Good Type

John Spoerl's favorite part of books – the part he went to like gamblers go for the sports pages – was “About the Type”. He read the reviews rapturously, marveling at the ubiquitous excellence. There was apparently never a bad type, never a font that wasn’t readable or agreeably aged or without a euphonious name. Just once he longed to read: “The type is 'Sandusky', developed in 1953 in Lansing, Michigan. While plain and not pleasant to read, it tries harder due to its mediocrity.”

It was the early 80s, before the Internet made clipping newspaper articles superfluous and replaceable by Google. He clipped articles from the dozens of papers he subscribed to, collecting them like S&H Green Stamps. There was a comfort knowing they were there, even as they yellowed worrisomely. On sick or rainy days he’d haul them from the closet and spread them out before him, catching up on a prior self who’d found such things interesting.

He liked the sophisticated even when he didn’t understand what they were saying, like a child trying on his father’s woolens. Coleridge was a poet whose very name was poetic by virtue of being referred to by writers who talked of summers immersed in books at Cambridge or Oxford, where the ancient buildings and expansive lawns caused deep thoughts to spontaneously combust. There was glamour, there in olde England, there in the summer lit programs. The most memorable of the clippings described a young lady’s account of meeting a young man at an Oxford series covering English literature. She was deep into George Eliot’s Middlemarch while he was a Bardophile. It was a Reese Cups tryst: he got chocolate (Shakespeare) in her peanut butter (Eliot). [insert groan here]

Renewed a correspondence today with an old friend by the name of "Dute". He founded our company's unofficial "Disturbed Loner's Chat Room", which consisted of a Lotus Notes address group of ten of us serving as an outlet, a forum for injecting creativity and color into all things corporate. The emails were as jejune as they were politically incorrect. Dute, though, is one heckuva writer, as you'll shortly see:
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An intranet site had a "Question of the Day" about China: "Which direction has China moved since Tiananmen Square 10 years ago (i.e. toward democracy or away)?"

Dute emailed the group: "I think China has been moving northeast since Tiananmen Square in the last 10 years. During the late Cretaceous period (80 - 65 million years ago), the Indian subcontinent drifted away from Madagascar and at a speed of 15 cm/year, its tectonic plate subducted beneath the southern margin of Asia. Around the same time, Australia separated from Antarctica, missed Borneo, and is currently in collision with China. This carom will send China east, toward North America, closer to the heart of democracy as we know it. However, if the continental subduction of the Puerto Rican trench and the Scotia arc become more volatile, North America will also drift east to collide with Western Europe in some 250 million years, leaving China farther away from democracy than ever. That weasel Clinton and our incompetent Congress will no doubt sit idly by doing nothing about this but the usual partisan bickering."
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Refuting an email that went around titled "Why Beer is Better than Jesus":

Why Jesus is better than a beer:

10. Time isn't marked 'before beer' and 'after beer'

9. Beer never predicted its appearance centuries before.

8. A beer doesn't give a rat's -ss about you.

7. That the perfectly balanced universe is like a sharpened pencil standing on a table is not because of beer.

6. Beer makes you feel good, Jesus makes you good.

5. Beer tells you the world is okay even though everything's f--ked up.
Jesus tells you the world is f-ked up but that everything will be okay.

4. Beer today, gone tomorrow. Jesus today, Jesus tomorrow.

3. Praying and driving isn't against the law.

2. No one ever died for a beer.

1. No one ever gets a "Jesus belly".
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Dute was assigned to work New Year's Eve from 6pm to 6am to make sure our Y2K implementation was successful...Here is his reaction to learning he would be working that evening:

"I'm inviting everyone to a fin-de-siecle siege party in my cube from 6 pm 12/31/99 to 6 am 01/01/2000. I am going to provide the sandbags, bottled water, weapons, canned goods, paranoia, cheese fondue, ammunition, "cube rage", ham radio crystal set, surly disposition, an itchy as hell trigger finger, sunglasses, and coffee. I am asking for volunteers to bring nachos, paper cups and napkins. We will usher in the new year in true style as entropy kicks in, hotwires the gregorian calendar, and drives the new millenium, full throttle and top down... Watch milk curdle in the dairy case and cereal go all soggy right in the box! Watch airplanes fall out of the sky like a rock! Watch the electric grid fail and plunge the world, one hemisphere at a time, into total darkness! Watch anyone who was a Cobol programmer in the '60s and '70s look at others with shifty sidelong glances! Watch all commerce grind to a standstill as--oh, wait, what am I thinking? Commerce will be on vacation, like everyone else and his sister that f-ing day. Damn."
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In December of '99, the corporation offered a forum for Y2K questions. Here was my query:

"I heard a rumor the real scare of Y2k isn't bank failures or electricity outages, it is a takeover of the ENTIRE WORLD by a clandestine operation out of Brussels that has successfully hooked up all computers over the entire world by their entrails and will engineer massive fraud (i.e. quiet government coups will ensue by replacing world leaders with 'twins' who were genetically manufactured, i.e. cloned, off stray DNA that the Brussels group obtained). Most of the massive Y2k expenditures that companies have been spending are not to accomplish Y2k compliance, but to effect the coordination of the Fortune 500's computers into the Brussel's main hub. Use your commonsense - it can't cost a company $100 million to expand to a 4-digit year!! Helll-o! Me and a buddy could've done it for 1 mill and a Guinness to be named later. The world cartel has been salivating for this moment. What can we do to prevent it?"

To which Dute answered at great length, excerpted here:

"I've stockpiled a load of tepee poles and animal hides, because who knows whether our houses, all constructed in a year beginning with 19, will even be standing come 1/1/00. It's worse than you think, Paranoid-Man. No one knows the full story. No one. The Brussels cabal is just a smokescreen, nothing more, nothing less. Brussels won't even take a shit without the say-so of their order givers...."

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We received this in a corporate email:

"The [Corporation Name] Pride Club is hosting a holiday party on Sunday, Dec. 5 from 3 p.m. - 7 p.m. For further details contact..."

My response:
"Uh, didja notice that the "Gay" is mysteriously missing? When I first saw this entry, I thought "hmmm....a pride club. Pride in what? Pride in our country? A veterans group perhaps? Or just people who were proud of themselves? It slowly dawned on me that this was the gay club. Isn't it kind of oxymoronic to say you belong to a 'gay pride club' but then to leave off the gay? I mean, are you really proud of being gay if you name your club "Pride"?"
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Our corporation sponsors an annual picnic lunch for the homeless. The email promoting it urged contributions, saying "give the homeless of Columbus a day off!".

Ham of Bone, that wag, said "Ye wizened round-tablers, please explain to me the meaning of the phrase 'to give the homeless of Columbus a day off' found in the note below. I was of the opinion that the homeless have EVERY day off."

To which Dute responded, "To me, a day off means an opportunity to get away from the mundane routines that define and structure my life. So maybe you should take a day off that day, and sit on the curb at Pearl Alley wearing an 8-ball jacket and a 3-day-o'clock shadow while you jangle change in a tin cup. Let one a them scruffy [dudes] sit at your desk for a day, but make sure you write down all your passwords on a post-it note though, so as not to create any confusion."
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My email:

The big news in nytimes today is that women can cut their cancer risk by cutting off their breasts - no kidding - masectomies are recommended to avoid breast cancer. Have we come to an age when self-mutulation is the way to avoid risk? Will it come to killing ourselves so that some disease won't first? Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days when no one worried about health risks so much.

Hambone answered:

I believe that increasing the regularity of breast exams would decrease the risk just as well, and I know that there would be alot of volunteers for that important task...
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From Neil:

From: [Name Withheld], Data Center

Many employees have notified me they have received chain letters and other inappropriate e-mails over the last month. As you may know, our company discourages these sorts of e-mails, as they are hard on the mail system and can bring down our servers. If you would like more information on this, please see the note sent this past fall by John Doe, senior vice president and chief information officer. Please forward this message to 5 of your friends. This message has circled the world five times and if you break the chain you will be cast into the endless void and your hair will fall out.
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John was born a coalminer's son in godforsaken Pike county in southeast Ohio. His vision was tunnel, his daily food coal dust, his drinking water laced with uranium that leaked like a sieve from the nearby nuclear power plant. He grew a third eye as a result, and was resigned to a life of the circus as a side-show act until he challenged the big employer to the north on the grounds of diversity (i.e. three eyes are better than two). XYZ Corp hates the smell of lawsuit in the morning, so they hired him as a 'vision consultant' but in practice he just sends out mind-numbing communications.
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On finding out the very liberal "Community Fest" aka CommunistFest, would not be allowing alcohol or pets for the first time in twenty years:

To the CommunistFest Kommittee Members:

I'm outraged that your webcite sez the following:
NO ALCOHOL NOT BOUGHT FROM THE FEST!!!
NO PETS AT THE FEST!!!

As a member of the human potential movement, E.S.T, and Rastfarians for Bush, I do not feel it is in keeping with the spirit of these organizations, or in the best interests of the karma of the organizers to make dogmatic, militaristic, and plain ol' mean statements like that. But if you must, then I like imported beers, preferably specialty ales. I don't like lines, they're bourgeois. Ann Archy Rulz!

Pravda baby,
-T
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From Bone:

At the company meeting last week we received saltine goldfish crackers and a plastique bucket & shovel. Why not empower ourselves, take it a step further and bring the sea theme into the everyday workplace? I'll get a couple, five, bags of sand to provide a nice sandy beach in the cubical. A few heat lamps, pair of shades, a couple margarita's and we'll be set.....we'll be called the sea men, or semen for short...but wait! hey that's not a Cap'n Dick Seaworthy Combination Telescope and Periscope Kit! That's a hidden microphon-- (And that's when we lost transmission)
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Dr. Joe was allergic to clichés. He was a Midwestern chap, middle-aged, of average looks, of average talent and lived in an average town. The one thing he had was an above average vocabulary. Yet, as a General Practitioner he was forced by circumstances to have to say the same thing many times --- the dreaded "open up and say 'ahhhh'".

He said it without a problem the first couple times. After all, he was young and needed the money. The first time was to a West Jefferson resident who'd complained of a sore throat. The second time to someone from Poughkeepsie. He began getting self-conscious about it. By the tenth time it was getting stuck in his throat.

He began variations. "Open your mouth and say 'Laaaaa!'". "Gape your mouth and say 'Baaaa!'". Inevitably, things went downhill as things often do. After saying "please widen your aperture" to a young woman, he was slapped with a sexual harrassment lawsuit. Alas, creativity has its price.

Irish Fathers

Another morning made stale by
work’s dissipation;
he made sluggish use
of a dull razor
and from his face
did Guinness bleed.
He dabbed at it
tasted his ancestor’s elixir
and laughed at the mad poets
and the drunk Foggy Dews
and drove to work
to bask in the flourescence.

Returning home his children cried,
“Tell us again, Daddy,
about the Children of Lir!”
And he said:
“You are children of the Irish Sea
shape-shifters one and all
wearing your skin fitfully.
A tight fit you find it?
It’s because you are of the sea
restless as the waves,
having your father’s father’s
father's brine in you!”

The next morning, tired-eyed,
he returned to his shaving mirror
but missed the reflections
of the Kings of Meath,
Armagh and Tara.
Hungry for want of fathers,
he missed a sea of them.

_______________________

References:
Children of Lir
Foggy Dew

I’d always been attracted to the notion of profligate waste, the more profligate the better. Waste appealed not only because of my naturally parsimonious ways but because it mirrored the profligacy of the natural world. A million fireflys and butterflys die on arrival, long-lasting as fireworks.

Eccentric characters and underachievers held my affection. I saved newspaper and magazine clippings of plumbers or mailmen who could quote long sections of Moby Dick or who’d read 10,000 books. “Dropping out” was attractive in all its delicious permutations. A pretty nun was a figure of wonderment; here was untapped potential in all its inconceivableness. The sum total of happiness she could give a man over a lifetime could not be calculated by the adolescent mind.

Keeping a low profile as a child was a survival tactic but redeeming in its own way. I read May Sarton devotionally, growing terrariums and tending aquariums and missing the clues of her sexual orientation. I looked covetously upon the shores of Walden Pond as depicted on my copy of Thoreau’s work. He was Robinson Crusoe come to life, acting like it were actually possible, laying out the cost for seeds and wood but then he quit and went back to Boston and it felt hollow. A year and a half out of fifty? He called it an experiment but it seemed a failed experiment, else he wouldn’t have high-tailed it back to civilization. Only the permanent is romantic.

Uncle Bud used to take me fishing. He had the leather, reptilian skin of someone who’d been out in the sun every day of his life and didn’t know SPF from the ATF. A born fisherman, he’d look out over the water and after ten or twenty minutes I’d be getting ants in my pants but he’d sit there like Mount Rushmore. I’d walk around the lake and grab at the cattails and look for dead fish near the bank and inhale the intoxicating dank smell, and then come back around and see if Uncle Bud caught anything. There weren’t near enough action I thought. I’d bait my bamboo pole and put it in the water and pull out a wormless hook.

I'd sit and stare at the water and wonder if there really were any fish under all that water. They said it was stocked but maybe the other fisherman already caught all the fish. The water looked the same as soil, only with the relentless ripples.

Uncle Bud was actually my uncle's father, so he was getting on in years. Ever-bachelor, he lived by his own rules and died by his own rules. Got cancer but wouldn't have anything to do with doctors. Holed himself up in his house like an outlaw with the law outside yellin’ for him to come out, so the hunter shot himself. There was shock in the horrible coupling, good uncle Bud and Judas’s final sin.

I ache for him to be in heaven because the thrill of waste ends at Hell’s gate.

Belloc’s sweet prose stiches somulence over me. I can't read him without falling asleep because he has charms to soothe the savage breast. I fall into the rhthym of the sentences and it satisfies what I didn’t know needed satisfying. He inspires me to try.

I am a mad scientist longing to string words together in new and strange and potentially explosive situations. I want to know where the powder lies and where the fuse is and I want to light it. Roth’s prose is too painfully current, he brings all our sores to the fore and would heal wounds by probing them. Belloc and Bellow and Dineson heal by pointing elsewhere. The gashes are healed by cunning indirection.

Mary Slaney blamed it all on “Torn Between Two Lovers”. Her dissipation that is. MacGregor’s hit song came at a time when Mary was distrusting the old verities and here was another sweet-warbling Mary with a voice so pure that she sympathetically thought, “torn between two lovers…that can happen.”

Pop songs made love beyond the borders of marriage okay. There were no shortage of angelic-voiced innocents singing of shedded inhibitions. It was as if the radio were filling a need for Mary and Juice Newton was singing her song:

“I see no need to take me home,
I'm old enough to face the dawn.
Just call me angel of the morning, angel”

This was what she needed, reassurance that what she wasn’t doing anything wrong. And not from a guy, not some cad who’d say anything to get into her jeans. No, she wanted to hear it from a girlfriend, a girlfriend experienced but innocent.

College was easy, her sorority sisters comfortable in their skin and sin. “There’s nothing wrong with it Mary!” they said. Cross-wearing fornicators, they’d ask her to find another place to stay so they could entertain their men, even as the silver jewelry made fashionable by Madonna dangled from their necks. They said they loved Jesus and their life. They seemed to have married justice and mercy, their will and God’s.

And so began the long struggle for Mary, who took the long road to and from the wilderness, arriving at last back to her true home only to find a surprise waiting.

The surprise was to find that Christians are all cross-wearing fornicators in one way or another, and that all, in big ways or small, try to marry their will and God’s. And it struck her as she donned a cross necklace: "Can I wear this silver jewelry?"