Chagal4's Blog

…I carried that book with me until I emptied my foot locker a couple of years after I left the army. I never managed to finish it and it sat in the bottom corner of the foot locker collecting more dust. It never got better than that first sentence and even though I wasn’t a very acute reader back then…I knew it wouldn’t. The tiger only lasted a few pages…and it was down hill from there.

A life is filled with little mysteries and inexplicable inconsequential events. In any given day you can ask yourself a dozen times….”what?”…and get no answer. I love that. I love making up my own answers to those stupid little puzzles. This morning watching soccer on T.V. I saw a player being sent in to replace a guy who was injured. The replacement crossed himself three times, pulled up his socks twice, reached down and pulled several blades of grass from the field, tossed them into the air and kissed a tattoo inside his wrist…all before going onto the field. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen these little rituals performed by all kinds of athletes. There must be hundreds of little private gestures in locker rooms and dressing rooms all over the world. They’re supplications, prayers, wishes, incantations…”let me do good”…”let me not get hurt”…”let me win”.

I don’t know where they pick up these rituals…how they become habits…why they continue even when they don’t work. I imagine some older more experienced athlete taking the younger aside and saying;

“O.K. here’s what you need to do before you go on the field”

I wish somebody had said that to the guy who wrote that awful book all those years ago…might have worked.

Maybe he was fulfilling a dream…may even have gone on to write more and better books. I’m glad he tried. I’d like to say that I learned something from that book of his but I didn’t, really.

But here’s the thing. After writing that post the other day I was going through my portfolios and purging old prints and drawings that I’d done years ago and now hated. They were bad and I knew they were bad. Should I keep them or toss them? I thought about that stupid book and the guy who wrote it…and I wondered if he thought it was good when he did it…Probably, yeah. And what would he think years later? I tossed the drawings.

I probably didn’t cross myself in the right way the day I did them…or I didn’t remember to throw the grass in the air. Whatever…I thought that they were good at the time…and I’ve moved on from there. I think that the things I’m doing now are pretty good most of the time. Tell myself little stories while I’m doing them…talk to them…make up mini mysteries about them. I don’t know if I’d like them a few years down the road. It doesn’t matter. I’d like to think that I’ve kept the ones that are good enough to leave behind. That somebody will find them…or some of them and wonder what’s the story. And maybe somebody will see one and say…”Wow! that’s a really ghastly piece” But it’s the next sentence that counts.

“I wonder what he was thinking.”

Yep, I’d like that too.

There really aren’t enough awesomely bad books.

There are thousands of mediocre, disgusting, ugly, juvenile, sickeningly sweet, dead boring, horrible and virtually unreadable books out there. And I’ve read a lot of them. Yet none of them have reached that awesome plateau that is so bad that you want to share it with all of your friends…so bad that you can’t really believe it. Did some publisher read this shit and pay cash money to put into print? Wow!

One of the worst I ever read…and that’s what got this post started…a vagrant memory that intruded last night while I was on my way to the bathroom. One of the worst I read, happened more than fifty years ago. While I was in the army still. In those days we weren’t at war with anybody but the military likes to keep it’s troops on a sharp cutting edge just in case. In my corps (Engineers) we maintained a cutting edge sharpened by all things alcoholic. But what can be done? You can only march around a parade square, remake your bed, shine things, iron things, fold things, paint things, salute things…for so long before dangerous youthful exuberance causes problems. So the army organized a kind of summer camp far away from normal humans. It brought trucks and jeeps and tanks and artillery. It brought tents and kitchens and hospitals and water purification plants. It brought tons of guns and hundreds of soldiers and even brought some from other countries. There was mud and dust and rain and mosquitoes and black flies and bad food and latrines and twisted ankles and gallons of beer…There was a month and a half of playing war. To say that it was nothing like the real thing would be the understatement of the year.

The place for all of this was a military preserve that included a couple of expropriated hamlets in eastern Canada. It was a glorious summer by any weather standards…and as we were “working” only about three hours a day…there was plenty of time to explore…(watch out for poison ivy, poison oak, snakes, other soldiers on war parties, and don’t get lost). So three of us found an abandoned farm house on the edge of a non-existent village…spread our ponchos and  poured on the sun tan lotion…settled in to catch some rays. It was still early in the day…the sun was simmering on the long grass and a fine haze signalled another warm day. There was a distracting buzz in the air but aside from that…hey…we were nineteen, in great shape, playing with tons of boy toys and getting drunk whenever we could.

Black flies. If you’ve never met one…don’t. The little fuckers are less than half the size of a house fly…but they have the teeth of a full grown pit bull. They settle down at night in the long grasses and  wait until the sun warms up the morning, dries their wings and then about a million of them jump out of the grass looking for breakfast. O.K. now…honest to god, I have no idea how any living thing survives in that part of the world because those little bastards will eat anything. And they don’t sting…they bite. And fifty of them hit you at once…you bleed and there isn’t enough calamine in the world to deal with that itch… and the itch stays for days…maybe months.

We couldn’t dress fast enough and you had to be careful not to trap them inside shirts or pants because they just kept biting. They bite anywhere…have no shame…bite right through cloth. Bite inside your ear…and those army issue undershorts? feel like canvas when you first get them…but those babies didn’t even slow those black flies down.

We grabbed everything and ran…(later I counted twenty two bites) I made it back to my tent and got covered in calamine…and drained two or three beers…unrolled my poncho to make sure there were  no little demons hiding there. That’s when I found the book…it must have been lying in the grass under my ground sheet. I say “book” but it was missing the first fifty pages and seemed to have been ravaged by weather…I wondered if the previous owner hadn’t been devoured by those imps. It was ratty and water damaged…but I shook off the dust and started to read.

“The tiger walked across the kitchen floor, huge fangs dripping saliva on the linoleum…”

Well, I had to read the rest didn’t I…and combined with the merciless itch of  two dozen black fly bites…it was by far, the worst book I ever read.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Having read a recent review in the New York Times, of a book* that painted an exciting picture of the despair we can all look forward to in the promised land, one of my pals asked a tough question. There are a number of books and articles and opinion pieces pointing the finger of fate and bad management in all sorts of directions…but the gist of the story is that the former carburetor of capitalism…Saudi Arabia and its pals seem unwilling to turn down the taps on the oil wells…while the U.S.A. through the judicious use of fracking and other hideous tactics have reached a kind of energy independence. Well…that served to drive the global price of oil down. Good for the driving public but not so good for the oil aristocracy and the economic oligarchs. You would think there would be rejoicing in the streets…Uh—No. Then China with its great surge and huge population caught a serious case of consumer flu…The stock markets climbed the stairs like drunken bankers until Beijing said …”Slow down dudes and dudettes”. Beijing apparently, can say those things and mean it. The stock markets took up sky diving.

So those are the essentials of the story but there are details that are frighteningly consistent. It looks like the western world of good and plenty is still pretty good but there’s a lot less “plenty” on the horizon. That usually means that the one percent filthy rich will have to make do with the old yacht for a couple of years longer than expected…alas like all privileged classes…these people are generally unable to suffer alone. Naturally the un-monied classes will be making do with no yachts at all and the prospects of a rowboat or two are fading into the future.

So my friend was asking if this means that the “party is over”.

And that is a question riddled with shades and nuances. For millions and millions of people this last century hasn’t seen much singing and dancing. For them the party isn’t so much “over” as maybe “over there” somewhere…elsewhere. For those of us with spare change…we’ve seen it shrink a bit…seen jobs disappear…seen friends and relatives fall through the system…seen things get worse.  ..seen whole cities go to hell…but we keep going. So the answer I guess…is that the party is still going on. Some of us just are no longer invited.

If I had to reach over my shoulder for another analogy…I’d say it’s not about the party…it’s about running out of paved road…

*The Rise and Fall of American Growth :by Robert J. Gordon

Reviewed by Paul Krugman