Jacke Wilson's Blog, page 77

Writers Laughing: Zora Neale Hurston

Another great one. There’s at least one other picture of her in this car: 

 

Seems like she was having a good day!

Writers Laughing: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Love this. What are they laughing about? We don’t know. But there’s also this:

Image Credit: Corbis

 

And this:

I read somewhere that Sartre loved to sing “Old Man River” and often did so at the top of his lungs. A friend of mine used to do an impression of this (baritone voice, passionate feeling, crazy French accent, some existentialist twists) that never failed to make me laugh.

It is an unconfirmed rumor that this is the source of the mirth in these photos.

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #22 – The Sound

1

I fall asleep with my hand on my girlfriend’s hip. I awake with her hand squeezing my throat.

“Jesus!” I gasp after I finally pry her fingers from my neck. “What are you doing?”

She blinks, still in a fog, halfway between sleep and madness. “Huh? What…?” She shakes her head, coming awake. “Oh, sorry… ” she says. “I was dreaming that I was choking you to death.”

“Nice dream,” I say.

Her eyes drift shut. “It’s the SOUND…” she murmurs. “It’s making me…INSANE…”

I cannot blame her. My dreams are just as bad. Monkeys howling, trains derailing, slaughterhouses at night…

“One more day,” I say.

The sound is still there, encasing us. My throat tingles. With one hand I grip her arm; with the other I wrap my pillow around my head.

It does not matter. The sound pierces through.

2

We’d seen some terrible places before finally finding this one. It was the usual assortment of college-town drudgery. Terrible carpet with stains and holes. Linoleum that curled up in the corners. Bedrooms with no windows. Bad smells. Fumes.

One place we looked at had been painted black—entirely black, fall the walls and windows, including the fireplace bricks, the refrigerator, the stove, all of it black, black, black. The landlord said he wasn’t going to do anything about it because the tenants had skipped out on two months’ rent and he couldn’t afford to do anything.

From there we went to an old house that had been carved up into apartments in such a way that the front door of the unit entered into the bathroom. From there you walked into the bedroom. Finally you made it to the kitchen. Last of all was a common area, which had a window that led to a fire escape but no door. The only entrance was through the bathroom.

It was hard not to be depressed. We were not undergrads excited to be on our own and looking to live on the cheap. We were graduate students starting a life together. We were poor, but we wanted a home.

I was beginning to worry we wouldn’t find anything better. “I guess we’d get used to it,” I said.

“What if we have people come over? They’d enter through that little bathroom?”

“I think anyplace we live will come to feel like home eventually.”

“And I think you can’t really call a place home when you have to kneel on your toilet to let in your guests,” my girlfriend said.

What could I say?

And then, as the panic was beginning to mount, we found it: a cute apartment in a newly renovated art deco building. Rent a little higher than we’d targeted but manageable.

We first visited it in the late summer evening, as the sun was going down. We looked at each other, a half-second glance, but we didn’t even need that much, because we both knew immediately that this was the place. Our little third floor corner apartment. One bedroom, a hallway to the bath, a hallway that curled around to the living room, a kitchen behind a glass door. Beautiful layout. All we needed.

Our home.

I felt like dancing across the hardwood floors.

Our search, those days of misery and near panic, receded into our past. That was just a good bonding experience. A test of sorts – one that we had passed. Our relationship was stronger than ever.

My girlfriend pointed out a framed newspaper article in the lobby.

LOCAL BUILDING HAUNTED BY BROADWAY GHOST

The story was from the 1950s. It told the story of a local talent who’d hit it big with a few Broadway plays in the 1930s. He returned in the ’40s and lived in this building, bringing a tangled social life along with him. His wife, once an “enchanting chanteuse of the Great White Way,” had encountered him with a mistress. She fired a gun at his head, missing him but killing the mistress. Now the mistress’s spirit was said to roam the halls humming Cole Porter tunes.

Flapper girls! The jazz age! A razzle-dazzle murder mystery. It was just the sort of quaint, charming history that we were looking for.

“Are you worried about ghosts?” my girlfriend said.

“Are you kidding? I love Cole Porter!”

Naturally we couldn’t wait to move in, but there was a scheduling snag. For a twenty-four hour period we had no place to stay.

Luckily our new landlord had a solution.

He was a wonderful man. His name was Peter and he came from Greece; he spoke with a fairly heavy accent but with plenty of gusto. His mother-in-law was also Greek and used to tend the flowers around the building. I never met his wife. It was always just him, the dutiful son-in-law, and her, who actually owned the building.

This building was their life. He told us a long story about how they had fixed the water pressure—when they had purchased the building, the third floor could not be occupied officially because the running water could not even reach that high. “It was disgusting up there,” he said. “No faucets. Toilets not working. People were living there anyway. Squatters.” His English was perfect but he pronounced words like that carefully.

All that had changed now. They had fixed the water and blasted the place clean. Tenants were happy. The brick exterior was beautiful; the woodwork on the inside dazzling.

And now, the magnanimous landlord had an idea for us. He had a unit that was unoccupied. We could live there for a day or two, then move our stuff up a floor to our real place, as soon as the current tenant moved out and he and his mother-in-law had a chance to clean it and get it ready.

It was the perfect solution—or at least it seemed that way at first.

But then, after we moved into our temporary place, hauling all our stuff from our friend’s house, to our car, to the second floor of our new building, we heard it.

A sound.

And not just any sound. A high-pitched screeching sound. An electronic wail.

We wandered around, trying to figure out its origins. “Is it coming from outside somewhere?” my girlfriend asked, going to the window that overlooked the back parking lot and a ravine that ran all the way down to the train tracks and the lower campus.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It sounds closer than that. It must be in the building.”

I checked the corridor, thinking that someone may have propped open an emergency exit door, or that there was a smoke alarm somewhere that had gone off and needed to be reset.

To my surprise, as soon as the door closed behind me, the sound stopped. I reentered the apartment.

“It’s definitely coming from in here somewhere.”

We walked through the place, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. The sound was consistent and eternal, high enough to grate on the nerves. I felt like a dog subjected to a nefarious whistle, pitched perfectly for maximum discomfort.

There were two smoke alarms; both were functioning properly. We unplugged appliances, including the refrigerator. Nothing stopped the noise. We ran water, flushed the toilets, opened and closed the windows. Still it was there, in the air, everywhere.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Sometimes the waves of sound seemed to rise and fall.

EEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeee.

It wasn’t clear if that was the sound itself or just the way the mind processed it. Because it truly was inhuman. You could torture prisoners with a sound like that.

“It will stop soon,” I said confidently.

We turned on and off all the lights. We opened all the cupboards, checked all the closets, looked for any stray wires.

The sound continued.

It did not seem to have an origin: it just drifted around, seeming to be louder by one window, but just as loud across the room. We were trapped inside echoes and vibrations as the sound bounced around. It was like we were stuck inside the sound itself, somehow.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

“Jesus,” my girlfriend said. “How do people live here?”

“Maybe they get used to it?”

That night we dragged our futon mattress to the bedroom and closed the door. At first we thought this blocked the sound. But after we had laid down, and our breathing steadied, the sound traveled under the door and joined us. It seemed as loud in here as it had in the other rooms.

“Oh my God,” said my girlfriend.

“It’s got to stop eventually. Maybe we should play some music?”

“I don’t know what box the radio’s in. Do you?”

I didn’t. But I was already half asleep. “Maybe it will stop soon,” I said. “We’ll wake up to a quiet morning.”

“Maybe we should sleep in the car.”

My eyelids were heavy and already half-shut. My legs and arms ached from the dual move: basement to car, car to here. Over and over and over…

“What if it’s in our new place too?” my girlfriend said.

“It won’t be,” I said. “We saw that place. Remember?”

If she responded I didn’t hear her.

3

The next thing I remember was being choked. And then it was morning and I was aware that we were both awake, both still lying in bed.

“Is the sound still there?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“I don’t hear it,” I said. “Do you want coffee?”

“You can’t hear it?”

I tried. I thought I heard it. But then I wasn’t sure. “My mind must have adjusted,” I said. “Hearing the same thing for so long. Like how you don’t feel your heartbeat in your chest.”

“It’s not the same.” Her voice was sharp. “It’s angry. The sound is angry.”

“I’ll go get us some coffee. We’ll feel better after that.”

“The sound does not like it when you claim you do not hear it.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

As soon as I opened the bedroom the door I could hear the sound again.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

On my way to get coffee I swung by our new place. Peter and his mother-in-law had been there until past midnight cleaning. It sparkled in the early morning light, and of course there was no sound, and I could not wait to be there. Home.

I returned, excited about the prospect. One more move with the boxes, this time just up one flight of stairs, then unpacking, then settling in. And then our new graduate courses, our new lives together, all our dreams could begin.

It almost felt like the sound had had a purpose: to make us enjoy our new home all the more. Any minor complaints about the new apartment would fall to the side. Who cared if the closets were small, when by God this place did not have that torturous screeching sound!

I started hauling boxes two at a time. My legs limbered up. Our eagerness to rid ourselves of the sound gave us both new levels of energy.

The sound really had affected us. I did not know if we could have lasted.

I had been through hardships, I reflected as I hauled box after box, but that sound was as pernicious as anything I had encountered. It had a sneaky, powerful influence. As I carried our microwave up to the new place, I almost thought I could hear the noise all the way.

When I returned to the old apartment for the next load my girlfriend was standing in the doorway, staring at me.

“The sound’s gone,” she said.

“Hallelujah!” I said, already feeling relieved. “That thing was going to destroy us. You know, I hallucinated that I heard it on the last trip?”

She nodded slowly, not sharing my delight. We took our next loads together. She was a few steps from the new place when suddenly she stopped in the hallway.

“It’s here,” she said. “What did you do?“

“What did I do? I…I don’t know!” I retraced my steps in my mind. Illogical thoughts began combining themselves into strange theories. “The microwave? I carried the microwave?”

She leaned down by the oven I had left sitting in the entryway. “It’s this!” she said. “The sound’s coming from this!”

“It must be faulty!” I cried, pressing past her as she backed away in horror. I reached down.

“No, no – don’t touch it!” my girlfriend said.

Bravely I lifted the microwave and carried it to the living room, hearing the sound the entire way. I set it down by an electrical outlet and undid the cord.

“Are you crazy? You might start a fire! You might blow up the building!”

I considered the risks. “I need to know,” I finally said.

It had seemed bizarre that the thing could make that sound even when it hadn’t been plugged in. And it was even more bizarre that, after I plugged it in, I was able to heat a cup of water. None of this made sense.

“It works just fine,” I said, mystified.

“Jesus, Jacke! It’s making a CONSTANT BEEPING SOUND.”

Once again I had to admit she was right. I hauled the thing down to the car. And again I felt odd, because I could no longer hear the sound. My mind was playing tricks. What would it be like if I could no longer trust my senses?

When I returned to the new apartment my girlfriend greeted me in the hallway wearing a strange expression.

“It’s in there now,” she said in a faraway voice. “The sound is in there.”

I staggered past her and into our apartment.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

4

Peter was just returning from church when we showed up at his house. When he recognized us, his happy expression transformed into one of concern. It was not every Sunday morning that two brand-new tenants turn up at your door unannounced, wild-eyed and sweating.

On the way there we had pieced together what had happened.

Here’s what we knew: the microwave had not been faulty when it was being stored at our friend’s house; the sound only began when we took it to the first apartment. It must have transported the defect from the first place to the second, which is why I heard the sound in the hallway when I was carrying it. Then I plugged it into an outlet at the new place, transferring the sound there. The sound then left the microwave.

I didn’t know enough about electricity to make any kind of educated analysis. I could only assume it had something to do with electromagnetism. Somehow the faulty microwave was reversing the polarity of the electrons, or something like that, which was causing a high pitched sound. My theory made me think of magnets whose poles could be reversed, or the feedback you get when a microphone comes too close to itself.

“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t know how the microwave got the sound in the first place.”

My girlfriend was silent.

“I mean, it seems weird that this force-field thing, or whatever it is, could just leap from the walls to the microwave. If it could affect the microwave like that, just by us bringing the microwave in the room, then why didn’t all our appliances go haywire?”

“I…might have plugged it in.” She half-smiled. “At the first place.”

“You did what???”

“It was when you were driving back to Jen’s to pick up one of the loads.”

“Why did you plug it in? What’d you do, eat something?”

“I wanted to make sure it worked.”

“That couldn’t wait two days???”

“I don’t know…it just seemed like the right thing to do….Do you really think that could be what happened?”

“Nothing else makes sense,” I said.

Now we explained all this to Peter. His eyes grew wide. “The wires? I’ve never heard of that.”

“What else could it be?” I asked.

He had no answer.

We walked back to the building and climbed the steps to the third floor, and our cute little apartment, really a gem of a place, except for whatever electronic chaos had infested its wiring.

Peter started nodding as soon as he opened the door. “I hear it,” he said, somewhat surprised. He stood in the center of the living room, slowly turning to try to assess the origin of the noise. Finally he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “I think it’s in the light fixture.”

“How did it get there?”

“How should I know?”

“It’s your building!”

“This has never happened before.”

We were at an impasse. I pulled a kitchen chair over so he could stand on top of it. “Yes, it’s definitely louder up here,” he said. “It must be in the light fixture.”

I nodded. “Maybe,” I said. “But it also seems louder over here.”

He joined me at the outlet by the front window. “Yes,” he agreed after bending over to put his ear closer to the electrical outlet. “You’re right.”

“It must be traveling through the walls,” I said. “The outlet, the overhead ceiling…”

“Can it do that?” Peter said.

I was startled by the question. How was I supposed to know? I’d been here for two days. I was supposed to be the expert in his building?

“I would assume so,” I said wisely. “It’s all wires. The whole thing is connected.”

He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of this before.”

The sound was getting to us. So loud, so high, so swirling and relentless. I was close to asking him to void the lease, but I thought that might be premature. I asked Peter what we could do.

“I’ve never heard of this before,” he said again, mystified.

“Should we call an electrician?”

“I think they will laugh at me.”

“Well, they wouldn’t if they came here,” I said, irritated that he wasn’t coming up with something better. We had paid the security deposit and first month’s rent already. How hard would it be to get it back? There was no way we’d be able to sublet this place unless we were lucky enough to find someone who didn’t care.

“What else do you have in mind?” I said. “An exorcist?”

To my surprise, he didn’t smile or scoff, but nodded slowly, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. He reached down and adjusted the plate over the outlet (as if that was going do anything!). He walked back to the center of the room and looked up at the light fixture.

Then he looked straight at me, raised an eyebrow, and said, in a low voice:

“Do you believe in dark spirits, Jacke?”

I was too startled to respond directly. We stared at each other for at least a minute.

“I just need it gone,” I finally said, snapping us out of our trance. “Whatever it is.”

And I did. My relationship, my finances, my new career as a graduate student—my whole life was going to be tied up in this new place. I couldn’t have it be a source of struggle, a fight against madness.

Peter had another idea. He went to the basement and shut off the power to that side of the building. I heard a neighbor shout (“Hey!”). I wanted to shout back at him. Loss of power for a few seconds? Ha. A small price to pay. How would he like having an electronic wail jump from my place to his through the wires? This whole building was at risk!

The power came back on. Thirty seconds later Peter returned to the doorway. “What happened?” he asked. “Did that stop the sound?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t need power,” I said. “It’s electromagnetic. It supplies its own.”

“Supplies its own power? How?”

“The power of electrons,” I said guessing with conviction. “The power of the atom.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Peter said.

I reminded him that it had traveled when I was carrying the microwave. The sound had accompanied me even though the microwave had not been plugged in. “It’s a disturbance in something in the wires,” I said. “Something’s gone wrong in the force.”

Peter looked at me in stunned agreement.

It was a look I would never forget. It was as if something had ripped apart, some layer of logic and landlord-tenant civility, which once governed our behavior but no longer concealed the truth. Now we knew something deeper, something darker: we knew what the world could do to us, how capricious and arbitrary it could be, and how little power we had to combat its terrible power. This was bigger than us both.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

He left, promising that he would be back, promising that he would do something. I believed him. He looked stricken, and several times had mentioned that this building was his retirement, everything he had, the bank had already overextended his line of credit, his mother-in-law she would freak out…

Of course he’d be back. His whole building was on the verge of succumbing to this mysterious power that would render it uninhabitable. They’d need to rewire this whole place, or knock it down altogether, seventy-two units reduced to rubble.

After he was gone I called my parents. They had been homeowners for decades and knew a million little problems and fixes that I had never paid attention to. Of course, they had never encountered a problem like this. But they knew a guy. That was the advantage of staying in one place rather than roaming around like I did. You could always know a guy.

“I don’t know a guy,” I said. “I just got here.”

“We’ll call ours,” my father said.

My girlfriend returned. She heard the sound and went straight into the bathroom without saying another word.

“He didn’t fix it,” I called through the door, as if she needed to hear that.

My parents called back. Their guy, an electrician, had never heard of this. He did not even think it was possible. I held the phone out to let them hear the screech.

“Not possible?” I shouted over the din. “NOT POSSIBLE???”

“I couldn’t really hear it,” my father said. “It didn’t really come through the phone.”

“You’re probably lucky it didn’t!” I said. “Who knows—maybe it travels through phone wires!”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” my father said.

“Take care of yourself, Jacke,” my mother said in a forlorn way. “Please.”

I shrugged at the phone. Who was going to help me with this?

I stomped around the apartment. All my stuff was in boxes. I was hungry, tired, and alone, sweating from the heat. My jaw hurt and I realized I had been clenching my face. The sound had made me do it involuntarily.

Peter knocked on the door.

“I need to break the lease,” I said.

“Don’t be hasty.”

He mumbled a few things that made it clear he had been doing the same calculations as me. A deaf person? Could you rent this place to a deaf person? Maybe if you disclosed the sound and discounted the rent?

“Look,” I said. “I love this place. This building is like a dream come true. But my girlfriend has been taking a shower for 45 minutes.”

“I’m not in the shower,” my girlfriend called through the door. “I’m just running the water.”

“You see what’s happening?” I said to Peter. “We can’t live like this. We’re going to go insane.”

“Can you stay in a hotel?” Peter asked.

“Every night???”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “You’re right. Listen, I think we can fix this.”

He walked into the living room and stood in the center, under the light fixture. His back was to me. He pulled out what looked like beads. They were made of wood and stained brown. He held them with both hands, stroking the beads. His eyes were closed and he was mumbling something I couldn’t understand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He appeared to be in some kind of trance. I walked around him and bent down so I could see his face. “What are you doing?” I said, more loudly.

He snapped out of his trance. “Huh? What? Nothing! Nothing!” he said. I could see now that the beads had spiral markings on them, like those mazes designed to trap evil spirits. He crammed the string back in his pocket.”Just something my mother-in-law told me to try,” he said.

My girlfriend emerged from the bathroom. “This place is cursed!” I said. “The Greek admitted it!”

My girlfriend made a face. I don’t know if she was disgusted with me, or him, or the situation. Most likely all three. I felt like something was slipping out of my grasp.

She looked at him for confirmation.

“Please. Don’t say that so loud,” he said.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

5

It’s still embarrassing to reflect on the moment when we discovered the source of the sound. It was not a curse, of course. Not a ghost. Not demons. Not Satan’s whistle.

No, it was a digital alarm clock that I had bought for five dollars to make sure we weren’t late for class. The battery had leaked, making the thing go haywire.

After we discovered the clock, all the pieces of the story fell in place. It had been in the pocket of a backpack, which had been sitting on top of the microwave when we first moved in, underneath the window, falling directly in the sunlight, heating it to the point where the clock started to melt. I had slung the backpack over my shoulder when carrying the microwave to the new place, confusing the source of the sound as I walked. The backpack had been sitting in the floor, next to the electrical outlet that seemed to be the most charged. The center of the room and the light fixture must have sounded loud due to the acoustics of the room.

Acoustics. A leaky battery and a cheap plastic clock. Not electromagnetic forces with reversed polarity, haunting the walls like demons. And not demons, haunting the walls like electromagnetic forces with reversed polarity. Science. Rationality. Logic.

After we unpacked the backpack and discovered the clock, I marched downstairs and flung it into the dumpster. I overshot the mark and the clock went sailing down the ravine. The sound went with it, in a pathetic dying way.

Eeeerrrrnnn…

And then, finally, it was gone. It would not be missed.

By the time I made it back to our apartment my girlfriend was restored to her best self, the sweet and lighthearted person I had fallen in love with. “Look at the woodwork,” she said. “It’s so beautiful. And look!”

She showed me a feature we had not seen before. A small closet in the kitchen we had not noticed before. It had been designed to hold an ironing board, but it had been converted to a spice rack.

“See? Isn’t that cute?”

“Adorable,” I said. The door had opened with a slight squeak. It was all I could do not to attack it with a can of oil.

Part of me wondered whether she and I could last after such a shared humiliation. But we did; couples go through things like this. If you can’t be crazy with each other, you’ll never last.  Crisis builds character; she and I were closer than ever.

But where she and I could put this in our past, Peter and I never quite could.

We never mentioned it again, not even as a joke. But something was there, unspoken, every time our eyes met.

We could forget the sound, but the sound had taken us somewhere else, to a world ruled by darkness and panic and maybe even evil. A place we both had within us, a place we didn’t want others to know about.

I don’t know exactly where it was. But once we’d seen it we could never not see it again.

***********

Oh boy. Another wild one. Not all the 100 Objects are filled with such madness. (They’re all at the main page, by the way.) The drift into supernatural also occurs in The Sweater, The Spitwad, and The Sign. (And maybe the Monopoly Game Piece as well.) And of course, my book The Promotion (paperback for about five bucks, e-book for about three) might as well be the fruits of a seance trying to to rouse Edgar Allan Poe… More about arrivals in The Motorcycle (Taiwan). And reasonable dad makes his appearance in The Keyboard and The Speed Trap and even The Blood Cake. All this bloggy goodness, just for you, readers! As free as I can make it! Oh, except for The Race, my other book, which will also require you to part with your hard-earned cash. Unless you’re a reviewer, or tell me you are, in which case I’ll send you a copy for free. Just leave a comment or shoot me an email. Onward and upward, people!

Image credit: hotpads.com

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #21: The Speed Trap

[image error]

Some advance warning: I’m going to stop this story and start over because it’s the only way I can figure out how to tell it.

So it’s 1980, morning in America, and I’m riding in a car with my grandfather. We are on the way home from the golf course. It’s sunny and we’re in Wisconsin and the car is, I believe, a  1974 Gran Torino. Anyway I’m sure it’s a Ford, because my grandfather bought all his cars from Barney at the Ford Garage, which was just up the road from his house in the small Wisconsin town where he lived.

As we reach the crest of the hill, we see a police car stopped by the side of the highway. He has caught a speeder. Another car—a Ford, no doubt—sits in front of the squad car. The officer of the law is walking toward the driver.

I know what my grandfather is going to say. In fact, I’m about to blurt it out. But I don’t.

*

Here’s where I have to interrupt myself. Because I was wrong about what my grandfather would say, and it matters, but first you need to know what I thought and why.

A few hours before this trip I had been taken over the exact same hill by my father, who was dropping my sister and me off at the course, where we would spend the afternoon with my grandfather. And as it happened we had also seen the squad car parked behind a speeder. This was a speed trap: the officer sat there all day, catching cars who came down the steep hill and let their cars race past fifty-five miles an hour into the sixties and seventies, which was when the red revolving lights came on.

A speed trap. Speeder caught. And we drove by.

“That’s what you get!” my father said, shaking his head at the other man’s folly.

It was so him to say that, and to say it in his grim but essentially happy voice. It was the voice of a teacher—which of course he was—disappointed in the student who had turned in work that was copied from someone else. For him, it was simple. Actions had consequences. You speed, you break the law, you pay. His worldview in a nutshell.

“That’s what you get!” Knowing shake of the head. Soft chuckle.

He may have been voicing this in order to teach me and my sister a lesson about the world, how to separate right from wrong, and how life is easier when you are honest and don’t do things like break the law. It was less a moral judgment than practical advice. Risk might be tempting, risk might be more fun, but you pay the price.

It’s like this in all areas of life. Lying, for example, catches up to you eventually, either because others don’t trust you, or because you have to remember what you said and who you said it to and whether anyone has figured it out, and before long you’re spending all your time worried and under unnecessary stress. And breaking the law, even in a minor way like speeding, leads to fines or increased insurance premiums or being late for where you’re headed or losing your license or spending a night in jail or any number of bad consequences.

He may have been instructing us. But I suspect he’d have said the same thing if he were alone in the car. “That’s what you get!” It was his genuine reaction. Don’t make life hard for yourself. As I said, it was not a moral judgment, but in the end it amounted to the same thing, I suppose.

After we saw the speeder, he dropped us off for a round of golf with my grandfather and his friend Tony. The contrasts between my grandfather and my father were just becoming clear to me.

They were both teaching me how to play golf, using completely different methods. My father gave me a few instructions when I was first starting out. After that, he would just watch me play. I would hit shot after shot after shot, slicing, hooking, scruffing the ball along the ground. I’d be all over the place, knowing that my swing was a wreck, and he would patiently watch. He gave NO unsolicited advice.

Finally, exasperated—he was a golf coach, after all—I would turn to him. “Why am I slicing so much!”

“Your grip might be rotated a little too far to the left,” he would say, as if that were something he had noticed hours ago (which he probably had). “Try shifting your hands back to the right.”

And I would do that, and it would work. And I would be thankful and appreciative and relaxed and suddenly in possession of the ability to hit the ball straight, at least for a little while. Not too much tinkering. Not too much advice. And—more important—the father-son relationship was still strong. I didn’t feel like I had disappointed him or that he had been overly intrusive in my development. He was there, a gentle guide, not an oppressive coach demanding I improve or suggesting that I had failed him in some way. This was just golf. People had all different levels of skill. We should enjoy our time out here together.

My grandfather would watch one slice and chuckle. “Ooooh, good luck finding THAT ONE in those trees!” he would say. But he was only amused once: a slice on the next hole, into the trees again, would make him hop up and down with anger. “Jee-zus, kid! If you hit it like that every time, AIM LEFT!”

Then he would grumble to himself, shaking his head, confused by someone’s inability to learn from their mistakes. Why would you want to play sports at all, if you couldn’t be bothered to correct your flaws? Did you want to spend your whole life digging the ball out of trees? That wasn’t how to win. That was barely even how to play. Didn’t you care?

And I’d be a little frightened, but I’d also be inspired to get better in order to keep up. And until I could straighten out the slice, I’d aim to the left, and wind up in the fairway. It was not as good as hitting it straight, as my father did (EVERY SINGLE TIME), but my grandfather wouldn’t see it that way. For him, it didn’t matter how you got there. You just had to get where you wanted to go—which in the world of golf meant you needed to get the ball in the hole in par, with now and then a chance for a birdie.

Next to my grandfather’s house was an alley. My father never drove through it: why would you, when there was a road nearby? Sure, the road took a little longer, but the alley was kind of like cheating. It wasn’t the right way. And sometimes, when someone had left their trash cans out behind their house, you had to stop to drag them to the side, and the route would take longer. You thought you’d save a minute or two, but you paid the price. Thought you found a shortcut? Well, that’s what you get.

My father NEVER took the alley. Not once.

My grandfather took the alley every time.

“Grampa!” I cried the first time I barreled through with him, the gravel crunching under the car wheels, dust flying everywhere, the neighbor’s chickens squawking at the roar of our engine. “Is this legal?”

“Hah?” The question surprised him. “It’s a shortcut.”

Which did not answer my question, at least not directly. It was a shortcut. Why ask any more questions?

The two of them, these men who raised me, had a fascinating relationship. In many ways they were alike. They had the same profession and many of the same hobbies and passions. But they were both very strong in their own way. Their differences, I came to learn, were instructive.

My father never went fishing, which was unusual enough in Wisconsin, and even more so because it was my grandfather’s other great passion (besides golf). It was not until I was older that I heard the story: apparently, my grandfather had taken my father fishing when he was five years old. Something or other went wrong, and my grandfather yelled at him.

“I don’t need to do this,” my father had replied. And he never went fishing again.

Stubborn? Yes. They both were, in their own way.

One was intense and fuming and desperate to endure the harshest that life had to offer. The other was mild and gentle and just as determined and unyielding.

One was like a rigid tree, battling the wind: proud, fierce, determined not to break, enjoying the struggle as a kind of test.

The other met the wind by swaying, willing to bend until the wind finally subsided. A different path to victory, certainly. And maybe a different victory as well.

In the car, on those trips in 1980, I didn’t really know this the way I do now. Then I was just a kid with his dad, and then his grampa, first eager to drive the golf cart and later looking forward to some powdered-sugar donuts back at the house.

But even at that age I was starting to sense a difference. Grampa did things I could not imagine my father doing. He played cards for money. He drank a little “hooch.” When we went to the Casino, the local restaurant known for its Friday night fish fry, he and my grandmother hung out in a lounge with blue lights, a well bar, and carpeting on the walls. We would venture in there sometimes to tell him our table was ready. His friends, who were a little faster than my father’s, would greet us with a cheer. Sometimes we got to sit in there with them, drinking kiddie cocktails. It all felt very swanky.

It was around this time I heard a story from my aunt, about how she had been five years old and an older boy, a bully, had knocked her down on the skating rink and sent her home crying. And Grampa stormed over to the boy’s house to talk to the boy’s father, and she was so scared she hid under the kitchen table.

I have no doubt that my father, had this happened to my sister in 1974, would have resolved this dispute effectively using peaceful means and with the same smile he had worn throughout the Fifties. My grandfather, in 1949, raised in a hardscrabble immigrant’s house during the Depression, wound up tackling a man a foot taller than him and thumping his head on the sidewalk.

What can I say? Justice was rougher in 1949.

Grampa was never proud of this story. He didn’t defend his actions.

Nor did he apologize. He just grumbled, still bitter, about how that guy had argued with him, refused to accept blame, wouldn’t back down…

The rest of us laughed, but my grandfather didn’t. He couldn’t. So he just shook his head, muttering to himself that the guy “had it coming.”

Even so, I thought I knew what my grandfather would say when we saw the speeder. He was a teacher too, and moral, and lived according to rules. He taught me and my sister many things about how to live an honest and decent life. And of course, there was the example of sports, where he was a stickler—much tougher about it than my father.

If someone cheated a little, let’s say they kicked a ball a few inches out of the rough to give themselves a more favorable lie, my father would shrug. You could read in his shrug the attitude he silently bore:

I saw that. It’s not how I would do it, but your conduct is up to you. If that’s how you want to play, fine. You won’t have my respect; maybe that’s not important to you anyway. So go ahead, make your next shot easier, have fun, live your life that way if you want. I’ll just be over here, playing by the rules, and if in the end I lose, I don’t care. We’ll both know why, and I’ll at least be honest with myself about it, and that’s enough for me.

If my grandfather saw someone kicking the ball out of the rough he wouldn’t be able to contain himself.

What the heck are you doing? This isn’t any fun if you CHEAT! How will we have any FUN? How will we ever know who WINS? Why should we even play?

Only he wouldn’t think this quietly to himself. It would burst out of him, as incredulous as it was angry.

Once I heard him shout at a fellow player, who had played a ball from out of bounds, “Well, nuts to you, you can either count the penalty  strokes or not, but I’m counting it on my scorecard, and that’s the one we’ll be using from here on out!”

Given this example, and my limited understanding of grownups, I had every reason to expect that he too would use the sight of a speeder, apprehended by an officer of the law, as a teaching moment. That’s what you get. Nuts to you, speeder.

What I had not yet come to understand is that life was not the same as sports.  The goals in life were more complicated, and that meant that the rules were not as clear.

*

We are approaching the hill with the speed trap. Another driver sits stuck in his car, waiting for the cop to write him up.

And I think I know what my grandfather will say because my father has just said it: “That’s what you get!”

In fact, I’m about to say it myself. “I guess that’s what you get, huh Grampa?” I’m about to say that very sentence, to show that I know the right response. Wise beyond my years, he will think. Kid knows how the world works. Kid knows right from wrong.

But something stops me. Maybe it’s the expression on my grandfather’s face. A firmness to the jaw. A narrowing of the eyes. A surprising look of empathy.

“Poor devil,” he mutters.

*

It was the same road, but I learned to see it in two different ways. There was the highway, plain and efficient, where my father rode 100% of the time. And so did my grandfather—almost always.

But where my father’s eyes stayed on the road ahead, my grandfather’s always darted around. Checking the conditions, checking the side roads. Looking for an angle. Maybe a little turnoff. A little gap in the hedges.

A little risk. A little excitement. A little freedom, you might say.

Those were my two models, both present on that day. I learned from my father the importance and efficiency of staying on the highway. It was great advice, to be sure.

But I also learned from my grandfather that sometimes you need to look for the shortcut. Why?

Because sometimes you need to take it. That’s the most obvious reason.

And sometimes—and this is something I only learned after many years—you just need to know it’s there.

*

O for a muse of fire…or at least public golf courses and drinks in tall glasses (Old Fashioneds!) and the big backyard with a garden full of asparagus and a burn barrel to take care of most trash (except no burning on Sundays, by town ordinance). And the M&M, the greasy spoon restaurant down below the street where fries came in a cardboard tray and burgers were served piping hot on a sheet of wax paper. And the green swimming pool and “Jimtown,” the dark and frightening stretch of farms we drove through at night on our way home, the spooky silos and farm equipment hulking above us, and wild packs of dogs barking at our station wagon like demon hounds.

I could write about this stuff all day! But who would read it? My sister, maybe. So I turn to more universal topics, like the other 100 Objects, all available for free here on the website. And my cheap little books The Race and The Promotion, which both have Wisconsin stretches at their core (but do not wallow in nostalgia, oh no, these are books for and about grownups). Let’s see…the sister makes a grand appearance in #2 – The Spy Drop, another story about life in the small town all those years ago. More father figures in #16 – The Laundry and, I suppose, in #1 – The Padlock and #10 – The Spitwad. Or how about taking a break from Jacke’s fiction and reading about a great poem by Auden, who it turns out was an extremely nice guy? Onward and upward, people…onward and upward…

Image credit: texasescapes.com

Today’s Comment of the Week: The Hateful Reader!

Today’s Comment of the Week comes from Wonderful Reader G.Z.K., who writes:

Love misrepresented advice. This is brilliant. Your style of writing is immensely appealing. If I wasn’t such a sore loser I would adore this, but unfortunately I’m just jealous and I’m forced to hate you.

And I welcome your hatred!

Seriously, this is a very nice comment and made me laugh out loud.  And it made me think of something I’d never considered before: what’s the opposite of a back-handed compliment? A back-handed insult? A front-handed insult? What does that even mean?

I should check with my roommate’s OED, I suppose. Or think through the overthinking of clichés.

My thanks to Wonderful Reader G.Z.K., who joins the Student Headed to Bologna, the Misunderstood Traveler from Mexico, and The Compulsive Family of Readers in being designated a Today’s Comment of the Week. And to all my other wonderful readers, whose comments and feedback have been encouraging and inspiring.

Oh, and feel free to check out the original post that inspired the comment at Object #5 – The Motorcycle. All the object stories are listed on the 100 Objects page.

And now: onward and upward with a trailer for what is almost certainly the craziest and best movie of the year:

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #20: The Sign

[image error]

I was in my twenties and working yet another dead end job. You know how it is. Overworked. Overtired. Undervalued.

I simply could not believe that this was all there was to life. And then what? Death. Oblivion. So it was this and then that. Wow.

Or was there a Heaven to look forward to? Who knew? And what good was Heaven if we couldn’t count on it?

I decided it was time to demand a little more from the Deity.

I had not prayed since childhood. But that day, during my lunch break, I formulated what seemed like a reasonable request:

God, You have given me many trials and tribulations. I can make it through these. But I need to know that You exist. I just need to know.

I was surprised by the immediate response. Words resounded through my body like thunder.

YOU DON’T GET TO KNOW.

Startled, I looked up at the sky, which admittedly was blocked by the ceiling of a Blimpie’s. “Okay,” I said, chastened. “I don’t need to know everything. But it would help if I had something. Please send a sign. Just one little sign. Something to suggest that there’s a God. A God who loves and is good.”

DON’T SET TESTS.

“Tests for whom?” I said slyly. “Tests for You? For you, God…?”

DON’T GET CUTE.

I tried some more, but that was it. No more conversations with thunder. Had I imagined it? What other explanation was there?

I finished my sandwich and went back to my cubicle. Like most of my fellow workers I had set up an elaborate structure of boxes and blankets to make it seem a little more like an office. Now it was basically a cross between a tent, a cave, and hell. I spent the afternoon in this darkness dragging files into folders and thinking about Yahweh.

Arguably it had been be a little odd to ask God for anything like a sign. The universe itself was something, no? And life? Wasn’t life itself a miracle? Couldn’t that have been the sign of his omnipotence? And his goodness?

If God existed as commonly described, it followed that everything around me was a sign of His creative powers—and now He was supposed to create some additional sign? Like throw a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk, just for me? Or send a stranger my way with – oh, I don’t know, an unexpected job offer?

To put it another way: let’s say God had created the universe, including the laws of physics and probability, and intended that to be a sign to EVERYONE. Now He was supposed to violate those very laws as a sign to ME?

No, I had no right to expect something that illogical. But was Heaven logical? Not really. Maybe that was the point! Maybe God had erred in making the universe so logical, so tightly bound, so unstintingly rational, so governed by unassailable laws, such that a person with a brain could find it impossible to believe that anything outside the universe existed. Maybe I needed more mystery. More miracles. Maybe I needed water to run uphill once in a while, or for lead to turn into gold before my eyes. Maybe that would make it easier to believe that anything—even heaven!—could be true. And that I could depend on my senses, which had told me that there were exceptions, and not just my feelings, which were mere hopes that that might be the case.

Wow. It seemed that my personal vanity knew no bounds. In one afternoon I had gone from doubting God’s existence because of the world’s imperfections to believing that His commitment to perfection had made it impossible to believe, and that therefore it was now incumbent upon Him to prove himself to me. To me! Jacke Wilson! It was absurd.

It was as if Picasso had painted himself into a corner. And I, with no painting skills whatsoever, were there to point fingers and laugh.

#

When the afternoon finally ended I left the office, exhausted from yet another agonizing day, relieved to be finished but already dreading the hours I would spend alone at home, which if anything was worse than my job.

My drive took me around a lake. I could see my neighborhood across the water. I was living in the Pacific Northwest at the time, and the views were extraordinary.

And on that day, the very day I had challenged the Supreme Being, I saw through my windshield a great rainbow arcing across the lake and appearing to terminate on the other side, where I was headed.

Hah… a rainbow! A traditional sign! His preferred means of communication. What was next, tablets? A burning bush?

I turned down the radio and chuckled to myself. Ask for a sign, see a rainbow. Well, maybe there was something to it. Maybe I needed to stop complaining all the time. We got what we got. Maybe that was enough.

These extraordinary views, for example. Weren’t THOSE signs that life was good? Shouldn’t THOSE have been enough? And I got to look at those twice each day for fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on traffic and the lights.

I was in a better frame of mind now. This rainbow was spectacular, brighter and more vivid than other rainbows I’d seen. It looked more like a painting than a misty mirage. And as I curved around the lake, I began driving straight toward it. In fact it looked like as it were ending right in my neighborhood. Like a child I imagined I would be able to see the point where it touched the ground. What would THAT be like? Ha ha, maybe a pot of gold.

Ha ha.

Wait a second…

A sign! I had asked for a sign! A pot of gold would certainly qualify!

But that was superstition. In my heart I knew the truth. The rainbow itself was the sign. The promise. The covenant. Noah. Et cetera.

It almost felt insulting. A rainbow? I was supposed to see a rainbow as a sign? Oh, how quaint. As if I were some old shepherd, one step removed from worshiping the sun or believing in gods who lived on a mountaintop – some prehistoric simpleton who could be mollified by primitive explanations. A rainbow is a message. Oh sure. And the stars are pinpricks in the floor of Heaven. And the sun and the moon chase each other around the earth in fiery chariots…

In some ways it would be nice if I thought that way. Because I, trapped in modern thinking, was already starting to rationalize. Well, it rains a lot here, light gets refracted…perfectly logical and scientific explanation…

Fine. I could spoil things with science.

But even so…a rainbow that appeared to end in my neighborhood? This bright? On this day, the first day I had prayed in twenty years?

I was warming to the idea that this was too special, the coincidence too extraordinary to be mere science alone!

And as I got closer, the rainbow got bigger. This was getting crazy. Reality was transforming. And I had not been mistaken: the thing was coming down in my neighborhood…

I exited the highway with a pounding heart. The rainbow, thick and dazzling, dominated the heavens.

And as I approached my home, driving through the familiar side streets, the improbability grew even stronger. The rainbow was nearly vertical, arcing down directly in front of my windshield. And yes, it was ending in my neighborhood, of that there could be no question…and in fact in my subdivision…on my street…

I turned the corner and gasped. I could see the rainbow’s end. And it ended at my house.

My eyes watered. The sign! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank You…

My hands were trembling; I could barely drive. What would be at my house? A pot of gold? But no, that was greed again. Come on, Jacke! That was too much to ask. It would just be this, the knowledge that prayers could be answered heaven existed. That was enough, oh, that was enough!

But—who was I kidding?—I also wanted a pot of gold. Something metaphoric if not literal. I wanted a change. I felt changed. If God had chosen to reveal himself to me—to me, Jacke Wilson, poor sucker—surely he did not want me to drag files into folders for the rest of my life! My chest swelled with energy and pride.

What did any of this mean? Did it matter? It meant good things! It had to mean good things!

As I eased the car closer, my heart racing with anticipation, I noticed something odd. Water was running down the street, along the curb. But this water was full of colors. Was this what a rainbow looked like at ground level? Was the light still refracting, down here? Was it an optical illusion?

I reached my house. The colors – there’s no other way to describe it – flowed down my driveway. It was like water coming out of a hydrant except it wasn’t water. It was lighter somehow, more full of air. And red and orange and yellow and all the rest.

This was from the rainbow? I parked my car in the street and ran toward my house.

I was halfway up the drive when my front door burst open. A tidal wave of colors crashed on the front step and spilled across the lawn, submerging it in a deep, swirling pool. The colors continued to pour out of my house, like a river charging over its banks. It came up to my knees. A chair bobbed past. As I stood there, helpless, I saw my kitchen table and all my other things, drifting away, down the driveway, into the street, toward the end of the block.

Now I could see what had happened. The rainbow had blasted a hole through my roof. Colors poured down from the sky, coming down hard like some thick laser beam. It filled my house with a raging sea of colors, until my doors and windows finally burst from the pressure.

I fought my way up the sidewalk and into the front door. The colors were something between air and water, heavier than mist or a cloud, but not by much. They swirled around, each color full of its own energy, curling up and around one another like airy serpents before joining a busy pool that rushed through the room, lifting objects and carrying them out on a surging tide.

“No, stop!” I cried. “I—what do you want? I get it, I get it!”

But of course I didn’t get it at all. Was the voice angry? Resentful that I had asked for too much? That I had expressed doubts?

I waited. The voice was silent. The silence itself seemed to be communicating something, but I could not tell if it was sullenness or amusement. My memory of my lunchtime conversation (“DON’T SET TESTS”) resounded in my ears.

The colors continued to pour down on me and my house like an enormous spigot on full blast. My feet lifted off the ground; I had to swim into the kitchen, directly under the hole.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I cried. But it didn’t stop. The sea of colors reached the top of the room. I thought I might drown. I bobbed upward, battling toward the ceiling, expecting to go under at any time. My hair was plastered to the sides of my head; whether this was from sweat or the mist and steam of the colors I did not know.

With six inches to go the spigot suddenly shut off, like a miracle (or perhaps the ending of one). As the colors ebbed out of my house I descended to the floor, flailing my arms and gasping for air, wondering if I was trapped in some awful dream, wondering if it was truly over.

#

The next morning I called my insurance company and explained what had happened. The representative made an exasperated gargling sound and hung up on me in mid-sentence. This, from a company famous for its customer service!

Angrily I called back. “Don’t hang up on me please,” I said. “I’m a paying customer. I’ve never bothered you before, except for the time when that guy on the bicycle ran into my car… And I chose you because of your customer service.”

This time the woman heard me out. “Well, that’s a new one,” she said after I’d finished. “A, uh, rainbow attacked your house. Listen, was there any damage?”

Damage? It was complete devastation! “There’s a hole in the roof about eighteen inches wide,” I said, peering up at the circle of sky I could see from my kitchen. “The windows are blown out and the front door is off its hinges. The walls and carpet are gray, and everything I own is in the sewer.”

“Gray?”

“Yeah, gray. The colors from the rainbow leeched the color out of everything they touched. It makes more sense when you see it happen. In fact,” I reflected, “it would probably seem odd if that hadn’t happened.”

“Mmm. Why did you put your things in the sewer?”

I understood that my story was unusual—completely unprecedented, no doubt—but I could not believe I had to explain this. “I didn’t put them there,” I said. “The colors took them there.”

“Couldn’t you have grabbed them? As they, um, floated past you? On their way to the sewer?”

“Of course not!”

“Why not?” She was speaking very slowly. “Would it…have made…the colors…angry?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I said. “It was all I could do to keep my head above the surface! I was fighting for my life!”

There was a long pause. Finally I asked if she planned to send someone over that day.

“I…we might need to do that. You’ll be there? By yourself?”

“Well, I’m not going to work!”

“That’s probably wise,” she said, as if to herself.

She asked me if I would stay on hold for a minute. She asked this several times, then overexplained what it meant to be on hold, promising again and again that she would be right back and I shouldn’t hang up, until it began to seem as if she were either tracing the call or concerned for my personal safety. How could I blame her? I would have thought I was crazy too, or tripping on something or other, had I not been sitting in an empty kitchen, on a bleached-out carpet, with birds dive-bombing me through a rainbow-sized hole in the roof.

Was a demon imp deceiving me? Possibly! But it all seemed very real. It was more than a feeling. These were my senses I was relying on here.

She came back on the line. “Thank you for holding. It turns out that this is a fairly easy one,” she said.

“You think I’m crazy?”

“I don’t have to go that far,” she said. “Your policy doesn’t cover Acts of God.”

I felt a surge of excitement. “Oh wow,” I said. “Is that what it was? That’s your official position?”

“What else could it have been?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I hung up the phone and went outside. The grass was gray. Even my car was gone. Carried off. Probably in the lake by now. I had no possessions and would not be reimbursed.

But how could I complain? I had my sign and had my god.

#

Getting stranger! It’s hard to know where these come from sometimes. Real-life experience? Perhaps. And before you blame me for blasphemy, just ask who has a better deal? Jacke, who has his god? Or God, who’s stuck with Jacke Wilson? I think that answers itself! You can read more about the objects that have led up to this one by visiting the 100 Objects page. More about faith and belief in #18 – The Monopoly Game Piece. More about dead-end jobs in #3 – The Blood Cake.  Oh, and another sign from the sky in #9 – The Spitwad (don’t miss that one!)  And of course, you can run through a chase of a different sort in The Race (trailing behind a doomed politician recovering from a sex scandal) or The Promotion (insane lawyer chases down an obsession). Free copies available for all my reviewers—just drop me an email or leave me a comment, and I’ll ship one out. Or you can skip this kind of thing and read about Camus in Love or Charlotte Brontë Not in Love. Onward and upward, people! (And no, I won’t be embedding the Double Rainbow video…some memes are just too painful…)

Image Credit: actionforspace.com

Battling the Napoleon of Spam

As an independent author, I have to deal with a lot of unexpected tasks. Like designing a book cover. Or marketing. And of course, maintaining this blog, which arose as a way for me to connect with my readers. (Which has been awesome. Thank you, readers!)

One of the quirks of hosting a blog are the thousands and thousands of spam comments that come in as comments. WordPress filters out 99.9 percent of those before they ever reach me [statistic unofficial]. But a few get through. And once in a while, one tricks me and I approve it. It’s a minor nuisance and I feel cheated. More spam follows, attacking the same post, as if I’ve swung open the gates and let in the giant wooden horse. What was I thinking? How did I miss this!

So that was my world for several months. And then came something I never expected. The mother of all spam comments. The one that let me see the underbelly of the great spamming beast.

Something must have gone haywire on their end.  They sent me ALL of their spam messages, in ONE comment.

Fascinating! I feel like a general coming into possession of the other side’s war plans. Now, in the safety of my tent, surrounded by my sleeping army, I can quietly assess the strength of my opponent. What are his strengths? What are his flaws? How close did I come to losing control of my blog by falling for his subterfuge?

Imagine a great general – a Kutuzov, say – had he been given all of Napoleon’s battle plans IN ADVANCE. Imagine the thrill! The fascination, the appreciation for genius, the frisson of narrowly avoided disaster that he might feel. Those were my emotions as I undertook my task.

And this battleground? Words. Language. The very landscape that I, as a writer, have declared as my area of expertise.

Enemy, I’m ready. Let’s begin.

I have been surfing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be a lot more useful than ever before.

The stilted English is definitely a tell. And “the web” will be “useful”? From my stories? Not likely! Mark as spam!

I couldn’t refrain from commenting. Perfectly written!

Ack. This one appeals to my vanity. Love the idea that I wrote something perfectly. And that a reader could not refrain. Fooled!

I will right away take hold of your rss as I can’t to find your email subscription hyperlink or newsletter service. Do you have any? Kindly allow me recognize in order that I may just subscribe. Thanks.

What? Go ahead and “take hold “of the rss, whatever that means. I won’t be allowing you recognize. Or approving your comment. Mark as spam!

It is appropriate time to make some plans for the future and it is time to be happy. I have read this post and if I could I desire to suggest you few interesting things or advice. Maybe you can write next articles referring to this article. I wish to read more things about it!

The first sentence might have exploited my general practice of rewarding optimism. Who am I to rip up the fortune and crumble the cookie? But the next three sentences seal the deal. Write next articles referring to this article? What kind of robo-blogger does that? Mark as spam!

It is the best time to make some plans for the future and it is time to be happy. I have read this publish and if I could I want to counsel you few fascinating things or advice. Perhaps you can write next articles relating to this article. I desire to read even more things about it!

Again with the “write next articles relating to this article”? Who needs that “advice”? And “counsel you few fascinating this or advice”? That’s worse than before! Next time, set the language on the online translator to “English” and not “Spam English”!

I’ve been surfing on-line more than three hours these days, yet I never discovered any attention-grabbing article like yours. It is beautiful worth enough for me. Personally, if all webmasters and bloggers made excellent content as you probably did, the web shall be much more useful than ever before.

I’m sensing some patterns here. Now I can appreciate the variations. “It is beautiful worth enough for me”? What punctuation goes between “beautiful” and “worth” in that sentence? A colon? A hyphen? An em dash? A comma? The meaning would change, but the result would remain the same. I also like this: “Personally, if all webmasters and bloggers made excellent content as you probably did.” Personally?  Probably? Mark as spam!

Ahaa, its good conversation regarding this post here at this weblog, I have read all that, so at this time me also commenting here.

Ahaa! Me also marking as spam!

I am sure this post has touched all the internet people, its really really fastidious piece of writing on building up new web site.

You are correct: all the internet people have been touched! What can I say? It’s not easy hosting a billion-hit website. Of course, it helps that my writing is really really fastidious. Too bad it’s not about building up new web site. Mark as spam!

Wow, this paragraph is fastidious, my younger sister is analyzing such things,

therefore I am going to let know her.

And I will as spam mark.

bookmarked!!, I really like your site!

Close one. Notice, enemy, that the shorter your post, the better your chances. This would slip through. Again, it appeals to my vanity (you…like my site? aw shucks… really…?). I would notice the exclamation marks followed by the comma, which would raise my eyebrows. But then I would feel guilty for being a snob and would let it through. Very psychologically devious, enemy! You’re back on your game!

Way cool! Some extremely valid points! I appreciate you writing this write-up plus the rest of the website is very good.

Nobody ever appreciate the fact that I write my write-ups. Mark as spam.

Hi, I do think this is an excellent site. I stumbledupon it ;) I am going to come back yet again since I saved as a favorite it.

The wink is very appealing, but the rest of the comment falls apart. I would mark as a spam it.

Money and freedom is the best way to change, may you be rich and continue to help other people.

I like this one! It sounds so hopeful and helpful. But…it makes no sense! Money and freedom is best way to change? Those things help you change? Those are the goals you should have? Too much thinking. Mark as spam!

Woah! I’m really digging the template/theme of this site. It’s simple, yet effective. A lot of times it’s challenging to get that “perfect balance” between superb usability and visual appeal.

Here’s another pattern I learned to recognize: discussions of the website’s technology or form. But this blog is just a wordpress template; the appeal to my vanity is therefore low (and my spam detection ability is high). Mark as spam!

I must say that you’ve done a great job with this. In addition, the blog loads super quick for me on Chrome. Exceptional Blog!

Thank you. But the pattern continues. I’m onto you now! Mark as spam!

These are really impressive ideas in about blogging. You have touched some nice factors here. Any way keep up wrinting.

That’s my goal: touch some nice factors in setting forth really impressive ideas in about blogging. And rest assured, spammer, I couldn’t stop wrinting if my linfe depended on it. Mark as spam!

I love what you guys are up too. This type of clever work and reporting! Keep up the excellent works guys I’ve added you guys to blogroll.

Guys? One guy here, up too something other than what you describe. No reporting. Very little cleverness. Mark as spam!

Hi! Someone in my Myspace group shared this site with us so I came to give it a look. I’m definitely loving the information. I’m bookmarking and will be tweeting this to my followers! Great blog and wonderful design and style.

Huh? Myspace still exists? But I doubt my readers are “loving the information.” (Next time try something like “the gloom resonates with me.”) Mark as spam!

I enjoy what you guys are usually up too. This type of clever work and reporting!

Here’s another thing the “guys” here are usually up too: marking as spam!

Keep up the terrific works guys I’ve added you guys to my personal blogroll.

Thanks for adding the guys to your blogroll. Mark as spam.

Hi there would you mind stating which blog platform you’re working with? I’m going to start my own blog soon but I’m having a difficult time deciding between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal. The reason I ask is because your layout seems different then most blogs and I’m looking for something unique. P.S Apologies for being off-topic but I had to ask!

I want to help fellow bloggers. But different layout? Not really. Mark as spam.

Hi there would you mind letting me know which web host you’re utilizing? I’ve loaded your blog in 3 different web browsers and I must say this blog loads a lot faster then most. Can you suggest a good web hosting provider at a fair price? Thank you, I appreciate it!

Why would someone do that with my blog? Mark as spam.

I love it when people come together and share thoughts. Great site, continue the good work!

This would probably work. No major errors. I share thoughts. People coming together! Appeal to vanity plus clean English equals comment approved!

Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It in fact was a amusement account it. Look advanced to more added agreeable from you! By the way, how can we communicate?

Easy: you can write a comment that sounds like a short-circuited robot. And I will mark it as spam. That’s some advanced looking added agreeable communication!

Hi there just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The words in your article seem to be running off the screen in Chrome. I’m not sure if this is a format issue or something to do with internet browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you know. The design look great though! Hope you get the issue solved soon. Thanks

Thanks? For helping me? Hmmm. I probably would have approved this one, worried that otherwise I’d be kneecapping some Good Samaritan. Comment approved!

This is a topic that is near to my heart… Many thanks! Where are your contact details though?

Um…all over my blog? Mark as spam!

It’s very simple to find out any topic on web as compared to textbooks, as I found this article at this site.

My stories are really not the information you’d find in textbooks. And what is the point of this comment? Yes, you found an article on a website… are you sharing the thrill of doing so? Does anyone think the Internet is less simple to use than textbooks? Google is very, very simple! Mark as spam!

Does your website have a contact page? I’m having problems locating it but, I’d like to shoot you an e-mail. I’ve got some creative ideas for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great site and I look forward to seeing it develop over time.

Jeez, how lazy are you? It’s in the About Jacke page. Mark as spam!

Hey there! I’ve been following your website for a while now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Houston Texas! Just wanted to tell you keep up the good job!

Oh, I don’t want to lose shy readers from Texas… let me think about this…

Greetings from Ohio! I’m bored to death at work so I decided to browse your blog on my iphone during lunch break. I love the info you provide here and can’t wait to take a look when I get home. I’m shocked at how fast your blog loaded on my phone ..

I’m not even using WIFI, just 3G .. Anyhow, fantastic site!

Okay, that seals the deal. Mark as spam, Texas, and mark as spam, Ohio.

Its such as you read my mind! You appear to know so much approximately this, like you wrote the guide in it or something. I think that you can do with some p.c. to power the message home a little bit, but instead of that, that is wonderful blog. A fantastic read. I’ll certainly be back.

Okay, thanks for the compliment that I appear to know so much approximately this. (How backhanded can a compliment get?) Why would a guide read your mind? Why would my stories be like a guide? And why on earth would some p.c. (personal computing? political correctness?) power home a message? Mark as spam!

I visited various web sites except the audio quality for audio songs existing at this web page is in fact superb.

How does “except” work in that sentence? Does it mean “and after analyzing them all found that”? Wow. That’s a great new use of a preposition. Except I have no audio songs. Mark as spam!

Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam feedback? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any support is very much appreciated.

AHA! How clever is this? First, bombard me with spam. Then pose as a similarly beleaguered blogger. Well played, enemy! Comment approved!

Greetings! Very useful advice within this article! It’s the little changes which will  make the most significant changes. Thanks a lot for sharing!

Maybe this would have made it through if the article had had some advice. Provisional comment approved!

I absolutely love your blog.. Excellent colors & theme. Did you develop this website yourself? Please reply back as I’m wanting to create my very own site and want to know where you got this from or just what the theme is named. Many thanks!

Might have gotten me – I want to help bloggers. But my colors are black and white. Mark as spam!

Hello there! This blog post could not be written much better! Going through this article reminds me of my previous roommate! He continually kept talking about this. I am going to forward this post to him. Fairly certain he’s going to have a good read.

Fairly certain I will mark as spam.

Thanks for sharing!

Short and sweet. Ugh. Comment approved!

Incredible! This blog looks just like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Wonderful choice of colors!

I chose black. And I chose white. Actually I didn’t choose at all; those were the default colors. But I will choose this: Mark as spam.

There’s certainly a lot to find out about this subject. I love all of the points you’ve made. You’ve made some good points there. I checked on the internet for additional information about the issue and found most individuals will go along with your views on this site.

And I’ve found most individuals would agree to mark this as spam.

Hi, I read your new stuff like every week. Your story-telling style is awesome, keep it up!

Aw, thanks. Comment approved! (You devil.)

I just couldn’t leave your website prior to suggesting that I really loved the usual info an individual supply to your visitors? Is going to be back frequently in order to check up on new posts. I wanted to thank you for this very good read!! I certainly loved every bit of it. I have you book-marked to check out new stuff you post…

Thanks. And I is going to mark as spam. (Actually, the question mark here makes me laugh. That’s how I would read that crazy sentence too, no matter what punctuation was used.)

What’s up, just wanted to say, I enjoyed this article. It was practical.

You’re welcome, robot. Mark as spam!

Keep on posting!

Ugh. I’m such a pushover on these short ones. Comment approved!

I write a leave a response whenever I especially enjoy a article on a site or I have something to contribute to the discussion. Usually it is caused by the sincerness displayed in the post I browsed. And on this post What They Knew #16 | Jacke Wilson.

And when I see a computer generated comment like this one I mark a leave a spam.

I was moved enough to post a thought :-) I actually do have a few questions for you if you usually do not mind. Is it only me or do a few of these comments come across as if they are written by brain dead individuals? :-P And, if you are posting at additional sites, I’d like to follow you. Would you make a list the complete urls of your public sites like your twitter feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile?

The “hey isn’t spam terrible” gambit fails! What else do you want, my social security number? Greedy, greedy, greedy. Mark as spam!

Hi there, I enjoy reading through your article. I like to write a little comment to support you.

So…is that it…that’s the comment…? I’m waiting… (and marking as spam.)

I always spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s posts everyday along with a mug of coffee.

Coffee definitely recommended! But I don’t have daily posts. Mark as spam!

I constantly emailed this web site post page to all my contacts, since if like to read it after that my contacts will too.

Thank you for the comment. But if like to mark spam it.

My developer is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using Movable-type on a number of websites for about a year and am nervous about switching to another platform. I have heard good things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress posts into it? Any help would be really appreciated!

Too transparent. Mark as spam!

Howdy! I could have sworn I’ve been to this blog before but after going through some of the articles I realized it’s new to me. Nonetheless, I’m definitely delighted I stumbled upon it and I’ll be bookmarking it and checking back frequently!

Hmm… a little stilted, but I probably would have erred on the side of inclusiveness here. Comment approved!

Great work! This is the kind of info that should be shared across the web.

No info. It’s turtles all the way down. Mark as spam!

Disgrace on the search engines for not positioning this post upper! Come on over and discuss with my site . Thank you =)

Agree that it’s a disgrace that my post is not positioned upper. But your site will need to discuss with someone else. Mark as spam!

Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I find It truly useful & it helped me out a lot. I hope to give something back and aid others like you helped me.

Heya first timer! Too bad I don’t have a board. I’m for the first time marking this spam.

Howdy, There’s no doubt that your blog could be having browser compatibility problems. Whenever I take a look at your web site in Safari, it looks fine however when opening in I.E., it’s got some overlapping issues. I merely wanted to provide you with a quick heads up! Besides that, excellent site!

Howdy, spammer.

Somebody necessarily help to make critically posts I’d state. This is the very first time I frequented your web page and to this point? I amazed with the research you made to make this particular publish incredible. Fantastic process!

I amazed too. It’s not easy making a particular publish incredible like your comment. Mark as spam!

Heya i am for the primary time here. I came across this board and I in finding It truly helpful & it helped me out much. I am hoping to offer one thing again and help

others such as you aided me.

Heya primary timer, you sound a lot like the first timer we just had. I am truly marking this spam and it is being marked as spam.

Hello there! I simply would like to give you a huge thumbs up for the excellent information you have here on this post. I will be returning to your web site for more soon.

Hmmm. Not much “information” here but with the right post it might have fooled me. Comment provisionally approved!

I every time used to study paragraph in news papers but now as I am a user of net so from now I am using net for content, thanks to web.

Hey, not everyone speaks English as a first language. This one does not sound like a spambot might have gotten me in my early days. Not now. Mark as spam!

Your method of telling all in this paragraph is truly pleasant, every one be capable of simply understand it, Thanks a lot.

Another one. Might have approved this, thinking it was a fan. Comment approved!

Hello there, I found your site by way of Google whilst searching for a comparable matter, your web site got here up, it appears to be like good. I’ve bookmarked it in my google bookmarks. Hi there, just changed into alert to your weblog through Google, and located that it is truly informative. I am going to watch out for brussels. I’ll be grateful for those who proceed this in future. Many other people can be benefited out of your writing. Cheers!

How industrious! You’ll have plenty of time to watch out for brussels in my marked-as-spam folder.

I’m curious to find out what blog system you are working with? I’m having some minor security issues with my latest blog and I would like to find something more safeguarded. Do you have any recommendations?

Diabolical. But it’s so easy to find out this is wordpress! Mark as spam!

I’m really impressed with your writing skills and also with the layout on your blog. Is this a paid theme or did you modify it yourself? Anyway keep up the excellent quality writing, it is rare to see a great blog like this one today.

Too sycophantic. And the layout on my blog is too plain. Mark as spam!

I am really impressed with your writing talents as smartly as with the layout in your blog. Is this a paid subject matter or did you customize it yourself? Either way keep up the excellent high quality writing, it’s rare to peer a great blog like this one today..

“As smartly as”? You changed “and also with” to “as smartly as”? Didn’t I say the last one was too sycophantic already? Mark as spam!

Hello, Neat post. There is a problem with your website in internet explorer, could test this? IE nonetheless is the marketplace leader and a good portion of folks will miss your excellent writing due to this problem.

Hello, Neat comment. Yes, could test this. Prefer mark spam this instead.

I am not sure where you’re getting your info, but good topic. I needs to spend some time learning much more or understanding more. Thanks for magnificent information I was looking for this info for my mission.

For your mission??? From my stories??? What mission do you have – spend decades as a hack writer? Mark as spam!

Hi, i think that i saw you visited my blog so i came to “return the favor”.I am attempting to find things to enhance my web site!I suppose its ok to use {some of|a few\

And there we have it! The end of the carnage. The record needle scratches, the tape jumps the reel, the wheel falls off and rolls into the ditch. What was next, enemy? Some of|a few\EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN? What happened to your courage? Where was your nerve? Did you recognize how evil you were? Or did you just get tired? Or are you in fact a robot gone haywire, and your master finally realized what was happening and pulled the plug?

My thanks to all my actual readers, who leave actual comments. And to my enemy the spammer, whom I have captured and forced into exile on his island prison…where he no doubt sits planning his escape, even as we speak…

Image credit: Wikipedia commons

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #19: My Roommate’s Books

My roommate arrived before I did; I met his stuff before I met him.

Meeting his stuff first was fine with me, because the truth was that I was a little afraid of him. Wilfred Carter Boiteaux III. From New Orleans. Or maybe of New Orleans? I had not known anyone with a name like that before.

A month earlier we had spoken on the phone. I had expected Thurston Howell but he didn’t sound quite like that. He sounded like a decent guy who would make a good roommate. If anything he sounded as anxious and nervous as me.

And now, as I gazed at his stuff, I saw nothing to concern me. Nothing violent or bizarre; no gaudy signs of wealth. A suitcase, unopened, stood in his closet. A small black-and-white television sat on the corner of the desk, next to the folder of orientation materials we’d received in the mail. On the top of the folder was the yellow sheet with the room assignments, just like the one I had, only in the blank for roommate, his sheet would have my name instead of his own.

Jacke Wilson from Cadbridge, Wisconsin. Just how disappointed had he been to see that?

Well, what could I do about it now? Maybe I’d grow on him.

Then I looked up and noticed something else: his bookshelf. It was completely full.

In most respects our separate halves of the room mirrored one another: we each had the same desk, bed, dresser, and closet, in reverse. And a bookshelf that ran the length of the room.

I had brought only two books with me: a dictionary I had received as a graduation present, and a copy of King Lear, which I had purchased at the mall’s bookstore on one of my breaks from working at the shoe store. I don’t know why I bought it. I didn’t know what else to do. Shakespeare seemed college-worthy.

Suddenly the mirror image of our room looked very different. On his side, knowledge. On mine, emptiness.

I couldn’t help wondering if I had missed some instructions.

And what kind of books were these? They did not look like anything I’d seen before. A tall pair stood in a cardboard box that had a little drawer built into the top to hold a magnifying glass. You needed the assistance, I soon learned, because the print was tiny. The book – the Compact Oxford English Dictionary - contained the definition and first usages of every word in English.

Great. My roommate, it turned out, had a dictionary that T.S. Eliot had helped to prepare. My dictionary had probably been dashed off by some prisoner.

But that wasn’t the only difference. My King Lear was a paperback about as big as a box of crayons. My roommate had at least fifty hardcover books, all either green or red, which stood next to one another with imposing grandeur, like two legions of an ancient army in tight formation.

I didn’t dare touch any of his things while he was gone, but as soon as he arrived and we got some niceties out of the way I asked him about his books, first to make sure these were not required (where would I get the money?), and second out of curiosity. He and I were the same age and had chosen to come to the same college. How had I wound up with King Lear and he had dozens of these—well, what were they exactly?

“Oh, those,” he said, glancing up with affection. “My Loebs.” He pulled down one of the red ones. “These are great,” he said. “Latin on one page, English on the other. It helps.”

“No doubt,” I said, staggered by the pencil marks underlining Latin words and the neat translations in the margins. “What are the green ones?”

“Greek.”

“Oh.”

Fantastic. My roommate had taken five years of Latin and four years of Greek. I had stumbled through two years of Spanish and remembered nothing but ¡hola!

My high school career, such as it was, seemed like an eternity ago. My senior year I had run out of classes to take and had five study halls. It had been three years since I’d taken a math class, the most advanced one offered at my school. How could I possibly keep up?

My head was spinning and I went out for some fresh air. I circled campus a few times, but I had nowhere to go. I knew no one and had no idea what any of the buildings were.

When I returned, my roommate was relaxed on his bed, reclined on one arm like a Caesar, immersed in Catullus. I laid down on my side and stared at the concrete wall until it was time for dinner.

#

The next day at a registration workshop I raised my hand and asked about the minimum GPA that would be required to maintain a scholarship.

“Let’s say you don’t pass any of your classes. Or let’s say you pass but just barely,” I said. “Do they let you stay or make you transfer? And does this ever happen in mid-semester or do they wait to see what your final grades are?”

“Wow, those are some interesting questions,” the advisor said with a smile. “Are you asking for ‘a friend’?”

I was so disturbed I ignored the air quotes he was making with his fingers.

“No,” I said. “I’m asking for me.”

Everyone in the room laughed, but I didn’t care. This was serious business: I could fail, I would be ruined, my family would be disgraced.

Next the advisor handed out the results of our placement exams.

Will had tested out of two years of Latin and a year of Greek. A kid down the hall placed out of so many semesters of Chinese he could graduate in three years, if he so chose.

I had tested out of all the physical education requirements, which drew some envy, but in secret I was cursing myself for outperforming because now I would not be able to use gym classes to boost my grade point average.

I needed every trick available; academic performance alone was unlikely to do it alone.

Things were not going well. Everyone else had placed into one of three levels of Calculus. I did not seem to have made it to the first level. I had to raise my hand to ask how to sign up for one of these remedial math courses; to mask my shame I repeated a joke the advisor had made earlier.

“What if we’re in Math 101?” I forced a chuckle. “You know. Math for Jocks.”

The advisor smiled in a pained way. “Actually,” he explained, “Math 102 is Math for Jocks.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then what’s Math 101?”

“Math for Rocks.”

I nodded, my face burning, as everyone laughed at me again.

#

Sometimes panic can be productive. That year I launched into a course of study that attempted to overcome with sheer effort what I lacked in training or natural ability. Around me everyone else had fun and struck a healthy balance between study and leisure.

Toward the end, my roommate invited me to a party. I told him I was going to stay in because I was working my way through Plato for my Human Being and Citizen course.

“Midterm already?” he asked.

“We don’t have a midterm,” I explained. “We’ll get paper topics in a couple weeks. But I don’t understand the reading yet.”

He nodded, having read and understood everything years ago. “We’ll miss you at the party,” he said. “But Plato’s good company.”

I smiled. As terrible as my academic career was going, I could not have asked for a better roommate.  Will was kind and patient and never seemed to care that he’d been stuck with me. He explained things with seriousness and without condescension. His own intellectual curiosity, in addition to being inspiring, had given him the selflessness and temperament of a Socrates: my stupid but earnest questions were opportunities for clarifying his own thoughts.

The roommate thing could have been so much worse! I could have had some weirdo, like the kid who slept all day and roamed the streets of Chicago all night, getting mugged on purpose for the experience.

Or I could have had Del Denson, the guy who had promised his girlfriend at home, a woman named Amy, that he would take whatever foreign language was closest alphabetically to her name. This led him to Akkadian, a dead language studied only by two other students who were getting their PhD in archaeology. The Akkadian textbooks were in German, a language Del did not know, so he had to translate everything twice. After the first trimester the professor threatened to fail him but said he’d give him a C minus if he promised not to take the course again.

Del transferred to a community college closer to his home in West Virginia. At Spring Break he came back for a visit and bragged about how cool it was that his new school let him fulfill his language requirement by taking sign language.

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, I guess with Akkadian, and now sign language, you’re basically trilingual.”

“That’s right!” he said.

“Yeah,” said Will. “If you ever run into any deaf Babylonians, you’ll be all set.”

I was astounded by the quickness and ease of his wit. I have never met anyone, before or since, who would have come up with that joke.

No, I could have had any number of freaks. I had lucked out and gotten Will.

But still, I didn’t want to go to the party. And in a larger sense, I didn’t just want to hang around with Will and the other geniuses he had befriended. I wanted to be with him on his level. I wanted to know enough to be able to wrestle with great thoughts and great thinkers. To push my own mind to their limits. To challenge myself.

And to be able to make jokes as deft as the one about deaf Babylonians. To have a brain that would think like that. All that knowledge, all that history and philosophy and science and math and rhetoric and logic and ethics and religion and politics and economics and every other great subject – all there, all the time, at his service. Keeping him company.

I didn’t want the books above Will’s bed to be soldiers who lined up against me, their shields presenting a formidable wall as I marched toward them with my feeble wooden spear. I wanted them on my side, helping me conquer new territories like the soldiers just behind Alexander as he flew across the desert on the back of Bucephalus.

“You’re really enjoying yourself,” Will said, nodding at the paperback copy of Plato’s dialogues in my hand. I often amazed him like this.

“I have a lot of catching up to do. Hey, maybe I should make a deal with the devil. Sell my soul for knowledge. It’d be a lot faster.”

“Like Faust?” he asked.

I stared at him. How did he know these things?

#

When he year finally ended I felt better. In spite of my cluelessness I had passed – but then again, I guess that’s the whole point of school. School is designed for the clueless. What are the assigned readings but a set of clues?

That summer I drove a truck for an industrial laundry. The job gave me long stretches with nothing to do but listen to sports radio and classic rock and Chicago’s all-news stations, which I found comforting because they reminded me of my life on campus, which I couldn’t wait to return to.

For three months I lived at my parents’ house in comfort. I had friends and a sort-of girlfriend nearby. And for some reason I decided that this was when I had better test the extent of my intellectual powers.

It’s embarrassing now to recall this. But I thought with all seriousness that I should explore whether I had it in me to come up with some new set of ideas, or invent a philosophy as I thought of it then. Will seemed satisfied with studying Plato, and that was all well and good. But what about being a Plato? Was that ruled out for me?

I would not say that I went so far as to believe that I was capable of coming up with some new idea that had never been thought before. But I did think that if I was capable, I had better do it now. Nietzsche had published The Birth of Tragedy at 27; David Hume started on A Treatise on Human Nature at 22. Epiphanies come to the young, if you have the right stuff.

Why not me? Why not now? Nineteen was not quite over the hill, but it was getting there.

So as I drove my routes that crisscrossed the farmland and small factories along the border of Wisconsin and Illinois, in my personal Bermuda Triangle between Madison and Milwaukee and Chicago, I thought the deepest thoughts I could think.

I had learned enough philosophy to know the flaws in just about all of them. Descartes, for example, who started out with a solid premise—reduce what you know to only things that cannot be disputed, and build your way up from there—had then bungled everything with circular logic that assumed the existence and the features of the God he had all along been trying to prove.

Or the formidable Karl Marx, once a titan, but whose theories and predictions did not look so bright that summer as the Soviet Union crumbled. Or the mighty Bertrand Russell, whose elaborate system was skewered a paradox his theory could not resolve. Even Socrates took unwarranted leaps of logic when you looked closely enough.

The more I thought this through, it came to seem that everyone who pushed things too far in one direction wound up being wrong. Wrong in an interesting way, maybe, but wrong nevertheless.

And then it hit me: that idea itself was an epiphany! That could be my contribution! Nothing too fancy or absolute would ever succeed. Truth only came from balance and moderation.

Everything is average.

It seemed so clear to me, all of a sudden. Of course that was the truth! One theory after another tried to buck this idea, and in the end they all had problems. Because greatness, pure unmitigated greatness, was unnatural and nonexistent. Everything was flawed somehow.

My excitement mounted. I could hardly believe it: I was like a kid who had set out with a bamboo pole and a measly worm and had wound up landing a whale. How could I have done it? I, who had gone to such an undistinguished high school and had no real training beyond one middling year of college?

But that was it, wasn’t it? That was the answer! Maybe this theory could only have been discovered by someone like me, a Wisconsin boy! Real insight, exciting new ideas—ha! Mediocrity! Hesitation! Uncertainty! Those were the real paths to truth! The only paths.

The Wilfred Carter Boiteauxs of the world could not know these things, because they were blinded by their own proficiency! It was left to the meager, the measly, the ridiculously underprepared Jacke Wilsons to sense the real truth. Ideas, like people, were merely average.

As soon as I got home I started outlining this theory. But that was the easy part. I could come up with plenty of examples. The important thing was that I had found the key to unlock everything. And I was sure it would. You could not come up with a thinker who was beyond reproach, they all screwed up in one way or another.

Every great philosophy has flaws, I wrote. Because everything is average.

Did I even need to write more? No, probably not, but I did, I tried to flesh this out with a fuller scheme, like Aristotle and Kant and Hume. I no longer possess this document (thankfully!) but it involved numbered paragraphs and may have coined a few new words, which seemed like something all the best philosophers did.

What can I say? I took a shot. It was then or never.

#

When the fall rolled around I returned to campus, eager to learn. Will and I had gotten along so well we decided to share a room again. Over the summer he had lost fifty pounds in the New Orleans heat and looked like a new person.

“Will! I barely recognize you!” I cried, pumping his hand.

He nodded, as thoughtful as ever, but permitted himself a small smile. “I switched to Diet Cokes,” he said. “That was all it took.”

“You must feel totally different!”

He winced. “Well…I feel more like myself. That…last year…that never felt like the real me.”

I felt bad that he had felt that way. “I like you either way,” I said.

He smiled gently, accepting the affection, though it clearly made him uncomfortable to talk about himself. He asked how I had spent the summer.

“Oh, this and that…” I said. And then, because I could wait no longer: “I invented a philosophy.”

It came out less casually than I had hoped.

Will’s eyes grew wide, and he smiled in a way I had come to recognize. He found me incredible, in the “hard to believe” sense. Definition number five in his OED.

Ah well, who cared? I couldn’t really blame him. It was not his fault that I had no idea what I was doing. I pressed on. “Yeah, I needed something to do while I was driving the truck. So listen, I started out by thinking about all the philosophers we discussed last year…”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. And it struck me that they all had some flaw. You know, some problem that undermined their theory. There’s always something they got wrong. They go out on some limb, and they overlook some hole. A logical flaw. Or they miss something important.”

He nodded.

“And so it occurred to me…” I said, “Here’s the real truth. Everything is average.”

I talked a few more minutes in support of the theory I had developed in a burst of insight in the laundry truck and later refined and recorded for posterity in my parents’ basement.

“Ah,” said Will, nodding seriously. “Sounds a little like Aristotle’s Golden Mean.”

“What? Aristotle’s what?”

“You read Aristotle last year, didn’t you?” he asked.

I hesitated. I had read some Aristotle. Obviously I had not read all.

Will was lost in thought. “Mmmm. There’s the Middle Path of the Buddha, of course. Also sounds a little like Hegel. Are you thinking of his dialectic?”

I had not been thinking of that. I had not been thinking of it because I had never heard of it in my life. I did not even know what the word dialectic meant.

“Who? What?” was all I could say.

I was fading. Will was just getting started. He asked how my theory differed from William James’s pragmatism.

“Pragmatism?” I asked weakly. From the name alone I knew I had predecessors, and betters.”That’s a theory?”

Will nodded. He offered some more ideas about the Everything Is Average philosophy, which he took seriously, as he did any set of ideas that presented themselves for consideration. It soon became clear that he knew more about my own theory than I did.

I felt miserable. I had taken my shot and come up woefully short. I was not an original thinker on any grand scale. And now three more years of this! Of me not knowing things that others did.

The thought irritated me. But here was the thing: I was original, in my own way. I was me, the first me, the only me. No precedents!

“You know what? Screw this place,” I announced. “I don’t need these books and all of these ideas. I can just go live on a farm. That’s enough! That’s even better! I can pick up rocks again, and plant crops and milk cows and enjoy the sunsets and the evening meals with fresh baked bread and a dog by the fireplace and just be myself, my old Wisconsin self, without any of these stupid ideas running through my head!”

“Ah,” said Will. “Like Cincinnatus.”

I stared at my friend, who had just mentioned yet another guy I’d never heard of in my life.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just like him.”

Will went off to a party to test the theories of Epicurus. I stayed behind to plot my escape from the life of the mind. Milk the cows. Till the soil. Fireplace, dog. Rocks.

But as soon as the door closed, I walked over to Will’s shelf and pulled down one of his books. A green one.

Then I took it back to my desk, cracked it open, and started to read.

#

Another tough one! Why is it so hard to remember the days of my misguided enthusiasm? Was I really that far off? Hasn’t the rest of my life proved up my theory that everything is average? I was on the right track!  You can read another college story at Object #4 – The Sweater or Object #12 – The Tickets to the Premiere. There’s more about the summer job at Object #16 – The Laundry. And of course, you can read the grownup versions of my personal Bermuda Triangle in my book The Race, in which the narrator traipses around the area with a politician trying to recover from a scandal, or in my other book The Promotion, in which the narrator returns to that particular Bermuda Triangle to pursue a woman he has become obsessed with. Both are available for under three bucks (e-version) or under five bucks (paperback version). Or you can run through all the other Objects in the series for free here on the blog. Onward and upward, people!

Image Credit: Blackwell Classics

Today’s Comment of the Week: Advice for the Study Abroad Student Headed to Bologna!

Wonderful Reader Corra22s, commenting on Object #12 – Tickets to the Premiere, writes:

As a current twenty-year-old soon-to-be studying abroad in Bologna (a whole year early!), I really enjoyed your reflections and your hilariously illuminating recount of class relations.

I was wondering if you could give me any advice or suggestions for doors I should try to find. As you said, there are so many! (I’m still TWENTY.) It’d be fun to have a place to look forward to finding, a challenge of sorts.

TWENTY! She’s TWENTY! (You’ll understand the importance of this if you read the story.)

Okay, Corra22s, the first thing to say is that you are indeed a very lucky person, because studying abroad in Bologna is one of the very best things a person could ever hope to do. And the second thing to say is that advice from old people like me to young people like you is pretty much always annoying because it always boils down to the same basic thing:

Live like a young person. Not like me now. Live like me then.

Or put another way:

I wish I could live now like I lived then.

Or put another way:

I wish back then I lived MORE like I lived then, because I’M OLD NOW AND I DON’T LEAVE THAT WAY ANYMORE.

We old people could save our breath (which we need! how many gasps do we have left in these creaky lungs of ours!) by just saying this:

You are young. Enjoy being young. I am not young.

You probably already learned this at your high school graduation. Right? “These are the best years of your life – enjoy them!” It’s well-meaning and kind but you’re left thinking, “Well, great, but what does that MEAN? What do I DO?” Right? Did you think that? “I’m my age no matter what I do. But HOW DOES THAT HELP ME MAKE CHOICES???”

And for a long time I thought those were just things that people said, kind of like how at funerals people say, “Please accept my condolences” because they’re afraid to say the things they’re really thinking, which is more like “Oh my god, they’re putting your FATHER into the GROUND? HOW HORRIBLE FOR YOU! I CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT THAT MUST BE LIKE. HOW ARE YOU MANAGING TO STAND UP???”

But that’s not exactly right, in the case of this advice telling young people to enjoy themselves, or to keep an open mind, or to live life to the fullest. People aren’t afraid to tell you the truth. They just don’t know what it is. And so maybe they tell you something about museums and artwork and food and how great it will be to make friends and pretty soon they’re back to the general advice about living life to the fullest and keeping an open mind and before long they’re talking about themselves again. I AM NOT YOUNG. YOU ARE. BE YOUNG.

Helpful? Maybe a little. I suspect you already know how to be young. In case you don’t, it’s all true: keep an open mind, live life to the fullest, plunge in, try new things. Go to museums, enjoy the food, fall in love, make a lot of friends. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now let me shift to another story because it will help me tell you the advice I really want to give you. And in case you’re bored or impatient, let me say that yes indeed I have an idea for a door for you. In fact I’m somewhat astounded that you asked for one, because of all the wondrous things Bologna has, a particular special door is at the very top of the list. Don’t worry. I’m getting there. But first, the story!

I found myself at a crossroads at one point in my life, having failed miserably at everything I wanted to do. I had not gotten off to an auspicious beginning. For eighteen years I lived in the same small room in the same small house in the same small town. I had never been out of the country (well, okay, one trip to Canada) and had never even been on a PLANE. Somehow I made it to Chicago, which served as a kind of slingshot for me. Then I did my year abroad in Italy (a plane! I took a plane!) and soon enough I was traveling around the world and before I stopped to catch my breath I had been to a million different places and had had all these addresses and jobs and a smattering of graduate school on my resume and before long a wife and a baby on the way and suddenly…I WAS NOT YOUNG ANYMORE, whether I liked it or not. There is such a thing as numbers, and numbers go up, time travels in one direction  (in this universe anyway) and none of us lives to be a thousand and there are some statistics you cannot fudge if you have a baby on the way. And at that point my patchwork of jobs just weren’t cutting it anymore.

(You might face something like this someday. But that’s not the important thing right now. I’m still telling the story to get to the real story. Just a little longer…)

So I needed a job. What could I do? I could read and write and show up on time. And I tested well. Law school! Of course! And my baby would have shoes on his feet and diapers on his bottom and whatever the hell else babies needed. There was just one problem. I had gone to college with a lot of friends who had already gone to law school.

And this was the problem: every single one of them hated it.

They all gave me the same advice. DON’T GO. They hated their jobs, they hated their lives, and they all saw me, on the other side, free as a bird (that’s how poverty looked to them), and they all thought they could rescue me from this terrible misstep. And as well meaning as they were, all they did was depress me, because although it was almost certainly a misstep, it was the only step I had.

I was like one of those guys in the movies who runs out onto some little ledge, and the door closes behind me, and now I’m standing on six square inches of ledge with no bridge. And storm troopers are about to shoot. I need to step onto the invisible bridge. To save my baby. (I realize I’ve just mashed up something like five movies from the 80s but either you have never seen them or you’ll think I’m senile, which I can live with either way, so I’m going to leave that sentence as it is.)

And then I talked to one friend who was a lawyer and actually did kind of enjoy his job. An inspiration! But more than that, he gave me some advice that was so effective that I’m going to use it as a template for the advice I’m going to give you.

When you’re in law school (he said), everyone is going to complain about the exams and the professors and the Socratic method, and they’ll all be worried about the jobs they’re going to get or not get. Ignore all that: don’t worry about those things, which you can’t change anyway. What you should do is enjoy the chance to read the cases and think broadly about the law, and enjoy engaging with it on an intellectual level, because when you start working you probably won’t be asked to do that much anymore.

After that, you’ll probably work at a firm (he also said). And everyone will complain about the hours, and the drudgery, and the inhumanity, and the belittling that you suffer. And all that’s true. But you can’t change it. Instead you should enjoy the period where you have the resources to get things done well and really do good work. You’ll never produce work product of such a high quality as you will when you’re at the firm, because you won’t ever have resources and time like that again.

You see how this works, Corra22s! I’m sorry to say it, but you will probably not be able to study abroad forever. It will be a period in your life—a wonderful, magical period, hopefully—but it will end. And so you should enjoy the parts of it that will be special, and tune out the parts of it that are frustrating.

Let’s apply this to Bologna itself. Everyone who’s been to Italy for two weeks and can’t see past the end of their own nose will say the same thing: Bologna! Why not Florence? Why not Rome? Why not Venice? THOSE are the Italian cities to visit!

And of course, those are all great cities that you should visit if you haven’t already. But don’t spend your time in Bologna wishing that you were living in Florence or Rome or Venice. Those cities are flooded with TOURISTS, and you aren’t going there as a tourist, you’re going there as a student. And Bologna is a fantastic place to be a student, if for no other reason than it DOESN’T HAVE ALL THOSE TOURISTS. This means you can meet real Italians who aren’t exhausted by all the foreigners trampling through their piazzas and crowing about gelato. The Italians will be excited to meet you. They’ll be warm and friendly and eager and you should enjoy that for all it’s worth, because you’re not going to Disneyworld’s version of Italy – you’re going to the real place, with real people, and that will be one of the best things about it.

And while Rome and Florence and Venice are all amazing and gorgeous, Bologna has its own special beauty. Bologna has a medieval feel that none of those places have. The porticos, the Piazza Maggiore, the Seven Churches…well you’ll find all those places whether I tell you about them or not. But what I can tell you is that you should enjoy them without wishing that they were canals or the Duomo or the Colosseum.

And for everyone who sort of pities you because you’re only staying in Bologna, or who says they’d like to visit you but they wish you lived in, say, Florence, you can point out how close those cities actually are and isn’t it nice that you can take a train and get from Bologna to Florence in ONE HOUR. I don’t know where you live, but that is about the length of a daily commute in many parts of the world (like mine).

I think I’ve prattled on long enough (old man’s privilege!) so I’m going to summarize here and then give you one very specific piece of travel advice about Bologna. The door I promised at the beginning.

Here’s the general advice: Don’t let yourself be so distracted by what you’re not doing that you fail to enjoy what you are doing. Let the others have their Paris and London and Rome and Florence and Venice. You’ll probably have all those places too, someday. And for now, you’ll have Bologna, which is a very special place if you let it be. Others will think they own those places, but they won’t really get inside them the way they think they do. Bologna will be different. Bologna will let you in. Bologna will be yours.

And then one day, after you’ve been in Bologna for a while, long enough that you think you really know the city and you have seen everything it has to offer, find a friend or two and go for a walk. I suggest you do this after a good meal, where you’ve eaten well and had a good conversation and the weather is fine and it has gotten dark while you were inside the restaurant.

Close the meal with a toast to your friend Jacke. (Okay, you don’t have to do that part, I just threw that in out of vanity and nostalgia and because I wish I was part of what’s going to happen next!)

Wander down to Piazza Verdi, and from there follow Via de’ Castagnoli to Via A. Righi. Just before you hit Via Indipendenza, turn left on Via Piella and walk about a hundred feet. Keep your eyes on the wall on your right, and eventually you will see a window with a little wooden door. Yes, a little wooden door, elevated off the ground. Just placed in the wall. Eye level.

It’s very important that you do not Google this in advance, because you will spoil your surprise.

There you are. On the street. A little wooden door stands in front of you. What’s it doing there in the wall? What’s behind it? A statue? A painting? A little man selling grappa? All I can tell you is that it will change everything you thought you knew about this city. And it will show that yes, even though Bologna is smaller than other cities, and less famous, and less attractive to tourists, it has very magical properties all to itself, but only to those who are willing to do more than just pass through on their way from one place to the next.

You will have to find out. You will have earned it. So that’s what you should do: find that door. Ignore everything else around you. I’m telling you this will all be worth it, you just have to trust me, but you won’t need to trust me once you’re there, because you’ll know in your heart that it’s the right thing to do. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind: that you’re open to new things, that you’re looking for adventure, that you’re ready to enjoy the quiet magic of seeing a place you thought you knew transformed into something else.

Reach out. Put your hand on that little door.

And open it.

#

No spoilers in the comments please! My thanks and best wishes to Corra22s, and to all the about-to-be study abroad students. You can of course go back to read Object #12 – Tickets to the Premiere (in which I set forth my thoughts about being TWENTY in Italy, and my disastrous attempts to craft a Broadway musical with my friend Roberto) or check out some of the other posts in the 100 Objects series. What else…oh yes! My book The Race also has a trip to Rome as part of the mix. You can buy that for three bucks (e-version) or five bucks (paperback). Or send me an offer to review it and I’ll send you a copy for free. Not a professional reviewer? Not a problem! You can leave a review at Amazon or Goodreads or your own blog or Facebook page or wherever else you prefer. My other book The Promotion is also available in a similar deal. But that one is a little crazy. Ah well. I try, readers, I try, I try, I try.

Image credit: ciaotutti.nl

Getting Dumped by Charlotte Brontë

From the Internet’s best magpie Maria Popova comes the tale of Charlotte Brontë turning down her suitor’s proposal of marriage. As Popova mentions, it’s hard to top this as an example of “it’s not you it’s me.” I’m not sure what my favorite part is, so I bolded a few.

My dear Sir

Before answering your letter, I might have spent a long time in consideration of its subject; but as from the first moment of its reception and perusal I determined on which course to pursue, it seemed to me that delay was wholly unnecessary.

You are aware that I have many reasons to feel gratified to your family, that I have peculiar reasons for affection towards one at least of your sisters, and also that I highly esteem yourself. Do not therefore accuse me of wrong motives when I say that my answer to your proposal must be a decided negative. In forming this decision — I trust I have listened to the dictates of conscience more than to those [of] inclination; I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you — but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. It has always been my habit to study the character of those amongst whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original — her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her “personal attractions” sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride. As for me, you do not know me, I am not this serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose — you would think me romantic and [eccentric -- you would] say I was satirical and [severe]. [However, I scorn] deceit and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.

[…]

Farewell—! I shall always be glad to hear from you as a friend –

Believe me

Yours truly

C Brontë

How awesome is this? Makes me want to read Jane Eyre all over again. (Along with the book this came from, Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair by Anna Holmes.)

And let’s all watch this again. Forty-four seconds with the great Orson Welles, if for no other reason than to recall how awesome his voice was:

Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons