicago has a muscularity that New Orleans lacks.  Chicago says to you, "Get up and make something of the world!"  New Orleans says, in a genteel way, "Why bother?  Everything worth doing has already been done.  Meanwhile, have a muffaletta."  Even the famous political corruption is somehow admirable - it's ballsy, it speaks of wanting something and going after it.  It is impossible to imagine Carl Sandburg writing a poem about New Orleans:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the  little soft cities...
Well, I can't do better than Sandburg, so I'll leave off here.

Something We Will NOT Be Doing

I'm probably the only person who
ever played outfield sitting downNancy and I are flying to Chicago this morning.  When my pal Jamie Iredell heard this, he suggested we could take in a ballgame, I gave him a blank stare as if he'd just said, "Say, maybe you could watch some paint dry.  I understand there's a lot of fresh paint in Chicago."

I never cared for sports.  When I was a kid, they always made me play outfield.  None of the batters could hit a ball that far, which suited me fine.  I may have been the only person in history who played outfield sitting down.  There was usually a lot of interesting activity going on in the weeds if you knew where to look.  Other kids fantasized about being good at sports.  Not me.  When I was out there, I fantasized about French class.  I sucked at French.  I liked to imagine I'd been born in France, that I was a little French kid.  Then French would have been a snap!  And as a bonus, I wouldn't have to play baseball.  I mean, it was nice sitting out in a field with no one bothering me, and all, but you weren't allowed to leave.  Not even if you had to oui oui.

Later, in Athens, Georgia, I got another big dose of sports.  Nancy and I were there the same time as Herschel Walker:, who ran two hundred yards four times in one season, leading the Bulldogs to an undefeated championship year.  Before you get too impressed with my command of that statistic, I looked it up on the internet.  Frankly, it doesn't sound that impressive.  Two hundred yards times four is still less than half a mile.  And it took a whole season to run it.  Of course, he was running through halfbacks or quarterbacks or three-quarterbacks to do it, which I guess makes it harder.

You might think my time in Athens would make me a sports fanatic, but no.  When there was a home game, Nancy and I would hole up in our little apartment and make margaritas.  You see, Athens was quite scary when all the drunk alumni showed up.  I don't know if they were drunk all the time, but they were certainly drunk when they got to Athens.  The situation was not improved by the fact that in Athens, whenever a road needed a new lane, they just painted an additional stripe.  So no, being in Athens did not make me a big sports fan.  I did, however, become very fond of margaritas.

So to sum up, we will not be visiting Wriggly Field when we go to Chicago.  Nor we will be taking any French classes.  We may possibly get some margaritas.  And watch some drying paint.  I understand there's some very interesting fresh paint in Chicago.

Parapalooza

My fellow writers and readers might be interested in this: The Southern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA) has created “Parapalooza!” -- a YouTube channel devoted to people reading favorite selections from favorite books -- as a way to foster avid readers’ enthusiasm for great writing. People are invited to submit their own short videos to the channel by sending them to parapalooza@sibaweb.com.
SIBA Executive Director Wanda Jewell first conceived of the idea for Parapalooza! when she was reading the new Stephen King novel, Joyland, and liked it so much she had to interrupt her husband to read him different parts. “I suddenly thought  it be great if readers had a way to share that impulse,” Jewell said. “It takes the ‘You’ve got to read this!’ feeling to the next level.”  To see the videos already uploaded, visit, authorsroundthesouth.com/read-this/parapalooza
Below is a video of yours truly getting his hands on some Shakespeare.

Things Your Dog Knows That You Do Not

1. What's under sofa.2. What butt tastes like.3. Best spots to pee.4. What squirrels are up to.5. Location of missing sock.6. Who dug up geraniums.7. When collie next door is in heat.

Going to Home Depot

As you may know, my daughter Spencer and her boyfriend Glenn recently bought a new condo.  It's not really home yet, because as the poet says, "It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make a home, a heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye' sometimes have t' roam."  Ye also have t' put up curtain rods an' connect th' dryer vent, but the poet didn't mention that part.

Glenn had already bought the flexible hose and the duct clamps at the Home Depot, so I gave him a brief rundown of the procedure as I remembered it, and he clambered behind the dryer and set to work.  Maybe I could've done it myself, but I let him do the honors.  Not that connecting a dryer vent is that great an honor, but we have to gather these little Golden Memories while we can.  I should mention Glenn is a pretty big guy.  He does Iron Man triathlons where you run a marathon after you've had a refreshing four mile swim in the ocean and pedaled 112 miles on your bicycle.  So he's squeezed back there bending joints he never knew he had, working the screwdriver and cursing the flexible hose, until he announces, the clamps are the wrong size.

This is no big deal, I assure him.  I have never once embarked on a project that didn't require at least three trips to the hardware store.  And it's true - it might be as simple as replacing the light bulb in the refrigerator.  I might measure the bulb, write down the serial number, and verify if it's a left or right-handed model.  Nevertheless, it will require at least three trips to get the right one.

So we get the right hose clamps and Glenn sets back to work.  These hose clamps, of course, are designed by NASA engineers to just barely fit.  And by just barely, I mean they don't fit at all, but by a sufficient amount of cussing and straining you can make them fit.  Glenn is hampered not only by being a big guy but because he naturally can't let a full stream of cuss words loose in front of his girlfriend's father.  I swear, the worst thing I heard him say was "Darn."  Anyone will tell you, you can't do a decent repair job without access to a full range of cussing vocabulary.  I wanted to tell him, "You can use the F-word if you want, son.  It's fine."  My view of the operation consisted of the top of Glenn's head accompanied by creaking sounds.  Some of the sounds were the operation of the screwdriver and some were his joints.  He rose from time to time to wipe sweat from his brow and rest his knees, and then went back to work.  It would've been so much easier if he could've cussed.

At last he announced the hose was on, except he expressed a concern it was too long and would crimp.  I examined his handiwork, and while it did look like a dryer vent as imagined by Dr. Seuss, I felt it would do fine.

However, when Spencer saw it, she felt the dryer was not properly aligned with the washer, and after she'd tugged and twisted it into place, Nancy declared the hose was definitely crimped and the dryer wouldn't vent.  So Glenn removed the hose, amputated about half of it with my trusty exacto knife, and reattached it.  He was no longer finding it as hard squeezing back behind the dryer.  Partly because loss of sweat he'd shrunk down by about a fourth, and partly because he'd bent additional joints in his arms and legs.  By this time each forearm had two brand-new elbows.

We pushed the dryer back in place, and the hose crimped again.  At this point, Nancy expressed a desire to give it a try, and she went behind the dryer herself.  I will say now, and I love my wife as dearly as man ever loved woman, it would have been an enormous cosmic injustice if she'd succeeded in connecting the dryer vent after Glenn had expended so much sweat, effort, and inadequate cussing trying to do it.  She failed.  Thank the Lord.

I tried myself, and was able to connect the dryer, but when we pushed it back, the remaining section of hose was irretrievably crimped.  Oh, by the way, getting out behind the dryer, I managed to break one of the shelves in the dryer closet.

Part of the problem is the dryer exhaust pipe and the wall duct don't line up and there's very limited space to twist the hose.  I spent the rest of the evening meditating on how we could address the problem.  When we got home, Nancy showed me various solutions available online, but I paid only polite attention.  I was cogitating My Own Plan.  Please, please, please if you read this blog and think you know the answer, DO NOT write in to say what it is.  This is not merely a matter of a dryer vent.  Dryer vents come and go, they are expendable.  Here today, gone tomorrow is how it is with dryer vents.  This is a matter of pride.  In any case, I believe I have the solution.

It will require just one more trip to Home Depot.

***

PS - Check out Jesse Christiansen's Next Big Thing Interview here for his new novel, Pelican Bay: http://jgchristiansen.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/next-best-thing-author-interview/

Giving Blood

The Red Cross called Saturday and said, "We need blood.  Get your veins in here and drop us a pint ASAP!"  They didn't put it that way, but that's what they meant.  I've been donating blood fairly regularly since I was, I think, seventeen; I'm fifty-four now, so that's been... thirty-seven years.  The foolish thing I did was the appointment time - 7:15 AM.  I don't know what I was thinking.  Actually, I do know what I was thinking.  I was thinking I'd like to get it over with early and have the rest of the day to myself.  What I wasn't thinking was seven-freaking-fifteen AM in the morning.  That's what I'm thinking now.

Before you give blood, they ask you a lot of questions to which, being who I am, there's always an urge to give inappropriate answers.  Like they ask, "Have you been given money or drugs for sex since 1976?"  I have to fight the impulse to look thoughtful and say, "Hmm.  No.  Not since 1976."  I never say this however, for the same reason I never tell the airport people, "Why yes, now that you mention it, I have let a stranger repack my bags for me."  The reason I don't say these things is I am a coward.

This time, as a matter of fact, I'm not donating whole blood but platelets.  The Red Cross likes platelets whenever they can get them.  A single platelet donation can be the equivalent of 12 to 18 whole blood donations.  The deal is, they take blood from one arm, spin it in a machine until the blood cells get dizzy and fall down, then mix whatever's left with contact lens solution, and stick it back in the other arm.

I'm trying to think of a way to wrap up this blog, because I want to work on something else before I go in for my seven-freaking-fifteen AM appointment, but I can't think of anything so I looked up blood cells jokes on the internet.  This was written by someone named zzz1090.

Two blood cells are under a humans' skin.
Blood Cell 1: Wow, it's hot in here!
Blood Cell 2: Oh, my God!  A talking blood cell!

Don't blame me, I didn't write it, I just stole it.  I think it would've been funnier if one of the blood cells had been named Murray.

This Time of Year

Teachers bellyache about their jobs a lot, but in many ways it's an incredibly sweet gig.  I'm just now wrapping up my two-month summer vacation.  That's right, suckers, two months.  I'll be starting back to work in just a couple of weeks, and the strange thing is...

I'm sort of looking forward to it.

Don't misunderstand me; I really love my time off, and I've squeezed the juice out of every minute.  If the governor announced they were extending vacation an additional month, I'd be like whoop-de-doo.

Nevertheless.

I'm sort of looking forward to going back.

I can tell this because I start having dreams about being in the classroom.  These are pleasant dreams, not very interesting, but pleasant.  Mostly I'm teaching the same stuff I taught last year, only I'm doing a better job.  For example, last year I did a lot of work teaching my students to use parallelism and appositives to jazz up their writing.  And it worked, too.  Maybe too well.  They started using too much damn parallelism and too damn many appositives.  So this year, I'm going to do more to emphasize other sentence techniques.  For example, balanced sentences. I interrupted writing this blog to read an article on balanced sentences, picturing how I'd incorporate them in the classroom.  I get all quivery just thinking about it.

Clearly I must be sick.

But I'm sort of looking forward to going back.

Consider the Mosquito

It has been a warm and rainy summer and the mosquitoes are loving it.  Let's talk a little about the wonder of the mosquito.  The name mosquito comes from Spanish for "fly" and the diminutive "-ito."  It literally means "little fly."  Perhaps they would be better named vampiritoes or draculitoes, but let it pass.  Someone should also inform the Mosquito Indians how incredibly insulting their name is.
Anyway, when a mommy and daddy mosquito love each other very very much, the angels give mommy a tiny egg, along with about two hundred other tiny eggs, to put in a cozy little pool of stagnant water.  Soon the water is filled with tumbling little larvae, eating algae and breathing through their spiracles.  All too soon, however, their carefree childhood is over, and four days after hatching, off they go to have families of their own.
Boy mosquitoes eat only nectar.  Females are the bloodsuckers.  I will make no misogynistic comment here, I merely point out this scientific fact.  The men hang out in groups, and once in a while a female will fly right into the midst of them to mate.  No one thinks any worse of the female for behaving this way, but we have to keep in mind these are only mosquitoes.  Now the female has to get a good belly-full of blood.  This is key to the whole thing.  Without blood, she won't be able to make any babies, and a mosquito has a biological clock like a...  well, the simile fails me, but think of a very, very fast clock. 
Drinking blood could be very dangerous for mosquitoes which is something you probably never thought about, did you?  For example, if the blood clotted, as blood tends to do, she would choke on it, and pretty soon there'd be no more baby mosquitoes.  Fortunately God gives her a very special chemical in her saliva that keeps blood from clotting.  She's not just drinking you see, she's also spitting in you.  It's this spit, this mosquito backwash, that causes the bite to itch.  Without it, you'd probably never even know you'd been bitten, and what would be the fun of that?  So she finds some blood, so she can lay her eggs and the whole beautiful cycle of life begins again.
Let us now do some math.  A mosquito spends about four days developing from egg to adult, and typically mates about two days after that.  So an entire generation takes about a week.  Each female lays around two hundred eggs or so.  After a month, then, starting with just two mosquitoes - and there are never just two - there could be as many as one billion, six hundred million mosquitoes.  
But don't worry.  
Only about eight hundred million of those will try to bite you.`

Condo Minimums

Metaphor for AdulthoodMy daughter Spencer and her boyfriend Glenn recently closed on a condo.

Now begins, as Shakespeare puts it, the tempest to their souls.

Spencer and I went shopping briefly just to get one or two things: some cleaning products, filters for the air conditioner, blinds, and replacement hardware for a chest of drawers they have.

Cost?  Just shy of two hundred dollars.  And we didn't even find the replacement hardware.

Then off to the paint store to learn a gallon of the paint they need for some cabinets is going to come in around fifty bucks.  Mind you, this is only the tip of the iceberg of the expenses they've already covered, and the tippy-tip-top of the iceberg of expenses yet to come.  A couple of hundred dollars here, and a couple of hundred dollars there, and after a while it starts to add up to real money.

While Spencer was checking out a Home Depot I was standing behind her giggling like a fool.  The prices were so funny!  Ha-ha!  The blinds are fifty bucks, the air filter is $19.95!

I kept thinking of the scene in A Christmas Movie when someone challenges some poor mope to stick his tongue to a frozen metal pole, and he ends up getting stuck until the fire department comes for him.  That's how it felt watching Spencer - like someone had told her to stick her tongue onto a frozen pole, and she'd gone and done it!

Growing up is like sticking your tongue onto a frozen pole.  You don't know what it'll be like until you do it, and once you've done it, you can't back out.

Not that buying the condo wasn't the right thing to do, I'm convinced it was a very good move and I'm proud as punch they've done it, but that doesn't alter the fact that growing up is a bitch.  Actually it's a series of bitches, intermittently spaced and of various sizes.  And one day, Lord willing, she'll have a child of her own, and the day will come that child will strike out on his own.  And Spencer will get to watch him deal with adulthood's little surprises for himself.  That's how the species works; we pass the mantle to the next generation.

Put your tongue on this pole, now it's your turn.

Joe Blow Endorsed You on Linked In!

"Actually, LinkedIn Endorsements don't mean that much."Every so often, I get an email notifying me I've been endorsed by another passel of folks for various skills I've claimed on LinkedIn.  Then I visit LinkedIn and a dialogue box opens up asking if I'd like to endorse Terry Dactyl for Electric-Chair Upholstery or Rufus Leeking for Air-Traffic Control, and I click "yes," and "yes," and "yes" until my fingers get tired of clicking.  In some cases, I don't know if these people are good at what they claim or not, but it seems rude not to endorse them with their little profile pictures staring out at me so hopefully especially if they've already endorsed me.

I don't really have that many skills, so I subdivided the one or two I do have as many ways as possible.  For example, there's "novelist," "writer," and "reader."  Then I have "fiction," "fiction-writer," "fiction-reader."  "Re-writer," "re-reader."  "Looking for glasses."  "Finding them."  If you think about it hard enough, you can take a single skill and divide it into an infinite number of categories.

It's tempting to claim a skill like "Brain Surgery" or "Rocket Scientist" and see how many people would endorse me, but that could put me in a sticky situation.  Suppose somebody needed a brain surgeon and went to LinkedIn to find one?  No thanks.  So instead I just added the new skill, "Sex Symbol."  I figure what really makes you a Sex Symbol is having people believe you're a Sex Symbol.  Also, my self-esteem could use a boost.  Perhaps because she sees me so much around the house in draw-string shorts, black socks, and a tee-shirt with a mustard stain, Nancy no longer appreciates what a sexy Sex Symbol I am.  So when you go to LinkedIn and it asks you to endorse my Sex Symbolism, please click yes.  Click twice, if possible.