Signing off...

This is the 197th and final post on this blog. I could have stretched it to 200, but it seems fitting to fall just short of a milestone.

It also seems fitting to end with a selection from Richard Brautigan's seminal book "Trout Fishing in America." We've featured lots of Brautigan stuff, but nothing from this blog's namesake work. This will be followed by one of my own short poems and a picture of one of my recent pots.

And that will be that.


The Kool-Aid Wino
Richard Brautigan

When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as the result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn’t because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn’t even enough money to buy him a truss. So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.

One morning in August I went over to his house. He was still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet in his life.

‘Did you bring the nickel you promised?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s here in my pocket.’

‘Good.’

He hopped out of bed and was already dressed. He had told me once that he never took off his clothes when he went to bed.

‘Why bother?’ he had said. ‘You’re only going to get up, anyway. Be prepared for it. You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.’

He went into the kitchen, stepping around the littlest children, whose wet diapers were in various stages of anarchy. He made his breakfast: a slice of homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

We left the house with him still eating the sandwich. The store was three blocks away, on the other side of a field covered with heavy yellow grass. There were many pheasants in the field. Fat with summer they barely flew away when we came up to them.

‘Hello,’ said the grocer. He was bald with a red birthmark on his head. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. He automatically reached for a package of grape Kool-Aid and put it on the counter.

‘Five cents.’

‘He’s got it,’ my friend said.

I reached into my pocket and gave the nickel to the grocer. He nodded and the old red car wobbled back and forth on the road as if the driver were having an epileptic seizure.

We left.

My friend led the way across the field. One of the pheasants didn’t even bother to fly. He ran across the field in front of us like a feathered pig.

When we got back to my friend’s house the ceremony began. To him the making of Kool-Aid was a romance and a ceremony. It had to be performed in an exact manner and with dignity.

First he got a gallon jar and went around to the side of the house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.

He opened the Kool-Aid and dumped it into the jar. Putting the jar under the spigot, he turned the water on. The water spit, splashed and guzzled out of the spigot.

He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious Kool-Aid spill out on to the ground. When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination. Then he screwed the lid tightly on to the top of the jar and gave it a good shake.

The first part of the ceremony was over.

Like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the first part of the ceremony well.
His mother came around the side of the house and said in a voice filled with sand and string,

‘When are you going to do the dishes?...Huh?

‘Soon,’ he said.

‘Well, you better,’ she said.

When she left, it was as if she had never been there at all. The second part of the ceremony began with him carrying the jar very carefully to an abandoned chicken house in the back. ‘The dishes can wait,’ he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.

He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars. He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling a drop. He screwed their caps on tightly and was now ready for a day’s drinking.

You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn't any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

----

This version is from the 2nd UK edition, published by Vintage in 1997. The first UK edition was published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Original copyright Richard Brautigan 1967.

Curiously, one of the reviews quoted on the jacket cover is from The Financial Times. The Financial Times called Brautigan "A master of American black absurdism." What?

----

Step back
-- Jim Haas

I watch you go again.
It never gets easy even though it has become familiar
A commonplace

Can I tell you this?
"Don't be silly," you'd say.

But every day seems an opportunity lost
Every parting another small step away

-----

This vase was made some time ago and sold at the Northfield Arts Guild shop. It's not my best work, but is representative.

See you around town or around the ol' blogosphere!

Truth is stranger than....

Today's court calendar included this entry: "Forfieture. State of Minnesota v. 1997 Red Geo Metro."

Forfieture cases (where the state is siezing a vehicle or other property used in a crime -- usually a drug crime) aren't all that common in the county where I work. We should all be glad that the heavy artillery of the criminal justice system has been fired up in this case, eh?. That nasty person will no longer be able to enjoy the use of his 1997 Red Geo Metro! Ha! Take that!

(On 2nd thought, instead of taking it away from the miscreant, the court should make him drive it for the next ten years.)

End of the Line

In a week or so, this little blog will shut down. I plan to keep up with my favorite blogs and may post a comment now and then on those blogs. And I'll keep writing, maybe even submitting some essays and poems for publication. But I have grown weary of the blog thing.

The final post will feature one sublime Brautigan piece, one amazing drummer video, one mediocre poem of my own, and a picture of a nice pot. That should pretty much sum things up.

Thanks for reading and commenting during the short life of this blog. I appreciate it.

Have a wonderful 2009!

I'll Grant You That (Part VI)

The following announcement appeared on Grants.gov last week:

HHS
Department of Health and Human Services
National Institutes of Health
Optimization of Small Molecule Probes for the Nervous System (R21) Grant


My question: What function does the word "small" serve in that sentence?

Plowing right along

Penelopedia and other local bloggers have noted the unusual amount of snow we've had hereabouts so far this winter. At the same time, local governments are scrambling to find ways to spend less in the face of dire economic news. The Governor -- he's so charming, with that cute grin of his -- has 'unallotted' about six months worth of state aid payments to local governments, and that's just the first of many such cuts to come.

Here's my idea: stop plowing snow. Seriously. I wonder why snow removal is assumed to be the responsibility of the government. The quickest way to privatize this function is for government to simply stop doing it. And our Governor, not without justification, believes that the private sector is more efficient than government at most things, so relying on the private sector would presumably improve snow removal, right? I would happily join my neighbors in contracting with a private vendor who would plow our street. I'd even pay a small premium if that vendor would promise in writing not to leave heaps of snow at the bottom of my driveway.

Maybe the private company that hauls garbage could equip its trucks with plows. Maybe all those grain trucks that sit idle during winter could become snow plowing and snow hauling trucks. In any case, I trust that the market -- that great engine of innovation and opportunism -- would quickly meet the demand. You live in Northfield and it snows, you either remove the snow yourself (from the place where you live or work and from the portion of the public right-of-way that abuts it) or hire somebody to do it.

What say you, Timmy? Mayor Mary?

Too Cold for Baseball?

Everybody's talking about the cold. Y'know, it does get cold in the winter in these parts, but I understand why it's still newsworthy. It got really cold really fast (see the graph on Rob Hardy's blog, it's...umm...chilling). And it's the first nasty cold snap this season, which, though inevitable, still takes one by suprise.

Here are a couple of poems by Gail Mazur that I think are apropos.

Ice
Gail Mazur

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then—twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it’s dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn’t music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Gail Mazur, “Ice” from Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Copyright © 1995 by Gail Mazur.

Baseball
Gail Mazur (for John Limon)

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner

and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks
of in Breughel’s Icarus,
or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other and moving up and down
continuously for more beer
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown,
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,
manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away

Gail Mazur, “Baseball” from Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Copyright 1978 by Gail Mazur.

"...the mystery/of accidents always contained..." Sweet music.

Enjoy the cold!

Offseason Acquisitions

Major league Baseball, Inc. is having its annual winter meeting in Las Vegas. Sometimes teams make player trades during these meetings, but there are always more rumored trades than actual trades, especially for the Twins. It’s something for baseball writers and baseball fans to talk about during the long winter months.

In the Star-Tribune, one story from the winter meetings said that the Twins are looking for “a shortstop who can play defense and hit a little.” Read that phrase again. It raises a couple of questions, one of which might be: As opposed to what?

Some other useful things a shortstop can do if the shortstop can’t play defense and hit a little:

Help the umpires rub mud on the baseballs before each game.
Hang plastic sheets over the lockers to prepare for the victory celebration.*
Make sure there are plenty of paper cups in the bullpen so the relievers can play flippy-cup.
Make up elaborate and funny rules for bullpen flippy-cup.
Learn calligraphy and put really fancy numbers on the knobs of the bats and on batting helmets and batting gloves, giving the dugout some class.
Be a manager on the field.
Play with grit and hustle.
Make a festive centerpiece for the post-game buffet out of broken bats, dugout spittoons, an Ace bandage, and the rosin bag.
Start a blog.


---
* If the shortstop truly can't play defense and hit a little, he will pobably have to hang the plastic in the visitor's locker room.