The Zog Blog

2004-04-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

I've got a job, hoohaa. I guess. It's not writing headlines for the New York Daily News or NY Post, nor is it covering cops for either of them, but it will do. It's the government and Congressional beat for the American Trucking Associations (nope, the bosses, not the Teamsters, and yes, it's plural). So a week after I sign the contract to sell my house because I can't afford the payments I get a job that would allow me to afford to stay. Karma's a sonuvabitch.

I guess it's for the best. Friends have called the neighborhood "toxic," and while on one hand I want to disagree vehemently, I can see some of the reality. It once was toxic: Junkies and their dealers, winos, thieves, burglars, the occasional gunshots, never a dull moment on 15th Street. Hustlers, schizophrenics, junkies knocking on my door with some new rap that's all the same as the last one. It's not like I'm living in the middle of the city in a vibrant neighborhood full of coffee shops, cafes, poets, saloons, art, literature, and life. Just corner stores (one called "Yoni" what's not to like about that: I'm a half-block up from Yoni, I tell potential visitors). The dope dealers have moved on with a little not-so-subtle help, crime is way down. So now, for all intents and purposes, it's not that different from a suburban bedroom community, except we've got sirens here.

But no more Sunday mornings with coffee and newspaper on the stoop listening to the Gospel music bursting forth from Jesus Is The Way with each crack of the door; no more minor groceries -- bread, milk, etc. -- at either corner of the block; no more entertainment value of the latest laughable hustle. And I'm going to be out of the city where I was born and sometimes raised.

I hated life when my family moved to the suburbs. The lily-whiteness of it all, and yes there were some white picket fences, left me lost in a land I didn't make. Better schools, sure. Crime was a rarity, sure. And no fistfights over bus tokens. But too much naivete, insufferable innocence, spoiled kids, limousine liberalism, and no buzz. Adrenaline was saved for little league baseball and football, not the bus ride home. No menace anywhere, at least not a factor in daily life. People walked the streets without moving their eyes back and forth and thought I was weird because I always watched all around me. I was surrounded by punks.

I have to start getting my financial ducks in a row. Got to do it to get a place to live. Back to punkdom may not be such a bad thing after all.

2004-04-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

A take on the weekend, a la country weekly society column.

For some, this weekend was a celebration of Resurrection. For me, it was all ham all the time. Saturday, it was at Lennie's, Sunday it was chez Denise (only a block away from Lennie, but a million miles nonetheless).

We gathered at Lennie's for a Rip Torn cult flick, "Payday" -- if it had been done in black and white it easily would fall into the noir mileu. We gathered with our backs to the fire (It's April, goddammit, why do we need a damned fire!) Anti-hero and B-grade country singer Rip is, how shall we say it, an asshole. Hell, he even boinks a a reluctant groupie in the back seat of a Cadillac while his main squeeze supposedly is catching a nap. He's a drunk, a pill-popper, and he uses people. He's more worried about his dog than he is about his pill-poppin' momma. His is a life on the road, seedy motels, second-rate lounges, surrounded by bewildered psychophants wondering what the hell they are doing with this guy.

It was preceded by Suthun fare: ham, cole slaw and macaroni and cheese (thanks Christina, who also made corn muffins mmmm), and such. Doc Link led off with a discussion of antiheroes (Our country singer was one), vigorously argued by near-Doc Hughes with some sniping pro and con from the others gathered for the soiree. And neither Christina nor Marlis McCollum could figure out how to tie a knot in the stem of a maraschino cherry. They are far too classy for that type of bimbo behavior, but bless 'em for trying.

A good time was had by all.

Sunday, the grey-clad outside is hardly what our mind's eye sees when we say Easter. But I guess all the flowers on the churchladies' hats need water too. I'd be prevaricating if I said the temperature broke 50.

It was ham, green beans, mashed potatoes with a hint of horseradish (mmmmm), and cake and ice cream for Jennifer's earlier natal festivities. Plastic eggs filled with booty were strewn hither and yon, and Doc Link found most of them. It was quite a spread and good conversation, even if we didn't solve all the problems of the world (Bush is still in office, so ...) Jennifer got TWO BRICKS (as in about that size and weight) of nut-riddled fudge for her birthday. What's not to like?

Jim and I got to play Alpha males when Jennifer's truck wouldn't start: "Hand me those jumper cables, Missy, and we'll have you out of this jam in no time .... Vroom Vroom. And she didn't even give up any of the fudge. See if I give her a silver bullet next time.

Monday is the same gray, but that's OK, it's Monday and it sucks anyway. Leftover ham, mac and cheese and such.

Now my riff on ham. It's great. A feast item that makes the best leftovers. You can make sammiches for a cuppla days, then cut scraps off it and mix em up in salad, or mac and cheese or whatever, and then make a hellacious pea or bean soup with the meat-flecked bone. It's best to boil up the bone first, then put the whole pot in the icebox (outside if it's winter). Next day, skim off the fat, take out the bone itself and throw it away. Add onions, garlioc powder, chunks of celery, chopped carrots, a cuppla bay leaves. Then add the peas or beens or lentils. Cook slowly. Eat with a hearty bread, maybe some cheese.

Ham rules. Makes me glad I'm Goyim.

2004-04-07T16:15:00.000-07:00

"What fresh hell is this," sayeth the sharp-tongued dame Dorothy Parker. Indeed, Iraq has gone to hell in a handbasket in just three days. A religious zealot leading well-armed guerrillas has put the curse on occupation forces, Americans in particular. And Marines, with little or no sense of humor about people shooting at them, called in air strikes on a mosque filled with Iraqi gunmen. We're going to save this village of we by g-d have to destroy it!

Could the last three days be the Tet Offensive of the Iraqui adventure? By all common-sense measures, South Vietnamese and American forces kicked booty in 1968, but it was the beginning of the end for American involvement; the pictures on the nightly news were too gruesome for the vox populi to take. America may kick booty this time around, too, but the morgue at Dover Air Force Base is going to be busy.

International terror, Gulf of Tonkin, the check is in the mail -- it's just a world built on lies. How long will the memory of 9/11's 3,000 dead last? How much vengeance is needed to balance accounts? And are we going after the evildoers?

OK, enough pissant punditry.

I take Susan to the airport tomorrow morning for her big adventure in Western Samoa. Samoan men have tattoos covering most of their bodies and everyone wears togaesque garb. Apparently there's a strong Mormon presence in the islands, who'd have thunk it? I wonder how the white shirt-clad Mormon missionaries do with their bikes on the beach? Not a bad gig, proselytizing in the South Pacific, when you could get sent to Vladivostok. I wonder if the Jehovah's Witnesses are out there too.

Susan will be gone for two weeks, gallivanting among the bugs and parasitic diseases. And oh yeah, the fish, the fruits and vegetables and all those tattooed dress-wearing men.

Tomorrow the buyer comes through with a home inspector. Good luck, guys and gals, I'll be at the airport. I don't care what they find, I'm not dropping the price. The place works. It could be better, but that's why g-d make contractors.

Enough of this. I can't get down to the nitty gritty so I'll just stop.

M'ahalo

2004-04-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

OK, I just signed the contract to sell my house. A yuppie gal is buying it, she's going to rehab it. The house deserves better than I've been able to provide.

But I've got a big pit in my gut. What now? I've got to get the place packed up (ugh) and find a place to live. Settlement is April 26, I'll have until June 25 (rent-free) to move. I'd like to get a place on Greenbelt, but who knows if I'll get lucky? Luck hasn't been on my side lately.

It's a change, hopefully, for the better. This house never resonated with me the way the apartment on G Street did. Sure, G Street was much smaller, but the room I spent much time in faced south and had lots of sunlight. It was a Bohemian hideaway with benefits: I had raspberries and asparagus and tomatoes and lettuce and broccoli and spinach and rhubarb and herbs. I even got a watermelon, a Baby Sweet, out of the yard one year. And so what if it was smaller? "Stuff" expands to fit the space available -- and in my case, to crowd out the space available. The woman who's buying the place mentioned she wanted to put a Dumpster out front to get rid of the ratty rugs and such. I hope she does it soon so I can fill it up with a bunch of my crap.

Whatever happens, Big Guy, in his old age, will have to find new hideaways and range to roam in a new place. Can you teach an old cat new tricks? And as I've learned, the demons in my soul will move with me. The bastards. Anyone want to buy some used demons at a moving sale? I'll let them go real cheap. Maybe I can pitch them into the Dumpster.

I want a functional kitchen. That's important. I'd like to have some sun-drenched yard to plant some vegetables. That's less likely in heavily treed Greenbelt, but I might be able to find some community garden space. A washer/dryer would be nice; it's hard to get psyched to go to a laundromat so dirty clothes fester in piles.

But life goes on, and I hope I can roll with it -- and wind up somewhere with my face turned toward that sun.

2004-04-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

wschelt@aol.com

Bathing is good. A good hot shower cleanses the soul -- plus it washes away the funk. Meditation, done right, can wash away the negative waves (Moriarity) and leave a blank slate. But lately I haven't been unable to unfocus on the unfocusedness of my life to get the wash-and-wax of my mind. There's always something going on in the background disrupting the white noise of the mind that's like sticking a hose in one ear and washing all the crap out the other.

If you've ever cleaned a tuba, and I have, you get a good mental picture of what I'm talking about. First, you unscrew and pull out the valves, baring the soul of the horn's tubing. Set them aside in a pan of soapy water. (This sounds semi Martha Stewartish recipesque.) But then, what Martha forgets, get nekkid and take the horn into the shower. Let the warm (not too hot) water rain into the bell, then turn it upside down (Woooo, it's heavy as hell already, now it's filled with water.) and let the water flow back into all the plumbing. Now take your sproingy brush, it looks a bit like a toilet snake but smaller, and run it through the piping to dislodge the crud. Empty. Now, fill again but this time add a little liquid Ivory dish soap. Repeat the brushing but be a bit more thorough this time. Empty it again. Then repeat twice with clear water. Let it dry. Take out all the tuning pipes and wipe them down, run the brush through them. Then slap some vaseline on them, put back in one side at a time and twist it around. Then replace all of them (There's five on my particular horn; one main tuning pipe plus one for each of the four valves.) With a soft non-shedding cloth, clean the valve pistons. Dry them, then give them several drops of valve oil and replace them (I hope you somehow numbered them so the right pistons go back into the right holes. Otherwise, you're in trouble and the horn just won't work. Period. You'll have to play around with them until you get 'em all correct.)

And that "play around with 'em" is what shrinkage is all about. Once you've gotten rid of the crusty junk and dried spit from your soul, you need to relearn how to live, get the valves all working. It hadn't been working before, you just have to putz around, try this, try that. Slap a little Brasso on the bell and shine it up, fine, but it's still nothing until the breath of life can go in one end and around and around and around and come out wafting sonorous. Not just oom-pah, you heathens.

And several months later, do it all again.

2004-04-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

I'm back.

Am I getting too damned old? Today is the 36th anniversary (hmm, sounds too celebratory) of Martin Luther King's assassination. He was gunned down on the second-story walkway at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and a martyr was born. He had been to the mountaintop, he said earlier in the week. His death was a tragedy, as was the aftermath. But maybe even more of a tragedy was this: Some cracker was going to get him anyway. If not James Earl Ray, somebody. And that just plain sucks.

It was a Thursday evening and my parents had gone to the high school to watch the oldest of the next-door neighbor's son's play Arthur in Camelot. The television was on in the background and I heard the bulletin, but just as a break-in to the regular programming, I didn't really notice what they said. I forget what was on. Several minutes later the network broke in again with another bulletin and I heard it: Martin Luther King had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

MLK and Memphis had been in the news that week (Walter Cronkite, of course) because he was down there leading the garbage worker's strike. I was young enough, 11, that I didn't quite grasp the nuances of organized labor and racial issues. I was not yet a year out of DC Public Schools and into the suburbs and I was somewhat befuddled by the way these lily-white uber privileged kids treated the few blacks in the school. I did have sorta an idea that King was a troublemaker because he was always around the police, and trouble followed. It was 1968 and America was deeply troubled.

I scrawled out a note and taped it to the front door so my parents would see it when they came home. By that time King was dead and even though I didn't yet grasp the significance I did know that all the networks and radio stations thought it was big. Maybe that was the first BULLETIN I ever filed; more would come later in my news career, but none so significant.

School let out at 3 the next day, hey it's the weekend. But a pallor of smoke scummed over the city several miles south. The outrage had started.

A short side here: My grandparents lived in the city, on the then-fringes of Capitol Hill. Figuring they might be locked in for the weekend, she trundled down to the corner liquor store (which also had a righteous collection of penny candy, but I digress) and "WAS NEVER SO INSULTED IN MY LIFE!!!" There was a line -- she never went there, so she didn't know what to expect, didn't know that was out of character -- and when she finally got all 5-2 of herself up to the front she asked for a bottle of gin. Martinis aren't a new thing invented by yuppie slackers, ya know.

"Pint or half-pint, lady" the clerk asked.

"Pint or half-pint?" she growled. "What do you think I am, some kind of drunk? I want a fifth!"

And blind-as-a-bat Malvelle Haller who lived down the street from my grandparents and across the street from where I had lived until very recently, was trundling home from the grocery store around the corner, somewhat clueless. The block was dotted with large, strange men. And they weren't too polite to this liberal Yankee woman. Her husband was, at the time, one of the world experts in John Milton up at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and they were an erudite couple. So after getting a little rude treatment, she finally figured out what was happening -- maybe it was the smoke coming from 8th Street across from the Marine Barracks a block-and-a-half away.

"OH GOODIE," she said. "We're going to have a RIOT!"

Fear spread with the smoke. Up in Northeast near the Supreme Court, Thumper (that was his nickname then, but no longer) and his family were packing up to head to their boat, docked between Fort McNair and an electric power station. Good, safe place. Until some recent renovations, there still was a quarter-sized hole in the kitchen floor -- gotta watch where you put the chair leg -- that just happened to get there when Ol' Man Wallace was cleaning one if his .45 semiautomatics. BANG. Oops.

I watched the smoke pillars that afternoon as my home, my city, burned.

My grandparents got out of town and went to their place out in the country -- the home of the bell. LBJ called in the Army and airborne troops were posted at intersections and had sandbagged machine-gun emplacements around the Capitol and the White House. The National Guard -- including several members of the Washington Senators, think Eddie Brinkman for sure -- was patrolling the streets. There was a sniper reported atop the roof of Miller Furniture at 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast -- my old neighborhood. Suburban cops put up roadblocks on all the main drags leading out of the city. We'll have none of that nonsense out here. Gas stations and liquor stores shut down by order of the mayor.

Fourteenth Street and U Street in Northwest, H Street in Northeast, all were ablaze and looted. Lots of trouble about in the land. Fourteenth Street and U Street have more-than recovered nearly 40 years later and the area is a mecca for its nightclubs, playhouses and restaurants. H Street is still a flotsam and jetsam of retail, bad carry-out places, wig shops and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs just around the corner.

I don't remember how many people were killed in the melee, but I remember several years ago when a construction crew tearing down a building on H Street found the body of a soldier who had gone missing that weekend. What died almost instantly was the faux southern culture of the city. No longer would blacks step aside for whites on the sidewalk. Even the older men who had been held down their entire lives walked with their heads held high.

Maybe it was something that needed to happen.

And an 11-year-old innocent missed the Opening Day baseball game.

2004-04-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday with not much sun. Oops, there's a brief glimpse. There it goes, so long. It's as if the weather was reacting to my mood: Do I rain or not? Overcast or not? Chilly or not? And the answer usually is the wrong one. Or not.

There's damned little in today's Washington Post want ads. There's repeats of jobs for which I've already applied. There's entry-level jobs where they want experience in just about every desktop publishing program known to modern man, and they probably wouldn't mind an intimate knowledge of chisel and stone. Gutenberg was the man. Actually, Herr Gutenberg was a goldsmith who adapted his skills to carving movable type. I guess there's a lesson in that for bad job markets; become an entrepreneur and create your own job. What that means is all you faithful readers must send me cash for the right to meander along with me.

I've been perusing the Internet for HUD-foreclosed houses, and it looks like there's one in Brentwood that could be a possibility. The irony! I'm selling to avoid HUD foreclosure and thinking of snapping up someone else's sorrows. There's some others, but they sound as if they are absolute wrecks ("no insurance due to roof, plumbing. wood rot, electrical, blah, blah, sis-boom-bah") Sounds like a convenient fire waiting to happen.

Prices are right in Baltimore, but that's a tad far away from all my pals and I need 'em badly. If I get a job up that way in the next several weeks, and I've applied for some (hahahaha), I would consider the move. Prices are right in the Deanwood section of DC, too, but I'm worn out with urban pioneering and it will be two generations -- if ever -- before things pick up in that section of across the river. It might be the only neighborhood in DC where you can actually bargain down the seller, aside from far Southeast.

The Big Guy is taking advantage of a brief spot of sunlight and he's working on his tan. A cat ought to be the picture in the dictionary next to "lounge." They do it so well, and effortlessly -- as it should be done.

Wolf Blitzer is talking to Howard Dean about the Bush administration. The multi-level irrelevance astounds me. CSPAN radio, the ultimate DC geek activity.

I'd be planting lettuce and spinach in the backyard around now, but why? I'm outa here before I'll get any. Well, not the spinach, maybe some lettuce. It's another thing added to my "Why Bother" list. What happened to all the crocus? Croci? The daffodils and the jonquils are doing their thing, and the lavender and ivy ought to revive fairly soon. Except... except... except it's supposed to be rainy, overcast and cool all this week. April Showers can bite my butt, the plants and I need some of that Vitamin D sunlight. Partly sunny just doesn't do the trick and if we're lucky we might get as high as 61 degrees on Thursday -- when it's supposed to rain all day. Chew it well, muses of meteorology.

I'm cringing in the rain.

2004-04-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

wschelt@aol.com

So much of (white and from somewhere else) DC is all about what you do. Are you on The Hill? K Street? Tech stuff? Hello, the perfunctory fake pleasantries and the "So what do you DO?"

Not much, it seems.

I send out 10-12 cover letters/resumes/clips a week. I call around here and there trying to find work. I fret, worry, and fear myself. I drink cold coffee and rarely eat anything with more soul than a sandwich. So that's what I do with my time. Oh yeh, I take care of the Big Guy, sort of.

I thought money would talk, but maybe it doesn't yell loud enough; it's only 6 figures we're talking about here. I went to Greenbelt yesterday, sat down with a real estate agent. The type of Greenbelt house I can afford? It usually goes within 24 hours of hitting the market. You snooze, you lose. And there's the coop thing. I'm barely self-employed, so the coop people fear I might not be able to pay the monthly coop fees. Hell, I'll be able to pay two years in advance, I wonder if that will be good enough to cool their jets?

Maybe I'll just chuck everything and move into a rural Alabama single-wide and wait for the tornado. I've grown quite accustomed to eating dried beans, though Big Guy still has his doubts. But then he has his doubts about everything and glares moral inferiority into everything, including the plaster walls.

Maybe it's time to jump the White House fence. St Elizabeths (Don't get smart with me, it has NO apostrophe.) has some of the best views in town if you overlook the concrete plant and the tank farm. Just could be that I'm crazy, but if America re-elects George Bush this year I'll have plenty of company, but they'll be outside the walls.

I've never been cruel to pets and never burned anything down when I was a kid. Does that mean I'm sane? Even if I've done some "crazy" stuff back in the day? Or even if occasionally I have to scrub away at an anti-social streak? And see "anger management" as more effective, well-directed rage? Stare at blank walls and see all kinds of stuff? Are you sane if you win the argument with your inner voices? Take enough meds to choke a horse and flounder with the side effects, when the side effect of NOT taking them likely would be fatal -- and thinking that would be so much easier in the long run?

"Pets or Meat" the crazed rabbit-selling woman advertises in one of Michael Moore's earlier tomes. Naw, just something soft and furry and cute to stomp on. But that brings me back to "I've never been cruel to pets ..."

My fingers clog-dance across the keyboard with enough force to form lead type back in the day. Does that mean I'm angry? Probably so.

I'm mad as hell and I guess I'll just have to take it some more.

2004-04-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

wschelt@aol.com

A real estate guy with smarm in his future dropped by today to go over some paperwork on the impending sale of Chateau Will. He wanted me to sign lots of stuff that had teeny-tiny print on it, looked to be about 4-point type. Not a chance, weezilboy. You just go and fax all that stuff to my lawyer/brother, let him put the sweat to you. Sure, it looked to be all boilerplate, but I'm not just ready to jump off the turnip cart yet. I did initial several things in my own illegible should-have-been-a-doctor scrawl.

Now the worry. Will there be a place out in Greenbelt that I can buy? If not, I'll be jammed up and forced to rent (if my credit rating will allow, even with a wad of greenbacks) or move way out in the country. The boonies sounds attractive, I thought about it before I got this place, but it gets awfully lonely out there and too much introspection isn't always a good thing -- especially if it gets out of hand if you know what I mean and I think you just might. Mount Rainier would be nice with its unreconstructed hippies and other assorted lefties, but it's out of reach on the money front. Whatever it is, there's just got to be a better kitchen than the hellhole I have here. There's just zippo space, no counters (it gets old slicing stuff directly into the pot) and generally a pain in the ass. Plus the stove sucks. And the sink. And the icebox. Much of it my fault, much of it not. No matter, it sucks anyway.

Cooking will improve my frame of mind. A chopping block and a good knife = stress reduction. Just lay and onion down and chop the bejezus out of it and I guarantee you'll feel better, especially if you anthropomorphize the orb into whoever it is today that deserves the ol' slice-and-dice. For you Lorena Bobbitesque types, there's carrots, cucumbers, squash -- you get the point. I want a light-bathed kitchen, a dishwasher would be a major bonus but not required. I want counter space and storage. I want a gas stove but may have to forego that in Greenbelt. Many of my faithful readers know of the garlic-laden goodies that emerge from the soul of the house when I have the wherewithall(sp?).

In about a half hour I may head out to Greenbelt to scope it out, just drive around, take notes, check for signs, drop in on a real estate place or two, snag some local papers. Maybe check out Jim Link if he's around. I'll call first. Can you put a canoe in Greenbelt Lake? Drown a worm or two? I think there's a community garden hidden off in the woods beyond Chalet de Linque. Is there space there for me or is there a years-long waiting list?

I went to a staffing outfit in Rockville yesterday, they were supposed to call me yesterday afternoon. Is it a bad sign that I haven't heard from them? Probably. Either I don't match what they have or they are semi-incompetent. Time to get offline and give them a call.

Why won't folks buy the stuff I'm trying to sell? Are they Bushwhacked too, and poor like a churchmouse?

And where's my meds?

2004-03-30T16:13:00.001-08:00

Time to change despair tire, it's been running flat for too long. Time to move along, nothing to see here, move along. But move along where?
Sometimes I feel like finding a cheap trailer, a single-wide even, way out in the country and just holing up. Take some impenetrable literature that takes forever to wade through, just to have something to do. Hack my through some literary jungle. Or not.

So I'm selling my house, or so it seems. No biggie, I never really got into the right groove here anyway. But I will be leaving DC, even if it's just for the burbs. I hated it back in the late 60s when my parents packed us all up and moved out of the city, and I moved back as soon as I could. The idea that I'm leaving on my own, and not toes up, seems so wrong on so many levels. Every time I've left -- twice for jobs in the midwest -- I've felt the energy swell through my soles when I set foot back on home turf. I can feel this place, its rhythyms, its breathing, its life and death, everything. Sure Greenbelt -- my current favored landing spot -- isn't far away, especially by current commuter standards with people coming from West By God Virginia and halfway to Richmond into DC everyday for cubicle jobs. And Greenbelt is chock full of interesting, creative peeps, there's no junkies across the street, there's stuff going on all the time at the library, at the New Deal Cafe, the movie house. There's probably little or no gunfire, cars are relatively safe and the surly level is way down. What's not to like?

I can;t really answer that. Hell, I wouldn't be all that thrilled living west of Rock Creek Park or up on the Gold Coast of upper 16th Street either. Jazz and blues both out of place over there and up there, that's what it is. Maybe it's the homogenous nature of those places -- all well off -- that I don't like. No laundromats featuring razor and bleach fights, everybody's got a washer and dryer in the house. Just too damned safe, that might be it. Aren't all the cool and ultrahip movie and TV soundtracks playing in the city? The suburbs are Muzak (trademark). Yeh, I'm a friggin' snob that way.

In the city I can walk across the street for bread and milk and have as much privacy as I please. The door works both ways. Out in the country I could have space and privacy, but the inconvenience of a car trip for victuals. In the suburbs you have the cheek-by-jowl living with all the convenience of Green Acres.

And the bitch of all this, I'll probably get a decent job downtown as soon as I move to the 'burbs. Thanks, Murphy.

2004-03-30T16:13:00.000-08:00

Time to change despair tire, it's been running flat for too long. Time to move along, nothing to see here, move along. But move along where?
Sometimes I feel like finding a cheap trailer, a single-wide even, way out in the country and just holing up. Take some impenetrable literature that takes forever to wade through, just to have something to do. Hack my my through some literary jungle. Or not.

So I'm selling my house, or so it seems. No biggie, I never really got into the right groove here anyway. But I will be leaving DC, even if it's just for the burbs. I hated it back in the late 60s when my parents packed us all up and moved out of the city, and I moved back as soon as I could. The idea that I'm leaving on my own, and not toes up, seems so wrong on so many levels. Every time I've left -- twice for jobs in the midwest -- I've felt the energy swell through my soles when I set foot back on home turf. I can feel this place, its rhythyms, its breathing, its life and death, everything. Sure Greenbelt -- my current favored landing spot -- isn't far away, especially by current commuter standards with people coming from West By God Virginia and halfway to Richmond into DC everyday for cubicle jobs. And Greenbelt is chock full of interesting, creative peeps, there's no junkies across the street, there's stuff going on all the time at the library, at the New Deal Cafe, the movie house. There's probably little or no gunfire, cars are relatively safe and the surly level is way down. What's not to like?

I can;t really answer that. Hell, I wouldn't be all that thrilled living west of Rock Creek Park or up on the Gold Coast of upper 16th Street either. Jazz and blues both out of place over there and up there, that's what it is. Maybe it's the homogenous nature of those places -- all well off -- that I don't like. No laundromats featuring razor and bleach fights, everybody's got a washer and dryer in the house. Just too damned safe, that might be it. Aren't all the cool and ultrahip movie and TV soundtracks playing in the city? The suburbs are Muzak (trademark). Yeh, I'm a friggin' snob that way.

In the city I can walk across the street for bread and milk and have as much privacy as I please. The door works both ways. Out in the country I could have space and privacy, but the inconvenience of a car trip for victuals. In the suburbs you have the cheek-by-jowl living with all the convenience of Green Acres.

And the bitch of all this, I'll probably get a decent job downtown as soon as I move to the 'burbs. Thanks, Murphy.

2004-03-29T16:18:00.000-08:00

wschelt@aol.com

Mondays suck, even if you don't have to go to work. Trust me on this. Sunday's paper had less than a plethora of jobs, and the Post has changed its Help Wanted section so you have to run all about hither and yon to find stuff. I'll get used to it after awhile, but for the time being it's a pain in the gluteus maximus. The usual suspects among the job boards also were bereft of decent leads. Hey, at least I got a form letter from NASA today saying they'd hired someone else for a writing job I applied for five months ago.

A chill in the air replaced weekend's warm glow. I hope y'all followed my advice from last week and didn't run out and get tomato plants. And for those of you who either have no yard to speak of or don't feel like commiting to a real vegetable garden, there's some tomato plants that do well in containers, and herbs grow well in pots too. I hope I can find a place in Greenbelt that gets some sun. Hell, I hope I can find a place out there, with or without sun. It's what I'll be able to afford after the flight from the inner city.

I sold a pair of really strong binoculars over the weekend. To show you what we've become in this Bush/Ashcroft-inspired paranoia party, I was a tad worried when the Arab-looking guy bought the glasses that can really reach out and take a look wayyyyy downrange. Maybe he's scoping out a place to blow up or some such lunacy. Or there might be a woman across the street who leaves her curtains open. Which kind of creepy do I assume of a foreign type, 1-each?

I did get a call from a temp agency today, but I don't remember sending anything their way. The woman called and asked for Greg, now how's that for a confidence builder? No Greg here, sorry. Then she called back and said, "Sorry, it was Greg who gave me your number. Who are you?" Ego boost No. 2. So I e-mailed her a resume and waited for her to call back "in a couple of minutes." An hour-and-a-half later I punched up the number on caller ID and called her back; she hadn't even looked at the resume, but would "inna cuppla minutes" and call me back. That was at 4 o'clock and it's a quarter til 8. I bet she's not calling me today. She said she had some editing jobs, but I saw no indication they even did any editorial type stuff when I checked their website. Ego boosters #3 and #4 in there somewhere.

The highlight of the day was a non-productive attempt at napping with the cat. Big Guy zonked right out, but not me. That's what I get for getting some sleep last night, finally. And I bought a book on the Internet for next month's book club, wowee zowee. Seventy-five sents for the book, $2.78 to ship it. That doesn't seem right somehow, but what's a muthuh to do?

Unless something drastic happens, Virginia will go for Bush this fall. But I'll be in either DC or Maryland, so I can feel smug whether he wins or loses, cuz those bastardly bastions of pinkos will go for Kerry. Thinking of fall-back plans, it's too bad it gets so damned cold in Canada. I even have kin and friends up that way, even if they do drink sweet beer, worship hockey and talk funny, eh. I've always wanted to see moose and grizzly bears in the wild, and lay back and watch the Northern Lights -- LSD without the side effects.

You can probably tell I'm forcing this too much. Sorry, there's just not too much inspiring me to literary greatness on this Monday so I'm just gonna have to make do with a boring quasi travelogue of my so-called day. Anyone know any jokes?

Monday muhallos to all y'all.

2004-03-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

So much for possible brief showers predicted by the weather gnomes. An all-day rain has settled in for Saturday. Not that Saturdays are all that special to someone who's not working, but there's some sympathy from the peanut gallery for all the folks who had to work through yesterday's glory. March showers bring April flowers or something like that.

Exactly zero sleep last night. Went to book club Friday night -- good eats etc. and Robertson Davies chez Denise -- and never was able to get to sleep afterward. Big Guy came to bed and left several times, rather intolerant of the tossing and turning. And now I'm propping my eyes open during a 2-hour dowload so I can get my printer working; at some point I'm supposed to plug in the damned BUS cable so the printer and computer can talk. INTERFACE THIS!

The alleged fan club has implied that I might ought to address some issues o' the day rather than dwell on my bellybutton. I'll do it, but I'll keep the rant posts distinct from the internal meanderings. It's probably easier to skip over the maudlin detritus that way, and cut straight to the chase of the multipartisan ravings of a political eunuch (Living in DC does that to a soul.). Ayn Randians may want to avoid the political stuff, there's already a near-epidemic problem with Americans' blood pressure as it is. Bush fans be afraid. Be VERY afriad. Kerry fans, too, but probably less so. I'm pondering my manifesto, it involves benevolent dictatorship prominently featuring your humble correspondent, big black cars with running boards, and flags on the fenders, and cool background music accompanying my travels hither and yon. All hail Zog! Blackeyes and greens in every pot! Every man a queen! (That means all the wimmins will be mine mine mine.).

Cool, I've figured out how to muck about with the type.

Belated natal felicitations to Diana Ross, who shared a birthday with Ella and Matty. She's 60. But then, Mick Jagger is in his 60s, Keith Richards was born 110 years old and still going strong despite the odds, and who the hell knows how old Wavy Gravy is these days. Or where and what and who and how he is. I had planned a long riff on aging icons but I think I'll pass, it's too depressing.

By the way, Etta James still rocks. Tell momma all about it. Her band cooks, with a honking growl of a low-register tenor sax driving the high horns. Elemental, my dear what's-his-name.

Pictures at 11.

2004-03-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

Comments appreciated. wschelt@aol.com

If I move the Greenbelt, it opens up the Baltimore job market. It's a reverse commute most of the way and probably shouldn't be too bad. Can't be as bad as the poor schlubs who drive to DC from Frederick, Stafford County, or Harper's Ferry. And they do, crawling lemmings of the highways. I even applied for an editing job in Bawlmer, in the Mount Vernon Square area. Probably parking hell, but I might be able to get a train in anyway. But that's if I get the job.

I've been beating my head against the wall of unemployment for too long. I will feel ssooooo good when I get a job and can stop the insanity. I actually like working with words, those little bits and bytes don't intimidate me. Editing appears to be where the work is, but it pays the bills so we can write on our own time. I've got some great dialogue -- think Elmore Leonard -- and some great descriptives -- think Jim Thompson -- but I need a plot. Anybody got one for me?

In the meantime it's probably one of the better days we'll have all year in the great outdoors. A day like this two weeks from now would top it; nature will be busting out all over by then, sorry about that all y'all hay fever folks. Meanwhile back at the raunch, I'm sitting inside flailing away at the keyboard. I've got a great big window -- 4 feet x 5 feet -- open behind my right shoulder. Big Guy has been straddling the sill and glaring moral inferiority into any and all denizens of the alley, with breaks for food and tummy scratching. No salmon will get through him to attack me, that's for sure. I hope I can get a place with a sunny window, for both me and Big Guy.

AP needs a news editor in Montgomery, Alabama. Housing is impossibly cheap down there: A three-bedroom and study, 1,800+ square feet, fireplace, hardwood floors, washer dryer, gas heat and stove blah blah blah can be had for less than $50K. How bad can a neighborhood be? The old pilloried? mansions with acreage run in the $300s -- a moderate townhouse in this neck of the woods. But talk about a hellish commute to DC ... and there's the Limbaugh factor. I suspect folks drive around midday snapping their fingers to that rant-wing radio beat. Ahh, my hair is short these days anyway, what the hell.

The doc tore me a semi new one yesterday and she's not even a proctologist. She's mostly a psychopharmocologist for me, but apparently I just don't say enough to her about what's going on. Yeh, I'm alive, suicidal ideation not too bad, etc., but not much more than that. Friends have complained to her about that too; I won't let the real me out. Oh well. We'll get to that, in dribs and drabs, I just don't want to unload and scare the living urine out of my peeps. Or myself. (Mice Elf, as Sly and the Family Stone say).

I've got to start gathering and filling boxes, selling off/giving away/throwing out lots of stuff. One way or another I've got to lighten the load and get out of here. It's not like being a yung 'un anymore, just cram the clothes and records in the car and go. There's actual stuff. The house here faces east-west, something I didn't consider enough when I bought it. The old apartment faced south so the one room where I spent lots of time had lots of sunlight, even in the dredges of winter, and the garden got more sun. Veggies LIKE sun.

Hang in ther folks. The moveable feast will need your help at some point so we can relocate the blackeyes and greens to a new venue.

Chow.

2004-03-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

Natal day update.

This is a list of great recordings the Library of Congress announced on March 19. I'm in good company. That was my birthday. Thanks to Susan for digging this up. More proof that the Internet rocks.

2003 National Recording Registry (In chronological order)

1. Emile Berliner. "The Lord's Prayer" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." (ca. 1888)
2. Vess Ossman. "Honolulu Cake Walk." (1898)
3. Bert Williams and George Walker. Victor Releases. (1901)
4. Billy Murray. "You're a Grand Old Rag [Flag]." (1906)
5. Frances Densmore Chippewa/Ojibwe Cylinder Collection. (1907-1910)
6. The first Bubble Book. (1917)
7. William Jennings Bryan. "Cross of Gold." Speech re-enactment by Bryan. (1921)
8. Guy B. Johnson Cylinder Recordings of African American Music. (1920s)
9. Okeh Laughing Record. (1922)
10. Associated Glee Clubs of America. "Adeste Fideles." (1925)
11. Amade Ardoin and Dennis McGee. Cajun-Creole Columbia releases. (1929)
12. Leadbelly. "Goodnight Irene." (1933)
13. Huey P. Long. "Every Man a King" speech. (1935)
14. Marian Anderson. "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." (1936)
15. Robert Johnson. The Complete Recordings. (1936-1937)
16. Jelly Roll Morton. Interviews conducted by Alan Lomax. (1938)
17. Benny Goodman. Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. (1938) 18. WJSV (Washington, D.C.) Complete Day of Radio Broadcasting. (September 21, 1939)
19. Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys. "New San Antonio Rose." (1940)
20. 1941 World Series Game Four - New York Yankees vs Brooklyn Dodgers
21. Robert Shaw Chorale. Bach B-Minor Mass. (1947)
22. Budapest Quartet. Beethoven String Quartets. (1940-1950)
23. George Gershwin. Porgy and Bess. Original Cast. (1940, 1942)
24. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Oklahoma! Original Cast. (1943)
25. Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, Jose Férrer and others. Othello. (1943)
26. Louis Kaufman and the Concert Hall String Orchestra. Vivaldi Four Seasons. (1947)
27. John Kirkpatrick. Ives Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord." (1948)
28. O. Winston Link. Steam Locomotive Recordings. (6 vol.: 1957-1977)
29. Rafael Kubelik conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Modest Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition. (1951)
30. Billy Graham. Problems of the American Home. (1954)
31. Glenn Gould. Bach Goldberg Variations. (1955)
32. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book. (1956)
33. Chuck Berry. "Roll Over Beethoven." (1956)
34. Thelonius Monk. Brilliant Corners. (1956)
35. Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Richard Wagner Complete Ring Cycle. (1958-1965)
36. Eastman Wind Ensemble with Frederick Fennell. Winds in Hi-Fi. (1958)
37. Charles Mingus. Mingus Ah-Um. (1959)
38. Tony Schwartz. New York Taxi Driver. (1959)
39. Patsy Cline. "Crazy." (1961)
40. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Frost and others. Kennedy Inaugural Ceremony. (1961)
41. Judy Garland. Judy at Carnegie Hall. (1961)
42. Otis Redding. "I've Been Loving You Too Long. (To Stop Now)" (1965)
43. The Beatles. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (1967)
44. Johnny Cash. At Folsom Prison. (1968)
45. Ali Akbar College of Music Archive Selections. (1960s-1970s)
46. Marvin Gaye. What's Goin' On. (1971)
47. Carole King. Tapestry. (1971)
48. Garrison Keillor. A Prairie Home Companion. (First broadcast of the variety show, July 6, 1974)
49. Bruce Springsteen. Born to Run. (1975)
50. Fania All-Stars. Live at Yankee Stadium. (1975)

2004-03-25T15:44:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to make of it -- or myself. Two hours of e-mail dickering and I'm selling my house. I'll clear some serious coin, but I'll need someplace to live. Greenbelt looks good, I'd like one of those small two-bedroom GHI places: walk to everything, maybe more than across the street like here but exercise allegedly is a good thing; get into seances where they channel Eleanor Roosevelt, get an exclusive interview; no junkies down the street (even though are getting further away by the month and they pose no threat to me, it gets old); and this place never had the same feel as my apartment on G Street anyway; it will force me to pick up, pack up, etc, and unload a bunch of stuff.

But it's leaving DC. The only places I could afford (got no credit, this will be a cash purchase) are over in Deanwood, Marshall Heights, Randle Highlands, like that. I've been a pioneer, and anyway that's not just pioneer, that's Jeremiah F---ing Johnson. I have the size and can have the beard for it, but BTDT, got the t-shirt, thank you very much. Mount Rainier would be my style, it's got Glut Food Coop catering to the lesbian Muslims among us and is Takoma Park without the glitter -- or the Volvos. But it's been discovered as "funky" which translates into just barely out of reach. There's a 6-bedroom place over in Colmar Manor, but it's as-is and on a flood plain. Not a plan.

There's the Greenbelt Theater, known to show good movies, have fresh (not too chewy) popcorn, and a cuppla bucks less than the humongoplex theaters. There's the New Deal Cafe, hippies, coffee, veggie food, poets, pissants. There's the store on the corner where they sell 7-Eleven stuff and hand-dipped ice cream. There's trees. There's folks I know. Howdy neighbor!

There might be a better vibe. Can't be worse, this place never really "spoke to my condition" as Lady Susan would say. I hope there's a spot to do some gardening out there, I'm still eating off the collard greens I planted in the backyard last summer and I love homegrown tomatoes. And basil. And oregano. Had bumper crops of these last year. Well, not on the tomatoes, the funky weather made 'em a bit leggy and it was really hot for awhile and they didn't set fruit. Apparently word had gotten around; no rats dared pilfer from the crop. It was either the Battle of the Berries or the Big Guy and his glare that kept them away; the garden backs up on to an inner-city alley and they are out there, somewhere.

I won't miss the firetrucks hitting the damned airhorn as they draw even with my bedroom window on the way toward the intersection. I might miss Danny and his never-ending hustle but I've survived his recent sojourn as a guest of the city anyway. I might miss (now Bishop) Bynum and his never-ending hustle. And there's the Jesus is the Way storefront church, it won't be a font of open-door gospel singing for summer Sunday mornings on the stoop, not in Greenbelt. I hope I have some sunlight so I can grow another gigandor lavender patch and no I'm not gay, I'm straight but not narrow. And the white roses, I need some sun for them too. Bulbs? I can always plant more where I land, and there's some that will tolerate shade.

I won't miss the stranger hustlers. I wont miss the useless kitchen in this place. I'd like to have a washer and dryer closer than 12 blocks away. I'm tired of the bleach and razor fights and the junkie boosters coming straight from the drugstore across the street to try and sell me a bar of soap for more than it costs at the store and heybuddyhaveyagottacigaretteforaveteran.

It's probably a good thing. I must make it so.

2004-03-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday Aretha Franklin and Matthew Solberg. Even Matty is getting too big to toss around anymore, and as for the Queen of Soul, well ....

Rumors of 70 degrees waft in the light breeze. And more of it tomorrow. Finally a little meteorological nurturing for the plants. You just know they've been waiting for this, like mice in a three-point stance as the cat heads outside. Weeds are the advance men in this campaign, but 'tis ever thus. Now don't get carried away folks, it's still too early for tomatoes and squash. Maybe some greens -- spinach, lettuce, those kinda things. Snow peas. A single packet of leaf lettuce holds like a kajillion seeds, just rub them into the soil and wait. It's OK to plant aurugula, radish and cress now. Thin 'em out a little after they come up (eat the tender little baby lettuce -- or is the plual letti?). And remember, you can eat the dandelion leaves, either in a salad like escarole or quickly sauteed in olive oil and garlic. Hmm, is there anything we wouldn't eat given enough olive oil and garlic? Besides what we have to eat working for THE MAN.

I predict Home Despot will shrug off winter this weekend. The fairer among us will want plants, the guys will head for Aisle 3 for the 5-gallon drum of testosterone. Stuff's sprouting all over. It's March Madness and the coeds on campus are shedding their down parkas about now if memory serves me.

All I'll say about baseball is that BOB SHORT MUST DIE OF A CASE OF RUNNING OOZING SORES. Not that I'm bitter or anything. He actually had the stones to run for U.S. Senate from I believe it was Minnesota. Like his car tires would stand a chance in this fair shire. Ratfucker.

I flipped on the little windup-sun-powered radio by the computer and WPFW was playing a lot of Aretha. Since I'd heard yesterday she was in the hospital, I was worried about it all, radio homage and all. But the announcer came on and said it was her birthday and she was home after a bad reaction to antibiotics. Good. She's 62, she can start collecting Social Security early if she wants.

I'll give young-'un Matty a call later when he's home from school. I think he's 8, but I remember him as a lump in Yasemin's belly. And even before that. Eight years old as I head off to short-haired fogeydom. But then I'd never want to be 8 ever ever never again.

Be hip, holmes.

2004-03-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda talks about seeing "the heavens unfastened and open" and Robert Frost was "acquainted with the night." William Blake strove for the moment when you could hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Me, I just want to sleep. Like a log. Like a baby.

There's times when I need a pharmaceutical mallet upside the head, sort of like in the cartoons where the hapless foil of the hero gets smacked and the tweety tweety birds and stars circle like a new age store mobile above his head.

But there's times when my subconscious is saving me from the horrors of sleep and the dreams it brings. My hair is ultra short these days, but when it was long I'd often wake up at 0-dark-thirty with my locks a stringy, sodden mass from the cold sweat. Oh joy. Stuff right out of Sam Peckinpaugh. I never can run quite fast enough, but the Catch-22 of it all is that I wake up before the worst happens so I can just go back to sleep, waiting waiting waiting for it to happen again.

Those are the times when my psycho/psychic cat tends to jump on the bed and stick his head out between the curtains, daring any and all denizens of the darkened street to approach. Laugh if you will, but this is the cat that chased a po-lees dawg out of the house. Burglars broke in through the basement window facing the alley and made off with my computer (bastards, it had Quark 4 loaded on it) and a bowl worth of quarters for the laundromat. Their booty (mine or theirs, I dunno) was too big to take out through the back window so they went out the front door. Miss Penny down at the corner, a professional porch-sitter, saw them and called the cops. The cops, as a matter of procedure, sent the dog in just in case the miscreants were still inside. The 120-lb Rottweiler made it as far as the bottom of the stairs about 10 feet inside the door, the handler later told me. The cat came flying down the stairs in full dudgeon (I've always wanted to use that word), claws a-flailin' fangs a-flashin'. The dog backed right up and out of the house. I wish the Big Guy had done that to the burglars, but I guess they posed no threat to his bowl of food.

So he's a good protector, in a very self-centered way. The junkies across the street certainly took note and were very timid when they knocked on my door for a handout. Too mad for them I don't smoke menthols, what junkies prefer. But they somehow managed.

After two nights with hardly any sleep, I feel like one of those bobblehead dolls. Just give me a football or batting helmet. Might not be a bad idea anyway, for when my head falls forward into something undoubtedly not quite as hard. "He never broke any mans head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk..." da Bard. Henry the V.

Check http://www.mcphee.com/bigindex/current/11093.html

Ain't the Internet grand? Along with useless meanderings you get bobblehead Jesus, yours for only $4.95 plus shipping and handling. This little bit of knowledge is proof enough that I need a job, both so I can afford one and because I obviously have too much time on my hands.

Good evening Miss Bloods and all the Crips at sea....

2004-03-23T22:54:00.000-08:00

It's 2 a.m., another sleepless night with the radio is tuned to a far too cheerful oldies station. No smokey jazz to be found on the cusp of a Wednesday. It's all about innocent love, but I haven't had any innocence since I was three-and-a-half years old. I'll tell you about it sometime. Or not.

It's too cold and too hot at the same time. The blankets are too much and not enough. The pillows are too hard and too soft. Anything to keep sleep at bay. Where's the baby bear's oatmeal that's just right?

I'm too tired to sleep. I almost broke my jaw with the last yawn. In the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.

The same four chords plink out of the little music box again and again, then they add a new one for the bridge. It's the same for all pop music, even from the king of it all, Cole Porter. But he had better words. Irving Berlin lived to hear rap. I bet he was happy.

Let' try this sleep thing again.

2004-03-23T15:40:00.000-08:00

I sold the first of the stuff a half-hour ago. The mahogany glass-front bookcase and the old bell are in the back of some testosterone-enhanced bigass pickup truck headed back toward Glen Burnie. An aging big-bellied old redneck hippie bought 'em. "MMMM, gonna have to refinish me that bookcase." No, the price already is way too cheap. Got cash? Cash is good.

The bell was the symbol of an era, the weekends and summers at my grandparents' place out in the country in Keymar, Maryland along Big Pipe Creek. My grandmother or whoever else was handy would use it to call us in from the garden or somewhere else for the fantastic meals we had there. You could hear it peal for neary a mile. It would get really interesting when wasps would take up residence in the bell hanging on the back porch. It seemed to be a favorite of both the paper wasps and the gun-metal blue and evil mud-daubers. They would tag-team homebuilding inside the bell until someone, usually my grandfather, would knock their nests to Kingdom Come. My grandfather was really subtle that way.

The house has not been in the family for more than 15 years, but there always will be a piece of it in me. During my stay at the brain garage, in for a rebuild, they had us do some art therapy. Fun with crayons, but no scissors; we were suicidal, some of us. Draw a picture of something that made you feel safe, the shrink said. So we all did this and that and I drew a picture of the immense weeping willow tree that was the centerpiece of the property, neck and neck with the house for the heart and soul of the place. It was six- to eight-feet in diameter at its base and a rock provided a hideaway for Machiavelli, the resident big old black snake. It was strong and sturdy with its massive trunk, yet so gentle with its dangling branches. Its elbows were all gnarled with the nodules from the wasps laying eggs. It was safe. Now, the shrinklady said, draw a picture of a tree. Well fuck me, I just did. Thanks for the warning. Apparently there's some sort of study where they ask all burnouts to draw three pictures. Well the joke is on them, they got two of the same tree. Play with THAT symbolism, shrinkeroos. Sometimes a willow tree is just a willow tree.

Anyway, the bell was the last concrete (brass, actually) reminder I had of the place. The best I can do now is summon up what's inside.

Damn, a big galoot like me is crying. Let's not short-circuit the keyboard, shall we?

And I'm still short of mortgage and utilities.

2004-03-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

2004-03-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

So it's March 23 and the buzzards in Hinckley, Ohio have settled in for the Spring and Summer seasons. They were scheduled to arrive on the 19th, you hap-hap-happy folks can have your swallows and San Juan Capistrano.

I've been trying to load the software so my HP all-in-one printer will work. But I just can't seem to get it going. Each time I figure out one thing, like taking the tape off the color cartridge (D'oh!), some fresh technohell rears its ugly head. Movin' to Montana soon, gonna be a Luddite tycoon. Sorry Frank, it doesn't quite scan. If this damnable thing would work, allegedly I'd be able to print, copy, scan and fax. Maybe it makes espresso too, I have to check the back of the manual for that. Looks like a call to India may be in order. In the meantime I guess it's still sending resumes into the god-knows-where of the Internet ether.

Mother Nature is beginning to piss me right off. Out the window it looks like a gorgeous, clear and sunny day. HAH! It's cold. Bitch. This winter is like THE GUEST WHO WOULD NOT LEAVE. Go away already, we're south of the Mason-Dixon line here but our desire for our deserved warm days easily outpaces our Suthun hospitality. It's putting a crimp on my urban farming. The North 40 (that's 40 square feet) remains unplanted.

But I am getting more meds, for those who know of my woes and travails and multiple layers of Catch-22. Would that be Catch-88? Those little blue pills and their burgundy brothers are a godsend, to hell with that holistic organic herbal stuff.

Some of you were entertained by the Battle of the Berries, wherin your faithful correspondent vanquished the rat. In a stream of conciousness kind of thing, it led my mind to the scene in the movie Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte where an evil Bette Davis serves wheelchair-bound Olivia de Havilland a rat on a plate. "Din-Din" Bette says. And Olivia lifts the cover over the plate (they once were fancy folk) and there lays King Rat. Yum. Bette should have put a crabapple in the rat's mouth, but somehow I don't think she was thinking of an appetizing repast. And then I drifted to thoughts of possum, even uglier than rats with their rows of tiny sharp teeth, huge rat-like tails and general pissy demeanor. They don't always play dead; I had one hold his ground and hiss at me one day out in Rock Creek Park. At least armadillos, also ugly, have that neato-torpedo armor, even if it doesn't help against them pick-em-up trucks down thar in Texas.

I've got another batch of Anadama bread, courtesy of lady friend Susan who recently has ventured into the kitchen after a long absence. It's good, and it's even better with peanut butter (what isn't?). This is this third batch, and it's closer to the Real McCoy (what a bad black and white TV show that was, with Walter Brennan the head of a hillbilly clan before Jed and Ellie May hit the scene), but the dough needs some more leavening. Yeast, or maybe a touch of baking powder. More yeast probably would be easier to control.

Maybe soon I'l regale you with tales of Big Guy, the po-lees dawg-battling cat.

2004-03-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
A friend suggested last night that I do some blogging. I don't have a website, but I do have e-mail, so here goes. If you want to be left off the list, let me know.

Birthdays are different now. They are just a mark on the calendar, a day when we must contemplate, even if biriefly, our mortality. Getting older isn't the celebration it was when we were kids. At our age, we have to watch the sugar and saturated fats, shouldn't drink so much, and look even sillier now than we did back in the day if we wear those silly spangled paper hats with the elastic thread keeping it atop our noggins. We disdain consumerism, so no toys (rats!). But getting older beats the alternative, on most days.

A friend I hadn't seen for eons except as a screen name om e-mail took my out to dinner last night on birthday's eve. I had a lamb shank the size of my forearm, a glass of mediocre red wine. He had moussaka and Greek beer. We nibbled at a baklava between us and worried about the caffeine jolt in the little cup of Greek coffee we had. We talked about our health -- a sure sign of getting older, but at least we're young enough that we left our bowels out of the discussion. I had on a clean shirt and pants, a leap forward for me since I hardly ever dress up anymore now that I'm nearly two years unemployed. The "Other Will" was decked out in a dark suit, insisting he hadn't gone over to the Dark Side and become a Republican. We were joined later for a drink by a mutual friend, and the talk was sometimes politics and oft times about her (really cool and cute) daughter, and mom and child's day. Lucinda Williams was on the jukebox, not Black Flag or the Slickee Boys, and we didn't feel out of place with any of this.

My burbling melancholia may have dampened things, or maybe it's that we all slow down with age. We talked of diet and exercise, not bands and dope. The evil herb wasn't mentioned at all (Which is fine; one thing I noticed about those days is that my generational cohort seemed to talk about nothing but as we passed through that "phase we were going through.")

Thanks, Will. Thanks, Sara.

Tonight the revelry continues. Should I double-down on the Paxil?

To be continued ....

P.S.: In the past, the Scheltawire was the subject of much amazement, some shock, occasional glee. I'll see what weirdness I can dig up. There's always something Zenfully wrong going on in Florida and Germany. In the meantime, I'm waiting for a call from those McArthur genius grant people and a winning Powerball ticket.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY REDUX
So yesterday it was official, I'm one year closer to the AARP demographic. Friends gathered at a Capitol Hill saloon, drowned out, crowded in by March Madness and Friday night's amateur drinkers. I did what I hardly ever do, had a few drinks. But it was the friends around me that warmed my cockles (What the hell is a cockle?). No toys (rats), but a book, Beowoulf the ultimate bad dude, a shirt to wear to Monday's job interview, and a pair of slippers with the Bard's head on the toe. Plus a warm feeling from the assembled, friends from several distinct parts of my life.

Today is a letdown. I'm still surrounded by my own sloth and wading through the junque shoppe of my life. I know what I have to do but I lack any sense of motivation. I just can't explain it. Others have tried to light a fire under me, but I just can't seem to stoke the flames past the immediate burst of flame. And I'm paying for the several drinks I had. Ugh. Well enough of that, I say yet again.

It's supposed to hit 60 today, the first day of Spring. Some of my daffodils are blooming, vibrant spots of yellow here and there. Maybe I'll start some herbs today, put the seeds in soil indoors. But then, maybe not. Fresh basil is supreme. The oregano I had last year was pretty good too. I've never done that well growing stuff from seed, except the lettuce and spinach back on G Street, what I could salvage from the Harlequin Beetles and the slugs. Harlequin Beetles are beautiful, and though lord only knows where they came from, they are attracted to crusifers -- your cabbages and such. They came that early summer to feast on broccoli and the moveable feast headed next door to the spinach. At least the raspberies were bug-free, and I usually could get the ripe ones every morning before the squirrels and the birds.

I did blow away a rat who was both eyeing the raspberries and mocking me one night. Got home from work and there he was up on his hind feet on the patio, taunting me. Then he scuttled over to the raspberries and tugged on one of the canes. Mother F--k this, punk. Went in and got the .22 out of the closet, jacked a round into the chamber, went back out to the porch and laid the forearm and barrel over the railing. Kneeled and sited down on the little puke about 40 feet away, still yanking. Make my day.

POP.

Drop.

The next morning, Beth's dog found the rat right where the damnable rodent breathed his last. Beth, the downstairs tenant, was quite upset but Harry the Lhasa Apso was strutting around like some newly molded hero. The little fraud. Me, I'm Sgt. Schultz. Taxidermy? Maybe I should have done the Vlad the Impaler trick with the rat and made a scarerat in the garden. Some of his brethren later gnawed some low-hanging tomatoes, so I guess we called it even.

Now how's that for a thread hijack?

Thanks go out to cruise director Jim and the crew: Susan, Debby and Joe, Adele, Lenny, Denise, Elizabeth and our Blessed Lady of the Cake, Christina. Hmm, that's more women than men. Good party.

MORE

Another day-after festivities. March 20, the first day of Spring. And before you anal retentive types say "AHA! Mais non! Spring doesn't arrive until March 21," that only counts in years without a February 29. So there. Anyway, first day of Spring, time for a jaunt to the National Arboretum. Susan wanted to see the woods plants, reminds her of her childhood (same for me), so off we went.

"I REFUSE to call it Fern Valley," she huffed, looking at the sign. We ambled down the path, stopping here and there, probably reading too much into the little bits of green on the woods' floor. The occasional teeny bloom brought cries of wonderment and excited pointing. I never was worth a damn at plant identification, all that Latin is Greek to me.

There's all kinds of stuff growing out there, stuff you wouldn't expect in this climate. Cypress trees? What's up with that? And without the hanging moss and seamy heat and humidity?
And there was the camellia blooming, in the chill. It's full of little nubs that will be more flowers, it's in it for the long haul. A two-year-old sapling magnolia had impossible-sized blooms ready to go. Various cherries were out in full pink and white, even some bees were doing their thing. Too bad it's going to get colder next week; but I like nature with some spunk.

The I'll-never-call-it-Fern Valley was alive with deer sign. At several spots you could see that four or five Bambi's had been through an area, and they'd been sniffing around a trillium that was protected by a cage. The litte burble of a stream that ran through the little valley looked to be prime hunting grounds for crawdads, but not yet.

The old Capitol columns out there bring up images of Druids and Wiccan priestesses. Been there, Sara?

I guess I should feel more uplifted by the natural sojourn. Communing and all that. OK, whatEVER. It was the most time I've spent outdoors in quite awhile. Really sucks, cuz I used to love beating about in the woods, sliming through swamps, all that stuff.

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?? Oh, someone on my AOL buddy list has a really fake-sounding bird chirp effect. Click. Click. Hmmm, it's someone I don't even know, but they keep showing up anyway.

Where were we? Oh yeah, solopsistic(sp??) despair. It's really metadespair. Depressed about being depressed.. How many levels of that can we do? SHUTUP WITH THE BIRDS ALREADY! But there is some light in the tunnel I can't find. Interview Monday with the American Trucking Association (always wanted to be a dooh-dah man) for a job covering the Hill. Gonna wear that ultra-soft striped birthday shirt. It's vertical stripes, you think I'd wear a Rugby shirt to a job interview? And I'm getting some (ultra-cheap) freelance work from a newspaper in Queens. And a huge gas bill.

Enough feeling sorry for myself.

It's March 22. That means we had more sunlight than dark today. Sounds like a plan to me, but where is the warm that goes with the sun?

The machinations of the parking police struck close to home (well, actually it was in Adams Morgan at the other end of the city, but it was my lady friend Susan, that's close). Out she comes on a Monday that's just annoyingly sunny and clear, all that happy stuff. She plans to drive to work on this day, just so she can drop the car off with me at lunch so I can use it and PARK IT. Life for a car owner is so bad in parts of town that I take in refugees, I have plenty o' parking -- until the eventual scourge of what we used to call Yuppies (Yuppies get out, but leave us your wimmins -- but that's another tale) get here with two cars per house. Many houses here are unencumbered by automobiles, I moved in before the neighborhood was even "transitional: -- dont yopu just love Realtors[peak -- and junkies plied their trade in front of JESUS IS THE WAY right across the street. Nothing like that good ol' American entrepreneurial spirit, I say.

Anyway, to get to the point. Susan's car was gone. G-O-N-E. As a comfirmed city resident, she immediately assumed it had been towed for some alleged violation against G-d, man and the parking laws. She looked wher she'd parked Saturday night, thinking she'd had a brain (break wind, ladies don't fart). Nope. So hikes on down to work in Dupont Circle and after pitching a story idea about ravens threatening wolves when it comes to eating the kill -- she's a science writer, and hey, wolves make good art -- she starts calling various numbers in the city. She looks on the city's webpage and finds the link that tells you if you car's been towed. But first she had to rummahe through her desk (a good desk for rummaging, mine at home is much the same) and runs across her car's VIN number and license plate stuff. Do you know the tag number of your car? Didn't think so. So like the great explorer she wades through the jungle of phone trees. Every once in awhile she gets a real live human voice. Must have misdialed that one. She finally gets one after pressing lord only knows how many touchtone tones that instructs her to leave a message, we'll get back to you. "Yeh, right," as my cynical 13-year-old nephew told me. Finally, around 4 o'clock she gives up and calls the police to report the car as stolen. Well, it was, in a sense, but let's not quibble about the meaning of "is" stolen.

The cops had MOVED her car.

What's up with that?

Indeed, several blocks away from its orginal resting place sits the little red sled. Of course it's all the way down at the opposite end of the block they said it was on, and she got faked out by another same-colored Geo and was happy because there was no ticket on it, but there it was.

This whole escapade with the facist parking police brings up many questions of great social and moral and metaphysical import. But the most important?

How did the tow truck driver find a parking spot?