Date:        July 11, 2008 6:11 PM
Topic:        I’m preparing for the Pod, HAL

I’ve been tossing around a few ideas like the contents of wooden bowl full of greens before vinegar and oil. The one that has most recently topped the salad is I have been imagining putting together a periodic podcast. (Yes, it is true that I hate the word podcast. It has a certain slimy sound of sucking souls growing in the greenhouse. but I will give in to the term that has been spawned without one whit of consultation with me.)

I decided to look around on the internet for ideas about creating a podcast.

How is it that no matter what the endeavor, I always come with the same such perverse notion?

I seem to be forever reading about character development and the relationship between the arc of the plot and how the setting can affect the balance between the action and the meaning …Blahgity blahgity blah! Or someone blathering about programming style and its importance to the overall coherence to the project (we all use software, we all know how well that seems to work) , or the proper way to handle the guitar pick (plectrum?) in a splickity lick (I have yet to manifest the smoking speed of John McLaughlin. I prefer fingerpicking anyway, p-i-m-a, hand in a curve not a claw) , the proper use of persepective, the position and composition of a name block on a mechanical drawing, the absolutely necessary use of a smarmy Sincerely yours at the close of a letter, the pretense Dears Sirs at the beginning.

I find that people giving instruction about screenplay writing are the worst of the bunch. (The evidence for that is at the cineplex.) There are more rules that shouldn’t be broken planning a TV or movie script than found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy .

The stricture about only using Courier 12 Point for submissions, (I’m guessing ’cause it looks like a typewritten manuscript ) is both interesting and irritating. I don’t like any more than a couple fonts myself, but I have found that I can still read and understand things written in Times New Roman. And, though, I admit that I would have some trouble reading anything in, say, Stacatto 555 or Bernhard Schoenschrift, there are many many fonts that just aren’t beyond the reach of a literate person. Believe it or not whole works of literature are written in different type styles. Perhaps I just can’t imagine the pain of a poor tortured producer who would have to read scripts in several differing fonts over orange juice in the morning? Very messy, so distracting! Mein Gott naeste vi will be submitting zem in foreign tongues!!

What I find, after a very few minutes of review of these sage articles that I am prone to consult, is I am compelled to to figure out how I can break every rule that has just been put down by that good hearted person who was just trying to give the benefit of experience and bon ami. I am a terribly hard case. If I thought about it for a some period of time, I would be embarrassed.

Alas my search for Podcasting instruction fell into the same sad pattern.

In one online tutorial about podcasting I was told that podcasting was work intensive but that it could be a tremendous amount of fun.

For about a year and a half I put together a Comedy Radio Program. The group that I was part of wrote, performed, recorded, composed music for and edited an hour long program once a week. It wasn’t just work intensive, it was a horror! And I never really felt all that good about it, even though I think we were very good and that the broadcast was relatively solid. It became a push of a stone up the hill that managed on access to the peak just to slip to the bottom once again. I think I will skip the notion about about how much fun I will be having and pass over into some other realm, which may even be become evident to me as I write this blog post. (Blog, don’t like that word either, but I’m only one person and we grow accustomed to things)

The article went on to explain that it was only worth it to podcast if you incorporated your passions.
I was immediately on board with that whole idea about my passions until I started to reflect on my passions. It wasn’t so much that I don’t have them. I certainly do! but so many people are doing so many podcasts about similar ideas that I feel I could add very little to the mix.

Then I was advised that the best thing that I could do was plan the podcast out in detail.

It was a blow. I am incapable of planning out anything that has to do with creating. O, sure I can put a schedule together at work, I can even adapt and change with conflicting demands. In short, I can and do make decisions quickly and accurately and on the spot. I live with the consequences. But this idea of planning stymies me.

I believe that planning in the beginning is counter to production.

When you start something you have to be willing to stumble in the muck, build a structure, find the weakness then totally destroy it to build a better one. To me this is the method that works and yes it does mean massive amounts of confusion and work. How can I possibly know what is going to develop until I start scratching and clawing through the process. Planning comes afterward. Dreaming is what is required in those first steps, and failure, destruction and rebuilding are really part of the joy of exploration. No matter that the dream can become nightmare.

The vaster problem with dreaming is that often it is all there is, but I figure if dreaming is enough, maybe the rest of it wasn’t all that important.

The remainder of the article was about microphones and mixers and hardware configuration.

I didn’t pay attention to it much either.

Tomorrow I’m going to go on to editing techniques.

For the last two weekends I have dragged out the water hose and the big blue bucket full of cleaner soaps high density drying clothes shining rags, to clean the car. It is spring. A pine tree in the rear of the house gathered all the pollen in the area and slowly deposited it all on the roof of the Trail Blazer rendering its charming light reddish brown a yellow and sticky hue. Earlier in the morning so much of the fecund stuff was blowing off the pine needles that at first I thought I was witnessing a smoldering forest fire.

So I wet and I rub and I dry and I sparkle. Each of the two weeks it has taken less than an hour to deposit, out of a clear blue and sunny sky, a rain storm laden with tubs of water on the vehicle that I have just made pristine.  Life can be a cartoon. I watch from the rear picture window drenching rain blowing almost horizontally. Smile at the Saturday Funny.

Baseball usually catches me for a month or two early in the season and I dream of the home run king that I was sure I was going to be when I was a kid playing in a stubbled field just a short bike ride down Maple Street and up into the housing plan. We had as many on the team as there were kids that showed up. Sometimes the outfield positions would be doubled. On occasion there would be another roving shortstop and redundant second baseman, but I alone always played first base. Not because I was a lefty, but because I was the only one with a first baseman’s mitt. I wasn’t bad and I could hit the ball a ton.

When it finally came time to join a little league team I was sorely disappointed. All the fun was gone and the game became serious. When we played in our rough field, everyone played, regardless of age or ability. When we competed it was against the group at the far end of the field who had an identical ethos. The organization was more than democratic and it worked just fine. Score, Who cared about score for more than a minute. It was exhilarating. It was real life. Adult supervision and "organized" little league brought the fantasy of limitation, the fantasy of real life. It is happily a lesson that I have never forgotten.

I never made a little league team. I quit after one try out.

Spring is that season for rebirth and I take it with some seriousness and I crack out of my egg. It is more important as I grow older. More miraculous.

I am sitting presently on the side porch and writing in the chill of the morning as church going cars whine up the hill. I have on a corduroy jacket and I can feel the wind cool my hands above the keyboard, the sun is making the laptop screen dim. Life ain’t so bad.

I think of my life, reflections stuffed between the million of minute mundane minutes, in episodes. Not very deep, I fear, but there you have it. I don’t think of it as some four dimensional time line growing like a fat worm through the years. Past Present Future. Nor do I think of it as eternal now. Om mani padme hum. Barely I think it at all as I am busy with the tedium of my life.

In Pittsburgh we have a passion play each year in the Easter Season, called Veronica’s Veil. The church, St. Michaels, and the Passionist Fathers are gone, but the auditorium and the passion remain on the climb up the hill from the South Side. It is a drama writ in tableaus of Veronica as she wiped the sweat and blood from Christ face as he struggled with the cross on the way to Golgotha. The veil captured his sacred visage.

The thing that most folks remember, often because they were moved to spiritual lethargy watching the posed scenes, was the giant surprising clap of thunder and flash of lightning that occurs when Christ dies on the Cross. It definitely is an eye opener. But that isn’t what I remember about the passion play.

What I remember is the dense wet feel of my winter coat on the way into the auditorium. Squeals and whispers of the children that had been delivered from my automobile to the drama. My shoes streaked with muddy snow and my socks soggy, heavy on my feet. The smell of cooked cabbage and sweet foods being sold in the gymnasium. The even more overpowering odor and feel of the ages of that spiritual and local community that seeped its way into the walls. You could peel some of it off when you brushed past as you slowly walked up a set of stairs: The thrill, some young woman being chosen to play Mary, Mother of God. Soldiers, who had been in the crowd scenes only last year, uniformed returned from or off to any of the wars, embracing the people they loved and who loved them in a silent moment of hope that would soon lead to despair. The son who was Christ. The father who died short weeks before the performance. Fingers fashioning the shrouded veil that Veronica’s kindness created. The chatter of the ladies as the robes, shawls and costumes were sewn and assembled. Laughter. Tragedy. The Spirit. All greeting you. Smothering you in a palpable wave of warmth. The mothers cooking bowls of golumpki and buttons of pastry in their kitchen for transport to the Passion. Day after day season after season session after session building memory and life into hard surface of the plaster walls.

The way that I view my life is in tableau, like those presented in the drama, but peeled haphazardly off the accretion of brushed against walls and formed like those silent static scenes with an occasional thunderclap to awaken me. There is little seeming to do with progression but everything to do with causality.

So I glimpse, a dead summer night of the close to midnight sun on a funeral mound, wind blowing against me and the Limfjord down the slowly falling fields not a inch of sleep in my mind. Late at night. And the dirty dank dungeon smell of listener sponsored radio, floor uneven like a German expressionist film, walls covered with inexpensive ineffective paint and tons of reel to reel tapes sitting on a table while I argue with someone about their shift on the radio, it’s too long, it’s too short, it’s too shout, a day on the San Francisco Bay when we caught a crab and yes by god a boot with our fishing gear, the crab was boiled and swallowed the shoe thrown back, a summer day on a lake at a farm of our neighbors when I got both sun blitz and sea sick, a precursor to a day on the North Atlantic when I became as sick as any I have ever been, so much so that even dry land couldn’t heal me for a couple days.

So I glimpse, all manner of friends family and strangers around me. When I think of them I believe that they all know one another. I believe I know the lives and names of the strangers. When I send a letter or email to acquaintances they all must be confused by mentions of people that have no particular meaning to them.

Eventually, it comes to me. I am the great integrator. We are all the great integrators of our lives. Of course everyone knows one another. How could it be otherwise? They know me. I know you. I mix work relations with school relations with virtual relations with home relations with childhood relations with family relations. I discover that here lies my great wellspring. Here is the central tap of my creative power that carries the energy and flow of my living.

I’m not much taken to mysticism. I only visited Veronica’s Veil once and that was only as a favor to deliver a portion of a CCD class from a church that I attended out of duty. I did find, at my church, a spirit of community that I thought was powerful. Which will suffice as spirit. I consulted the I Ching once. The coin oracle because I could never conquer the dexterous mathematical concepts of, much less find, yarrow stocks. I don’t exactly remember the question but I suppose I was asking after the nature of my essential being. I threw the coins, yes they had holes in the center, and the answer calculated was six unbroken lines, primal power, light giving, active, strong and of the spirit, Ch’ien, The Creative. I took it as a wonderful affirmation. I still do.

Gee–Sus

Look at that guy

That guy right over there

Bet half a billion I could fall

        faster

in a well of gravity

a twinking twirling

                decay

a bloated supergiant

depleted of hydrogen

way above the main sequence

Think about it

They say my name is Raimundo

Can anyone believe that

A    squall

A        squeek

A      skew

All sleezy fully blown

like a carbon black ball

berry shot from the snout of

a

third stage rocket burning the

Mesosphere

Damn but I believe I am arriving

in the nick of time

My mother worked at the corner of Sixth Street and Penn Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh. A waitress. If you visit there today, you are most likely on the way to a performance of the Pittsburgh Symphony or some other event of high and cultural significance. Visits in my younger days were more practical, less high brow. The Mayflower Coffee Shop, tucked into the lower corner of the Loew’s Penn Theater, where statues stood in shining mail on the cold marble of the antechamber to the Men’s Room. Although the cold and the marble still grace the Heinz Hall rest rooms today, Galahad and his kin have long been banished to either some gilded Camelot or a tacky steak house. The theater balcony, up the silent red carpet, now abuzz with intermission patrons swarming a pay bar on performance eve, was most always dark, cold and closed for the afternoon showing of the latest film.

1960 was the year. Ninth grade. It had to be very early in the school year. My brother and I climbed the wet leaf laden street to the bus stop at top of the Maple Avenue. After an air brake whoosh and two short steep steps into the oily warm air and a tumble of change into an aquarium of coins, we rode the Harmony Short Line into downtown Pittsburgh. The Eastwood Theater, Father Blacks Church, The bar at Hamilton and Penn, the Liberty, Cameraphone, Sheridan Square, Regent and Enright Theaters, the teeth of Dr. Baum, the rotating Duquesne Beer Bottle at the intersection of Oakland and East Liberty, the dark iron picket fence of Bigelow Boulevard overlooking the heart of the Strip and the Allegheny River Valley, the sprawling post office and then the city itself.

We would meet my mother a couple times a year after her work shift ended. Christmas shopping was always one trip, but I’m guessing that the journey that I have in mind was for new school clothing. Another new beginning in the guise of the school year. And after that a movie.

My mother, always on the look to further the education and the moral position of her children, often embraced the catechism of Hollywood. A couple years earlier she had taken us to see High School Confidential to show us the evils of the inhalation of marijuana. To show her offspring what desperate and wanton dope fiends that they could become if involved with the “wrong” friends. My recollection of the movie revolves around Russ Tamblyn’s aunt, played by Mamie Van Doren. She wore a bullet bra covered by an incredibly tight white sweater. I still am moved by the memory. My mother’s heart, and possibly her head, was in the right place. Unfortunately that was not the part of my anatomy that was paying attention. Although I have to admit that my encounters with grass and sundry psychedelics at a later time remained experimental and slight. Perhaps a direct result of this film.

This early autumn day seemed no different than many of our earlier excursions. I purchased a couple shirts from Rosenbaum’s after an argument of color, material and style - the ever unending clash of my achromatic youth and my more variegated mother. Pants, all dark, with a tuck here and a dart there to fit my chubby frame. Some shoes - black loafers. Socks white. We were ready for a drink, buttered pop corn and the movie. The latest Alfred Hitchcock.

North by Northwest? Still my favorite. But no! Not this day. To Catch a Thief? Nope. Perhaps Vertigo, no, but a little closer. Rear Window? Do I really seem that old? Not bad Hitch, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak and twice Grace Kelly, not bad at all. This day it was to be, all too briefly, the lovely, the lonely Janet Leigh.

Lambs we were to the slaughter. Our sensibilities forever trounced. This is the day Hitchcock cleared the way for the Hollywood carnage that followed in an all American downward spiral that celebrates violence and gore because it cannot deal with sexuality and living - bad taste, loss of intellect. Psycho and The Music Man both. The only trouble in River City was Harold Hill and his disdain for Flaubert. Marian Crane. Marian the Librarian. Don’t dismiss the connections.

We walked, tub of popcorn tight against our chests, cold drinks clutched in hands, right into the Bates Motel.

I revere and appreciate the music of Bernard Hermann, although it forever creased some portion of my brain that afternoon. Forget the shower scene, shrieking violins are all it takes to send me into fits of fear.

Phoenix, wasn’t it. Moving Modrian lines in the title sequence forming the buildings. Am I remembering correctly? Marian takes some money. Makes an assignation with her lover. Then a ride east on the highway and a really bad place to stop for the night. Mild mannered Norman and his extremely temperamental mother. Wrong night wrong place wrong room.

The next day, I was as gory and unforgiving as anyone explaining the movie to my classmates, because something in me changed. I was a lot less sure of my place in the world. A lot of the innocence of my thinking left me to mingle with the dark smoke of the universe. This was not the catharsis of a scary story around a campfire. I like a good horror story as much as the next person. This was a warped vision of the world. A stamp of fear and caution crippled my flights of imagination.

Similar tales of unfounded fears are used continuously and effectively to control rather than to lead the exploration of our essential natures. We are forced to live in the world of the psycho and sociopath in the news that we ingest, in the entertainment that we choose, even in the warnings and labels of food that we eat.

It may be a dangerous, bad, uncompromising world, but I can and do choose not to live in the fear and ignorance that is spewed daily by others who are twisted and caught up in the unthinking mush that more and more seems the stuff of American dreams. My mother wanted to take us to a movie. A movie to feed our minds. Wrong day, wrong place, wrong world.

This is not about jargon. Not much anyway. How can you possibly poke good fun about a subject that is by definition and deep in its very own existence both important and ludicrous?I found myself asking the other day, “What was the TD of the superheat on the TXV?”

When I was a kid I used to be accused of spoiling everyone’s fun. Had I been a little more glib, I would have squawked. Had I pondered it a little longer, I would have shrugged my shoulders, realized the truth. Everyone was trying to spoil my fun.

I heard an interview with an author via a pod cast as I was driving home this evening. I purchased an mp3 player in the hopes that it would make the silly and certainly unnecessary drive time traffic less annoying. See, just more people trying to spoil my fun! I am convinced that the only reason there is traffic in this world is for the sole purpose of disturbing my equilibrium. The audio massage leaves me with a fine subdued sense of well being.

The writer was asked if he was going to pursue other means than the novel to write. In particular he was asked if he would consider a blog. He replied that since he didn’t even know how to use his iPod that a blog was out of the question. He also stated that he was going to get rid of the wi fi in his apartment and become connected via some wires. And that he spent too much time on the internet reading fluff and that he was going to get back to books. The interviewer agreed with him heartily.

Now, I had something more than traffic to annoy me.

I love books. I have quite a collection as anyone who has been to visit me can attest. I love reading, more than you, I’ll bet. At least as much as the author being interviewed. The attitude that I was hearing is one that people often feel they have to convey to me. This new kind of technology is demeaning and base.

I do my work on a computer. I consider it as an amplification of my thought, my being. I work more effectively and think more clearly when I am at the keyboard of a computer. A connection is made that is vital to me. More and more I consider blogging an evolving form of my art.

In no way do I want to convert you to becoming a computer user in order to become a better communicator, to amplify your intelligence, to check to see if facts are straight. All of those things and more are part of my work and my being. It doesn’t have to apply to you. I can stand it.

In no way do I want to convince you to read or write a blog, to download a pod cast or to configure an RSS reader.

The author, the interviewer and far too many people want to convince me that their particular means to enlightenment is the one that I should employ, the “way” that I should follow. Sorry!

Me? I kill the Buddha every chance I get.

A famous science fiction writer on a cable channel during an essay segment that he created brought out a crafted box containing his collection of pencils and told the viewing audience that here was the way he wrote. The synapse fired from brain through his arm in clean strokes of pencil on paper. No computer for this fellow. Not even a typewriter. Nope, just the smooth line of fine dark on white.

I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth of his writing. I’m pretty sure he was also telling all of us what slackers we were for not using such a divine method to write.

Use your pencils, write your novels, read only “great” literature, only read non-fiction works, don’t watch science fiction movies, drink wine out of a jelly jar, compose only jazz, put the toilet roll so that the paper reels out across the top, create a poem by scratching with an awl on a piece of sandstone. It’s not that I don’t care….well…maybe it is that I don’t care…it’s that it’s just not all that important to me.

And the way that I do things just aren’t that important to you. I’ll be glad to talk about my methods ad nauseum. I’ll listen with interest to your ideas. I could even adopt them as my own. But I’ll never write a how-to manual. And I sure as hell won’t read yours.

It doesn’t make me righter or brighter, does it?

- No no no! How many times do I have to tell you? Wash the glasses first, then the dishes!

In the words of Sir Winnie the Churchill, “Ending a sentence in a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”

What’s the point?

About a month ago I had this great idea. The muse called to me. Assemble a family tree. Come to understand your ancestry. It is time to confront your lineage.

-What the hell, I thought. Who am I to fly in the face of the daughters of Zeus?

After all wasn’t it Mneme, who in a dream, gave me leave to explore my memory?

And wasn’t it Urania who gave me a vision that I would live for a time once again at 1533 Maple Avenue in the house that my father built?

And how about old Thalia who lead me down the comedic path to Lackzoom Acidophilus?

So which of these lively lovely ladies called to me?
I just hoped it wasn’t Melpomene, the songstress of tragedy.

It started simply enough. I purchased a piece of software and started to fill in the blanks. Begin, the help file counseled, with yourself, the biggest blank of all. Further, said the help oracle, when compiling your genealogy, always find the best documentation that you can. I grabbed the old lock box off the top shelf of the bedroom closet. You all have one. Tan, maybe gray, painted metal with important papers inside. The registration for the 1961 White Ford Falcon. A copy of an insurance policy that you cashed in thirty years ago. Birth Certificates and copies of Birth Certificates. A cross earned, like military honors, at First Holy Communion. Inside, under the papers, an unused key that looks as if it might work to lock the box. A small silver circular lock on the exterior looks like, if you actually used that key and then lost immediately, it would not sustain one large blow from a hammer or an insistent crack from the long blade of a slot head screwdriver. Nor is fireproofing one of its virtues. It is there, as we shall see only to keep the prying eyes of your children from “the whole story”.

I found War Ration Book Four from WWII. Cards with pictures of Saints and Prayers, my father’s demobilization papers, honorably discharged in 1943 form the Army Air Corps, Thank you. A Plan of Property, Social Security information and MYSTERY #1.

My father’s Birth Certificate.

Born May 20, 1911 one Guiseppi Generoso Coluccio.

Who?

See my name is Joseph Anthony Coluccio Jr. on account of my father is Joseph Anthony Coluccio Sr. Honest it says it on my birth certificate.

Attached to the document is a letter dated February 9, 1942 signed Concetto Coluccio, who is my father’s father, stating that his son’s “right and proper” name is Joseph Anthony Coluccio and not Guiseppi Generoso Coluccio. You would have thought that in 30 some years someone would have noticed the mistake.

And now for MYSTERY #2.

My parents wedding certificate says that they were married on May 11, 1946.
And, by gum, they celebrated that anniversary every year.

I was born on December 31, 1944.

I know in this day, an age where people have two children from one marriage, another born after a passionate weekend trip to Connecticut with a psychotic movie star, one adopted from the USSR and one created in vitro and implanted in a surrogate, that being issued a couple years shy of a wedding certificate is no big deal.

And truly it doesn’t bother me. Although at work they are having a field day pointing out that they always knew I was a bastard, so why should they be surprised.

But it did give me pause in the second or so of recognition and realization. My mother and father have passed away as have all of their brothers and sisters. What made me hold my breath was that there simply was no one to ask. No one to explain what had happened. I was too stupid to ask when someone could have answered.

If, of course, I had known.

I hope I can paste the pieces of my life together for my children. I have vowed to do so. It will look more like a cubist collage or perhaps a ransom note cut from newspaper print, than a coherent picture, but what answers I can supply will be there.

Asterisk and all.