Etherhuffer's Synaptic Chasm

A Conversation

We went out for a date. Her choice of where to go. The smoke in the place was a second atmosphere. She seemed, 'nice.

"Where do you live?" She started with that one.

I live between the high notes and the low notes, between the big and little slinky strings, between the worn frets and the ones rubbed flat.

"On the west side." I answered, somewhat disinterested in this topic.

"Oh, I like the west side. Its cooler, more laid back. Our side of the lake is more uptight."

I took a pull on my Turkish smoke. She really was good looking, in a burned out sort of way. Her hair was put up well but had the dry look of over 50. She was trying really hard.

"The east side is ok. Uptight makes more money you know." Feeling her out. Burned out on money or burned by some other guy. Hard to tell. But money was in the mix for sure.

"Money." she ventured, tapping her drink glass with her fingernail. The question must have hit home. Or apartment, now, in her case. "Want some cliches to go with that?"

"Nope." I had seen money and I had seen none. Been at both ends, been to both places. Some of the places were clean, none of the women were. Dirt was relative. The music was absolute, the high and low notes. E flat was forever blue. I doubt she cared about that. I doubt she had a radio. Music was background to this one.

"I've heard lots of cliches. Some good, some bad. Most of them useful at times. How bout you?"

She smiled. "What kind of work do you do?' she asked, staring at my hands. I put down the cigarette and slid them under the table. I didn't want her to know.

"I work in the sewers. Our crew runs a machine down the trunk lines for inspection. It's horrid. The smell is not so bad, but the darkness is horrid. It pays so damn well for the shitty work. We get our time off and good pay. I never have to think off the job. It never follows me home." It was my standard. She knew I was lying. I could hear the high notes crying in my head, the howl of the feedback. My hands were too soft. She could tell it was a scam.

"You don't have to lie. Lots of guys lie. I'm used to it though."

"Pretty lies trump ugly truths. My truths are boring and safe. My lies are much more fun. Pretty lies never hurt no one." It was as close as I would let her get.

She sat there and stared coldly. The math was being done. Balance sheets. The guitars were howling now, the feedback, the shrieking, the groaning. It was a blur of notes running down the neck of the Strat.

"So, not a one trick pony?" she asked.

"We usually aren't. I won't disabuse you however."

She stared some more, leaned over and put out her cigarette, dropping it into the ashtray without grinding the butt down. "Lets leave." she said.

Checkmate

The black king or the white queen? The Black King it is. Ah, but he must still deal with the other white one, the knight. The queen was difficult. She could move as she wished, this way and that, from frontal assaults to oblique maneuvers, racing headlong for the length of the board and striking deadly poses. The black king stood and waited, drawing her in.

She took on the mantle of a knight, a Joan of Arc, rushing forward, dodging left and right. Neither left nor right seemed to suit her, each too limited at the magical shape changing she really needed. Her pawns had fallen away to the black pawns. The ramparts of the black rooks were too high, their steadfast immovability fixed her with a knowing gaze. Even her loyal bishops deserted her in the end. Even the black king's treasonous bishop could not undo him, and so he fell to the white. But his blood was now on the king's clothes, a stain so dark as perhaps never to be removed.

The magnanimous black king did not savage the remainders of the white queen's army. He offered them grace, an open hand, a chance to be redeemed as fair. His offer was brushed aside. The white queen, bitter in her defeat, had no desire to share a crown. She spat on the Black King. Fealty was her reward.

Of Floods.

Mrs. Clinton said yesterday that she could win. That "Hard working people. White people." would vote for her in the fall. Gee, thanks senator, for being a uniter, not a divider. I was appalled, but should not be, at this blatant use of race made justifiable with its endgame politics used as the justification. Just how low will she go? Bring out the bathyspheres.

Again, an oblique start to a separate question. When I was a student at Cal from 84-88, I lived in Bump City. Oakland, CA for the less streetwise. Oakland is as close as I can get to the ills of urban places. East LA gets the press, but Oakland lives it every day, decade after decade. No wonder one of the foils in Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" is from the Bay Area, a book that very humorously addresses the race mess we live in. Oakland can be pretty rough and in the day, the days of the crack cocaine epidemic, it was a place where you watched your back. Cocaine, the club drug of the glitterati, had come home to the streets as crack, and it did a crackerjack job on the black population of Oakland. Al Capone would blush I'm sure.

A classmate living near Lake Merritt heard a particularly nasty argument being consummated in the apartment next to hers, followed by gunshots and holes appearing in her walls. A quick trip into her large cast iron bathtub saved her hide. A few weeks after I left, an incensed relative of a woman hit by a bus got on that bus and opened fire. July Fourth and New Year's Eve were peppered with the local Chinese and Mexican fireworks, but also with Mac-10's firing blindly into the night, their leaden rain falling where it may.

And the color was black. No bones about it, crack tore the black community into pieces, pieces that now are suffering from crystal meth and yet more crack, not to mention Oxycontin and other legal stuff gone to the street. Go visit a big city and see for yourself. Don't take my word for it.

So I, like many of the day, understand the inception of the drug wars. Rudy Guliani would know best. But then so would Harold Washington.  The idea that fear of public spaces is OK would return us to the streets of Dickens's London, the English being at the lower levels as mean as we are. Society can't function when fear rules. Note that our president uses both sides of the fear coin. Heads, you fear terrorists, tails, I keep you safe but stoke your fears. Zero Sum.

Fast forward to 2008 and you have more people in jail here than most places in the world, right up there with China. This jail-fervor was the step-child of fear. And in the ensuing dragnet, drooling stoners who should be shuffling to the mini-mart for another beer to whet the cotton-mouth are instead behind bars. Yes, so are some folks who could outshine the characters of "No Country For Old Men."  In the last days of May, I think about this, for this is a building flood that no one wants to think will happen: Someday, the prison doors will swing open. When they do, out will come drug lords and gang-bangers made even more hard by the pen, not to mention the life skills the stoners will have acquired just to survive. This flood will be large, mean, and black. No mincing of words here. Stats tell the story.

So, back to Senator Clinton. How on earth could she use her words in such a manner, a manner meant to stoke more fear and more race? There is only one reason you can logically accept; personal ambition at all costs. Everyone under the bus until there is only the bus driver left, and no one else. A bus empty of humans but full of hate and fear and ambition.

I am for Senator Obama as he has not gone down the path to finding gasoline for all fires, building tinder fires of fear and race. He has held the line quite well despite the controversies that have hit him. When the flood comes, I want this man to address its problems and find a path that is not driven with fear and hatred and race. Those three horsemen will surely try to unnerve and pull under any man or woman they can find. The horsemen have already found Senator Clinton.

Hey Ladies. Hey Fellas.

So, after a week of lounging about, I now have a semi-functional foot. You see, there is this horrendous condition caused by too much salt intake called 'Morton's Neuroma.'.  Just fibbin. But, for the ladies tiptoeing about in skinny high heels, this is the result of all your late PM hijinks with Claude from the Sorbonne. Not due to Claude, who will give you worse bodily problems, but because of the shoes. Tight, pointy toed, 6" of butt in the air high heels. Not how I got this problem mind you, nor would I say so if I did. But somewhere out there, between your 3rd and 4th metatarsal lies a nice, unassuming, pleasant little nerve. It likes to tell you when you kick the bedpost and scream in pain or when you stomp a little honeymaker in the clover and end up with a huge painful toe. But, years of abuse also take their toll, and mashing a nerve twixt two bones leads to less than happy synapses. The little bugger gets all hot and bothered, then swells up like a pea. End result: Constant pain in the foot akin to standing on a stone every time you walk. Ow-wee.

So the doctor cuts this guy out, you hobble about for weeks, wishing you were not a slave to fashion or closet gay person who lives for ill fitting trendy shoes. Or, a person with a history of running or other foot abuse. As I sit here in an oxycontin fog I just wish to mimick some of my patients: If I had known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. Man those old folks are smart. 

Spent Uranium Skin Banging

How heavy is heavy? Go way back, way back in your way back machine and feel the frequency, the lowest of the lowdown, heavier than lead. Than Moon. Than Bonham. Blue Cheer!

A Numerology of Verses

A birthday like any other, at eighteen he couldn't drink a drop of moonshine in his home state. He didn't care. He didn't drink anyway. His girlfriend did, but she was not the type to go on a bender and strip down in a bar. She was a regular gal.

Most of his friends graduated this year from high school, some going on to college, pledging fraternities and sororities, others going the townie route. All 17 of them had plans, even though the plans diverged that summer for each of them.

It was August 16, 2006 when he joined up. He still was not sure why he joined. He had been accepted at university and a good one at that. Even a small scholarship was there for track and field. He was good at the Olympic sports, the odd ones that no one cared about. The discus, the javelin, the hammer. His nickname was 'The Hammer,' more for his ability to come down on his friends than to toss a too large weight down the field. Always the self righteous one. Always the nag. The army suited him well.

Fifteen of the guys in his basic training didn't make it. Some went nuts, or were nuts, before they arrived, barely functioning nutbirds before the recruiter got them for his quota. The others collapsed in the heat of the swamps or the gun ranges. Some just disappeared without warning. It turned out to be prescient.

Fourteen flights were leaving the day he left, all of them heading east, all of them full of ripe human cargo. Strapped into his seat he dozed into worlds and places that didn't exist or that he had nurtured into existence in his head. Real or not, they raced along in his head, a movie with no coherent sound track, no coherent dialog, no credits. It was all action with no reason.

They arrived in the desert on Friday the 13th, and he laughed about this with his buddies as they crouched into the back of an armored car. Black humor was indistinguishable from the lighter kind, but humor it was none the less. They were young, and so was the day. They were young and life was forever, like the sand.

Twelve hours into the ride the base glowed on the horizon, a small encampment blurring out the stars withs its mercury-vapor green glow. This was his home, his new home, his home until otherwise. This was a small piece of Mayberry in the sand. But no Main Street here.

His tent mates were good fellows. Eleven of them shared the large tent, laying beneath its cool shade in the day, playing cards in its glow in the night, gas lamps roaring like blow torches. They felt safe here, even as the occasional mortar came out of the dark and landed nearby, its loud thump more entertainment that emergency. It was just sound effects to a war.

The next morning blew in hot, hotter than he had ever known. By the time the wake up call sounded, it was 85 degrees. By ten, it was 100 degrees. This was the new life. Hot, or hotter, but never cool. Never free of sand and heat. Never free of the sounds of war in the distance.

Nine of the guys in the tent were from near his town. This was odd. There were no more regiments all from a town. The army didn't want whole towns to lose all their men at once. It was all mix and match and keep things impersonal and anonymous. Don't go to war with a buddy, go with a stranger. Its easier that way. To lose a stranger.

The next morning was the first for the patrol and the bugle  blew at eight in the morning to get them going. No one could play the bugle of course, but it was tape recorded, CD recorded and pressed into vinyl. No one was going to sleep in. The army said so.

The trucks headed down the road. The nearest village was only about seven miles away, but the jostling of the trucks and the hardness of helmet and gun was uncomfortable and no one dozed or slept. In the hundred degree heat, the misery was universal. They coughed sand and moaned.

At the edge of the walled village, six of them jumped out, happy to be away from the heat of the truck and blowing sand, better to be on foot and the master of one's own self. No more victim-hood of the truck driver. It was all on their own shoulders now.

Five houses down the street and no one was to be seen, either the heat or the fear of their infidel faces kept the streets empty, the windows shuttered. Alone in a town full of people.

As they crept along for four blocks, the village was silent. Not even the sound of a goat or desert bird. Only the soft crunching of sand and gravel under foot. Only the wind.

Of the whole group, three had done this before. They knew what to expect. They knew what could happen. Each had his own story. But none of the three had shared the stories. The math was all subtractive.

Two of the lead sergeants rounded a corner. He followed them, trusting their experience. They knew better. They held the key to live.

As they crouch-walked along a wall, one shot rang out. It found its target, but he didn't really understand. He didn't really comprehend the red in his hand, the pain in his neck, the blackness of his vision. He didn't have to.

At zero hour, in the cover of darkness, they put his body on the truck, and they left.   

How Physics and Philosophy Explain Barack Obama

"What?!" you say? Physics and politics? Goodness knows how many kilotons of politics Oppenheimer sent to Hiroshima. Made in America, Tested in Japan. OK, I apologize, but I still get to laugh a hearty if politically incorrect laugh over that one.

Yes, physics and philosophy are not that far apart. When you are sitting around the cyclotron bashing on neutrinos and yukking it up over the makeup of the universe, philosophy counts. If anyone gets to ruminate about the creation of something from nothing(or the reverse for Oppenheimer) its physicists.

While grunting away on the crapper in the physics building of the UW, I always had great guffaws at the grim yet greatly mirthful humor known only to also-grunting physics gremlins. To whit: "Heisenberg may have been here!"   This, my moronic and ill educated friends, is hilarious. Heisenberg noted that whatever you use to observe a phenomena introduces a factor that changes the object of your observation. Which is to say, looking at hordes of bats in a large caves by turning on a bright light can lead to the observation that a rain of guano pouring down on your head is a descriptor for bats. Not rabid furry critters all asleep upside down, but torrents of white dung. This, by the way, describes eco-tourism. You can't call a place 100 percent pristine while you yourself have entered the pristine realm. Its impossible! Your presence ends the pristine. Capice?

Well then, on to the more navel gazing aspects of life, aka philosophy. Kuhn's "Theory of Scientific Revolutions" did the same thing as Heisenberg. No, it didn't get him covered with guano. Kuhn introduced the idea of Paradigm Shift. He basically said, without the benefit of a cyclotron or nuclear conflagration, that when a new idea enters the world, the idea that got you there and the world itself are now different by virtue of what you have proposed. The paradigm has changed, the world has changed. All that went before is reorganized based on the new paradigm. Thoughts, ideas, proposals, are permanently in flux. Just when you really believe your new kitten is the bestest and mostest snuggly wuffins puddy ever, it pees on the rug. So much for all kittens being cute. The new paradigm is bigger litter boxes and a swat on the cat's ass.

Barack Obama was not supposed to happen. Hillary, while picking out the diamond for her coronation crown, had ostensibly worked for equal rights, women's issues etc. Democrats have been in the lead on civil rights and equality for more than half a century. I owe my ability to speak freely to their efforts. I can now almost take liberties with animals publicly thanks to them. Ahem.

So when the Clintons were building a Bridge to the 21st Century, they didn't understand that when the last bits of Korean made steel went into the last tie and girder, the very minute the bridge was complete, that the paradigm would shift. And shit, they cut the ribbon, drove to the other side, and there was Barack waiting to greet them in the new paradigm! "Oh crap!, Bill, there's a Negro in the road! Do we stop?" "No! Hillary, he's playing cards in the road, race cards! Only an idiot plays cards in the road! Run him down before he goes forth and multiplies!"  Thump, thump.

Obama is the new paradigm and the Clintons are still in the old one. The paradigm shift left them behind, even though they helped it happen. And instead of celebrating this(diversity), they only can see a turd in the punchbowl. How sad.

So, If W doesn't ride one down in the way Slim Pickens did in Dr. Strangelove, drink your morning tea or coffee and enjoy the new mocha paradigm. You will get used to it. You have no choice in the matter anyway!

Does Your Gal Eat Lefse?

Mine does. With butter. Yum. Hey, I had an Anne-Margaret dream last week. Anne was there and she smeared my lefse with butter and then slowly, seductively, nibbled away at it. Heh. Go Anne, ya floozy!

Why Anne? Well, why not? What a gal. As an aside, a broken down old fella limped into my office years ago. He was on disability, the kind you sign up for once you are in the disability biz and find out its a racket. One too many sales calls on pimply young kids yearning for a hot car that you think should have insurance instead and eventually you cry 'uncle' and take the disability plunge. Check in the mail, cold beer in the fridge.

He was in Anne's back up band. Before the teeth. Before the boob job. When she still sang with enough of an accent to make bohunks and norskies from Ballard to Fargo swoon at the sound. Go Anne. He related how she got famous, got around, got to the top, got famous, in his book 'got money.'  now he gets a monthly and lots of days off. He was an OK guy. No resentments, just didn't get his 15 minutes of fame. I kinda liked the guy. He stood by his gal til she went on to bigger things, brighter lights.

For odd associations, I am a big fan of Ken Russell and Russ Meyer. The women they put on the screen were caricatures to be sure, but tough and sure of their place in the world. Anne could have been a Meyer gal, but instead was a Russell gal in "Tommy."  Being hosed down with soap suds, baked beans and chocolate took some inner strength I actually don't care to possess. But it was fun in the day.

Why this stuff? Well, to tell the truth it was the dumbshow of Eliot Spitzer and his wife, the sordid and yet publicly acceptable catwalk of human frailty. I watched her stand by her man and was mortified. Yeah, its a guy thing. Heartless as we are, we can take two roads: She is a doormat. Or, she is a tag-a-long, trading procreation and publicity and wealth for individual integrity. I dunno. Really, I dunno.

But I think back to years of female models that have rolled down the road in the last thirty years and I have problems here. Helen Reddy, Camille Paglia, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, or any belle d'jour you may like has weighed in here. Hillary took the Tammy Wynette option too.

Why?

I dunno. I could only hope that if I cheated on Anne-Margaret that she would toss me out on my ear and tell me, in a seductively Swedish accent, what a shitheel I was. After a little trysting with buckets of olive oil and a lithe Aurora Ave hooker(fantasy for sure) I would hope that Tura Satana would show up and bust my clackers, if not my clavicle. Silda Spitzer is a handsome woman. Very handsome. I don't know what she will tell her girls, but it can't be a fun job. And maybe that is the clue. Its just a job. A job to be a mother, a job to be a wife. Different day, same job. I dunno.

But I do hope that some day in the future, the Silda's of the world will walk. They need to walk, as its the one thing that they can do to affect change. And in that change, some guys may find that their spouses are the real deal, not the Anne Margaret of Ken Russell fantasies. Real gals who are tough enough to write their own stories. 

Vile. Simply Vile

Vile. Simply vile. How else to describe a sorghum based drink that Nixon supposedly shared with Mao. I am surprised there is no corrosion of the glass in my bottle, that the cork has not turned to petrified wood. This is NOT an aquired taste, even with work. Gasoline could not tame this any more than it could tame a worm-in-your-brains mezcal. Ghastly. Moutai. Made in China.

On a Stack of Bibles?

I did something unusual for me on Saturday. I caucused for the Democratic Party. I am not one to tread lightly in Demo-Land. This is the land of the right brained, the national cistern of illogic thinking. Yet somehow the human nature of the Dems always brings em home. But damn, irrational Democrats look exactly like evangelical Republicans to me. There is really not much difference. Irrational thinking in the name of reason falls as flat on its face as evangenical thinking does. In the words of E. O. Wilson, "Men would rather believe than know." I have no time for evangelical Christians nor irrational secularists. Both are intellectual cripples, limping down their self paved paths to self created perfidy. May Allah help them both.

So what does a rational man swear up when elected POTUS? A Bible. Not a Koran. Not a copy of Emmanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason.'  Not on anything by Descarte for that matter. Nor Buddha. He indeed swears upon one of the biggest pieces of medievel fiction ever written: The King James Bible. Well hey, at least its not the Book of Mormon. Whatever.

So what to do? How can the secular man find something to swear upon, other than his mother-in-law's grave or negative balance checking account? What has some form of moral authority that no man would be tempted(notice Hillary is not a man)to cross? I had to muse upon this for a long time until it finally hit me: Abe Lincoln's hat.

Yes, Lincoln's top hat that he wore to Ford's Theatre. That hat that made the tall man taller, more iconic. A hat that is a national treasure imbued with meaning beyond a bible to most Americans. A hat that is a symbol of freedom due to the man that wore it. An American secular crown if you will.

I voted for Mr. Obama on Saturday and also became his delegate. Should be become president some day, he should consider Mr. Lincoln's hat. An oath upon this old secular chapeau would carry much more weight than any tired religious tome one can imagine.