5/4/2008 7:16:16 AM

I admit it I am a criminal! I am a thief. I stand as accused, Javier.

This confession comes only after software designing companies have bludgeoned it out of me.

I have recently purchased a Mac Book Pro. I normally steer as clear of brand name proclamation as I do of political discussions. For many of the same reasons. All claims are spurious and unimportant, But the OS change from Windows to OS X is some of the problem I am about to discuss.

I began shifting software to the new computer mid last week. I expected a nightmare and I got a nightmare. I have not yet completed my descent and have yet to see a Virgil around to help me. All is phantasm and horror. A couple toothy wolves and a panther attacked late this morning.

Sure the software loaded in a tame enough manner.  At the last "load a computer orgy" a couple years ago I actually took all earlier install discs that I could find and placed them in the box that contained the latest edition of  that particular software. It made for some very thick stuffed cardboard containers and a bunch of black magic marker magic over the software logo, but it paid off like the money roll of a carny shill at the chuck-a-luck wheel this time around. I had proof of purchase!

Now that I think of it, I am amazed that the confirmation process before any installation doesn’t include using some of the 5 1/4" Floppy Discs of the my original Win386 installation. Of course, there really doesn’t seem to be much play for my DOS copy of DBase IV. Oh, dear, I hope I haven’t let slip to these software providers another idea for a torture to use on the way to our perdition.

So I had gathered my forces. But I never reckoned with activation.

It is hard to do, but I must at this juncture still remind myself that it was my dollars (mostly as the cliche demands, hard earned) that bought these programs, but what do my dollars matter against INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?

The install discs loaded. I accepted the terms, without which the program would not work and I would have spent my earnings on but a dream. Did the companies every think to ask this question of agreement to terms before you put our credit card number on the line and click Proceed? Then I arduously with fat finger typed the ridiculous serial numbers with dashes designed so that you just can’t copy and paste . The program itself installed itself admirably. Then it booted and started.

The first screen was an activation screen. "Do you", it asked with a cloying kind of guile and innocence, "want to activate this program online."

"Do I", I asked each time, "have any choice?"

Send in the activation by Pony Express? I activated! Online!

Time and again, even though I only have most of this existing software loaded on one computer, I was told that all the activation slots were filled and that I would have to deactivate my copy on the other machine.

Who filled the slots? Why are there slots?

I scrupulously deactivated my offending copy!

In almost no case did it work. Now, I have to email or call during regular hours and have a conversation about the fact that I did nothing wrong other than pay my money and religiously buy the upgrades. Foolish me!  I wanted the software I purchased and upgraded to be usable as well.

My mind began to work in overclock. How the hell had I had managed to fill those damned slots of activation? I spend the nights sleepless, spinning.

I think part of the problem is that I wanted in many cases to change the software from Windows OS to Mac OS. Was ever there a crime more heinous in this country? I can’t even imagine what it could be. The perfidious box that contains the software in every instance about which I am writing claimed to support both Windows and Mac.

Were these claims written by home land security to entrap really bad guys like me?

I have concluded on my way to the gallows that I must be guilty. I tick the points off on my fingers and everything points to me. So learn from me brothers and sisters. Buy a computer, but think twice about getting any software. It will lead you to a life of crime as sure as it did me. Better you should download and find some cracks. You don’t have to activate them.

Leave Dickens out of it. I never worked for a lump of coal or ate a rotten bit of potato for lunch but I did go to work at a dreadful tender young age.

I believe my parents thought it would teach me a thing or two about responsibility. So each morning at the crank of something that I later in life came to recognize as the pre-dawn, new to me in that summer of my lost vacational, I would awaken to the smell of coffee that was too adult for me to drink.

I was a scant 13.

I couldn’t drink wine, hell, the Roman Mass was still in Latin, wine was for the priest, and I found the wafer a pasty sticky transubstantiation, and the heavy smell of incense as mind expanding as Baba Ram Dass tempting Tim and his Harvard colleagues. Or beer, thrust thrice down my young gullet, a trick that my old man was sure would keep me out of the trough and upstanding. A puff on a Camel was a stark impossibility for years to come.

How I longed for the totem.

There was milk and a cake donut that had been minted from the Mayflower Coffee Shop where my mother worked.

“As you ramble on through life dear brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”

My mother’s waggish boss once suggested, when she asked him to sponsor her bowling league, that he would only do so if the team wore that slogan on the back of their shirts. He surrendered. A smile on his face. A cup of steaming coffee stitched on their blouses.

Summer of 1958.

I am in working clothes and heading down the North Side of the Allegheny River in the back seat of whatever clunking mobile that we owned in those days. The car smells of cracked abused leather, years of construction cement and lime and dirt stuck deep in every recess, under the rug even in the glove box and a heavy hand fashioned wood tool box that holds my feet aloft loaded with bastard files, red headed hatchets and golden plumb bobs. The heat is blowing in the window with the breeze as we slowly travel with the traffic, mixes with a summer musk off the river. It is still dark.

And we are on our way to make a living.

The traffic light at the HJ Heinz plant, hang a left down to River Avenue. There’s always an old barge or derelict river crane to feed my sense of dark adventure. A sneak on to the Sixth Street Bridge, now named for Roberto hitting .311 or .314 in those days the Pirates two years away from glory. Over the hump and split into downtown Pittsburgh. Pull up close to the curb on Penn and let my mother off. Sixth and Penn. Walk. Don’t Walk. I believe there is a glint of day to come.

Then a vigorous course through every alley and back street, under skeletal fire escapes, garbage cans with loose round tops, the odor, grease, hash browns and buttery eggs from breakfast eateries turns to urine and beer out of the back of saloons. Which leads to

The Smithfield Street Bridge. Trolley’s to the left and scant room for motor vehicles on the right. Pedestrians on the walk. An early wooden version the bridge burned in minutes, the fire of 1845. The Mon River gray. Barges beat their way to and from the heated heart of the steel valley starting a mile or so up the stream.

A turn to the left and we are at a long thin gas station build into the steep side of the hill. My father is talking to the owner Bill, a small man in soiled dark blue coveralls. His forehead his cheeks his chin are trapped with dirty grease. He reminds me of Charlie Allnut as played by Humphrey Bogart in the African Queen. I imagine that his stomach is making a loud grumbling sound. My father laughs. Bill explains the ins and outs of the lives on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Gasoline spills over the rear fender of the car. Wiped with an oil dirt rag. On to South Sixth and Bingham Street.

The building is still there. Houses a similar business. At the head of the street on Carson a wild field leads up to the train tracks. One year hence Rennekamp will build a concrete yard, built gray with concrete block. We park at the rear of Beighley Hardware and Tool close to the garage door that never opens. One of my lifetimes ago.

I began.

Squa Tront!
Spa Fon!

I know what you’re thinking! I am not a Martian. (Alien? Perhaps. Outré? mais oui!)

surely a fan of EC Comics?

but marginally.

Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror used to scare the stuffing out of me. Too dark! Disgustingly graphic! Sinful fun, nonetheless.
The picture of Bill Gaines on the inside jacket of the book that I have in front of me as I sit here and write, “Horror Comics of the 1950’s” is more than a little frightening in itself.

I was a fan, however of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and the amalgam Weird Science-Fantasy. What could be better than Science Fiction created by “the usual gang of idiots”? I manage once or twice a year to purchase a copy of Mad Magazine. Laugh? You bet!

I feel that, in these ending years of my life, it is not only natural but necessary to explore the notions and conceptions that are somehow at the base of my being. ‘It’s what older folks do.’ Hollow echoes. Empty corridors. Furthermore my psyche seems in tune with this search and the deeper I probe, the further it resounds, the more comes to light. I bypass all the pain and hurt that is the constant bother of scores of memory. The same that keep me tossing fitfully as I sleep at night. The ones that are like a cold, hard steel poker thrust into a raw wound. I’ll deal with those as I can, but it is more important, at the moment, to dive deep, maybe even into those proclaimed archetypal depths, the ones that may link us all.

Ah Popular Culture!

It doesn’t matter what beach you inhabit when you see “…the world in a grain of sand…” or in what field you stand when you “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” By God, Mr.Bloom, Harold or Leopold, Western Canon or Buck’s snot-green, a color for poets, I am truly astounded by the breathtaking span of intellect and intuition that Shakespeare can provide, but have found much of the same sense and wonder plucking at me in what, for lack of a more imposing name, is called Popular Culture. The Popular Culture that clots twists and tangles my own peculiar mind.

I started the quest with the idea that I would find repose in the science fiction that I devoured in my preteen years. I have on my shelves, close at hand, among a myriad of others, almost the entire run of the Winston Science Fiction Juveniles that I first read in Junior High School. I have copies of science fiction magazines from the 1950’s through the ..well.. really through the present. The thirteen Heinlein Juveniles. Anthologies prepared by Groff Conklin. Articles by L. Sprague De Camp, criticism by Damon Knight, history by James Blish. I admit it, both as a guilty pleasure and with an occasional glimpse of deep insight, that I enjoy them all. Can think of a little better in the evening than to sit and re-read and re-experience the wonder the awe the horror that those titles provoked in my dreaming foaming psyche. Are they much of a mature literary pleasure? No! It is far more solitary and complex. I would not recommend it to everyone. But I assure you there is something there for my world to see. I can feel it. Synesthesia.

My early journeys to worlds dreamed then published are not the only entrance to the underground mine. By turns I have looked to B List movies and listened to the radio programs that covered the AM dial in the second to the fifth decades of the twentieth century. To what used to be called comic books that have sadly grown into slick expensive graphic novels. AHA! It seems that I am showing my old codgerness, my conservative cultural stripes, but the point here is that in my rash youth popular culture was evanescent. It captured the zeitgeist and then was bundled with the trash. It only seems now that the manifest sweeping panorama of spirit and mind had any lasting value. (Yes, of course, my mother threw away a fortune in DC and EC comics. That’s why God made mothers.) Those heady and primitive stabs of media were formative, part of a transition, part of my foundation. Right and Wrong. Blazing brilliant and blasphemous.

With a strong puff of dust I blow where Professor Maracot has his deep, Challenger his Jurassic plateau and Hans his Pfall; where Johnny Mack Brown hardly ever gets dirty; where Tom Bartlett and his twin brother Pat communicate across the stars; where Sam throws over Brigid or is it Miss Wonderly for popping Miles, who he didn’t even like that much; where on a sloping beach far past even Weena’s demise and the flesh eating horrors of the proletarian Morlock, crab like creatures grasp and then further still until it is further still.

I do not yet wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

It came on me here on the back porch, not so much in a flash of revelation but more like a shrug of shoulder resignation. No big sigh, just an uncomfortable slip into a slump. I have been struggling lately. The ride home this evening was like a slog through a bitter syrup. Indecisive drivers holding back forward motion, large 18 wheeled trucks jamming side roads, traffic signals malfunctioning. The realization of how little I could do. How little I cared to do. How little of life was used to just sit there and accept it. Listen to the topic at hand on the auto speakers. Stupid. A pod cast.

It is all invasive the struggle. The stress of life. There’s good stress eustress and bad stress distress. Yes, I’ve read my Marshall McLuhan, who in those old days seemed to have an answer for each with a brief firm nod to Hans Selye. There was further illusion of understanding in my early day readings. Marcuse worried the one dimensional being, Norman O. Brown held the Life After Death until the Closing Time. Even old Joe Campbell inhabited mythopoeic regions hence unexplored at least by my tender psyche. Jung was I and not easily Freuded. Norbert Wiener manned the helm steering humans humanly as possible and The revolution would not be televised. It would be writ in a language sempre più dolce, molto oblongata.

Who knew it would come to this. We wallow in shallow intellectual ruts of spiritual excess. Defined by lurid thoughts far more pornographic than any raw sexual act in the nonfiction and d-i-y list of endlessly bickering best selling crud. Tired beyond relief, stripped of most belief. There is not any longer so much an adventure of the spirit and the mind, but a combination regimen of sackcloth and ashes and the buttered balm of a cloying conscience. Beat me daddy eight or more hard. Is this what they call depression still. Cruel aches of the mind reflecting badly on the spirit.

Racking around in the muck and the mud. A church bell, soft in my suburbs, chimes in intimation of a Big Ben and there is a smell of garbage blowing in from some unknown location. The incessant susurration of tire wheels in even time commercing up and down the street. Heavy water molecules ringing out of the air on to my skin along with the gnaw and suck of a far less than extinct insect species. The truly ugly caw of a crow. Every cloud’s overcast, obscure every star’s in the sky. And I am tired.

It could be worse. I suppose it has been worse.

People suffer from cruel human conflict inhumane. Atrocities are caught. We are the terror. And I sit here in comfort and cry over a glass of Syrah, sirrah. How little I can do.

Opinion foisted, in my face, like a bad smell of undigested onion from the horrid breath of some bullying lout. I hear it as I fall asleep the radio set on the tawdry amplitudinally modulated dial. Ideas wailing from some circle of hell. Propped up and blowing by a foul wind. I hear it as I fall asleep with the High Definition Television blurred in my eyes. Uneven thoughts raging from the minds of the minions.

It is there in conversation as innocent as a water bubbler on the floor of a thousand tan carpeted offices. An overwhelming wealth of opinion, mostly ill considered and well intentioned.

Oy, the politesse…And Yoy, the poletics……as if it was important. It is mostly just an excuse for ill tempered people to massacre other folk. Murder in mind. In intellect. In spirit. In body. An intolerant nation, moving, more intolerant. Closing all avenues, shuttering every area, enclosing our world in the bubble of a field of rude force, creating a hot house of inhospitable breeding, a runaway greenhouse effect of conviction.

I’ll take another small sip of whiskey and then go in to sleep. After all I say, tomorrow could be another day.

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

The day smelled wet, gray, chilled. Late 1950’s early vernal promise out of the brown compost of layered leaves. My father circled the blacktop in front of Allegheny Observatory then parked in front of a set of concrete steps that lead the entry door.

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

My passions like tendrils creeping ever downward to tap roots, it seems, have been with me since my beginnings. It’s enough to make me believe in a calling. It’s enough to make me sad that I fall so short.

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;

Eighth grade Seneca Junior High School Social Studies Class. The last major project, as I remember it, before the end of the school year was a report about our “calling”. We were assigned the task of interviewing someone who was presently involved in what we believed would become our vocation. My head was ablaze with the idea.

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,

I had a thought, far too daring, almost unspeakable, for my introverted troglodyte teen age. A call to meet my call. My uncles mostly worked in the building trades. As did my father. Should I interview Sofis Pedersen, one hell of a plasterer, or Bettino Fragale, one hell of a painter, or even my old man, one hell of a carpenter. It would have brought home the grade, but it just didn’t seem right. I looked around our small suburban neighborhood. Streets like the promise of small town America. A public swimming pool at the bottom of the hill. Should I interview a township solicitor, a school teacher an insurance agent?

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

I called Allegheny Observatory. Somehow got through to a guy who was on staff who was an astronomer who would interview with me. I felt the spheres of the solar system click into gravitational place. More than a priest, more than a pope, here was a religion that I not only understood, but was in full mental, physical and spiritual accord. The actual meeting was closer to the Walt Whitman poem dispersed throughout.

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

I had a wad of gum chewed, devoid of all spearmint and sugar, in my mouth. I realized it as disaster as a left the car. Never interview with chewing gum in your mouth. Pretty sure that was in the lesson book somewhere. Maybe it was just my superego out for a laugh. I took it from my mouth and placed it in my right winter coat waist pocket. Never throw wet sticky spent gum on the concrete walk. I think that was a PA State law. My hand felt sticky. And wet. I was pretty sure I was going to have to shake Frank’s (the only vestige of his name left in my psyche) hand. Always introduce yourself with a firm handshake. Never chew gum.

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

I turned his hand into a sopping gooey mess. He didn’t seem to notice. We settled down. He showed me a 3 1/2 Questar Telescope. (Just looked on their website and the 50th Anniversary Model would be about right) Unbelievably small, unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably beyond my outstretched reach. Unbelievable.

I had orchestrated this whole rambling, haphazard interview to lead up to the one question of unimaginable import. “Frank,” I’m sure I called him Dr. so and so, “did you choose astronomy or did astronomy pluck a celestial chord, call like the Lorelei, haunt like a very very sweet melody and choose you?” That was the intent in any case and most likely not the actual words.

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
– Walt Whitman

He, poor guy, broke my heart. “No,” he said, “I thought I might give a try to chemistry when I first started out, but the course was pretty full and they were just developing astronomy department, so I chose it instead.”

I’ve compromised far more than ol’ Dr. “Frank” in my life. It shows. But somewhere down really in the depths of me lies the universe in all its awe and mystery. Just takes a dark night on the back porch. You’ve got it too.depths of me lies the universe in all its awe and mystery. Just takes a dark night on the back porch. You’ve got it too.

With all respect to the artistic excellence and the depth of emotion shown by Jorgi Jorgenson:

When did Holmes return from his deadly tumble over the Reichenbach Falls.
The birthplace of meringue, if you can believe
In the Springtime, my dear compatriot

And Whan was it that Aprille with his shoures soote,
bathed every veyne in swich licour?
I believe the same April that
bred lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain.

When is the resurrection of Christ
When is opening day for baseball
When can I open my inside world to the outside

Spring is that time of year that has a lot to proclaim. It’s a little like Friday afternoon just after work when a whole world of the soul is possible. The Pirates, as I write at 1 and 7, have me for a month, maybe two, maybe all the way to the All Star Game. I watch Angels in the Outfield (Do not even ask which version, there is only one version and yes Spring Byington is in it, as is the Gulf Station at North Craig and Bayard) with a clump in my throat and tears in my eye. It may be the closest I come to a Fundamental Christianity all year.

Yes, there is sans doute a spring in my step. There I’ve said it for all the world to hear!

And when I was just a youngun’, the event of the year would swing in the spring. It was better, I promise you than, Christmas morning. More spirit filled than Easter. It always happened on the Friday around May 20th, my old man’s birthday, which we would celebrate on the veranda of a stately cafeteria while smeared colored lights and hot oily smelling machines hummed.

The Penn Hills School District would quit an entire Friday this miraculous day. Long rolls and booklets of tickets went on sale in the classroom in early April for the school picnic at discounted prices.

Long suffering, the Catholic Church wasn’t nearly as accommodating. Oh the sin of meat on Friday more deadly than the sins of bacon frying! Standing on hot black top next the mechanical grind of Looping Loops, forced by the evil spirit to forgo the dull pasteboard taste of Mrs. Paul’s. That first bite, the saliva provoking, deep red, rouge of the hot dog. A verbal prayer as slap across the forehead “Oh my God, I have most heartily sinned, but honest I forgot it was Friday and I’m so tired of macaroni and cheese, mea maxima culpa and yes ketchup on the burger, buddy.”

There is an amusement park, east side of Pittsburgh reborn each spring of the year after the dead tracking cold of winter and ice that even an Eliza blast furnace city side couldn’t melt. Deep in the industrial maw of America the park was created circa 1898 so that the power companies could create a destination for under utilized electric trolleys on the weekend. It was purchased from the Kenny Family. It was named Kennywood. Each year it rises brighter than Camelot out of the brown shallow waters of the Mon River.

Just today, my jacket rakishly open in the parking lot at work, my mind clicked stop, a small silver bearing dropping into a roulette slot: 1958. Just a kid formulating the universe in my own peculiar image of twirling stars and galaxies in the back yard, chilled despite the early warmth, and romance a plenty. All time sprayed before me. I see myself then seeing myself now.

First it’s the Jack Rabbit, then headin’ for the Pippin and after that a penny for a post card of Linda Darnell, her long hair to her shoulders, that creamy creamy skin.Silver Rockets elegantly swinging over the lake. The crazy gypsy lady in the glass booth from a thousand centuries ago swings her finger my way says, “Got you, darling.”

I almost smile.

Aron Nimzowitch, chess theoretician, author and pretty good player, world champion, a Latvian who settled at the end of his life in Copenhagen Denmark, lost a chess game to one Friedrich Sämisch in Baden Baden in 1925. Yes, the same Sämisch who developed the variation that is considered to be the sharpest way of meeting the King’s Indian Defense. Aron it turns out was a sore loser with an aggressive attitude. He swept the chess pieces from the board stood up and shouted, “Why must I lose to this idiot?!”It seems that I understand his tirade more and more every day in almost every way.

An acquaintance of mine whose father was a professor of mathematics at a university says that his old man used to come home after an afternoon of student meetings and fall into a chair. After a quick snort of a palliative spirit he would rise from his funk and explain to his son. “I get so discouraged. I meet with these students year after year and they tell me things. Why don’t they ever tell me something that I don’t know?”

I second that emotion.

Look I am not a particularly bright person. My grades throughout my school career pegged me as an “above average” student. I managed to keep my nose floating above the sea of mediocrity sometimes deep into Grade “B” territory. My grasp of concepts comes with some effort. Some never come at all. I have a pretty good memory. I am moderately okay playing Trivial Pursuit.

I have invented a variant that I like to call Consequential Pursuit in which a card is drawn and some perplexing subject like “Love” , “The Essential Nature of the Cosmos”, “the Number of Pins on the Head of an Angel”, is revealed to the players, who contemplate that deadly selected subject for any number of years and really don’t ever reach any rich conclusion. If we could decide on the color of the box and get some kind of notion from the Ideal, I think it would sell tolerably well.

So here I am. A person of above average intellect. Rising above the ever swelling tide of unintelligible muck that has become the way of American consciousness and the destiny of American learning. There, my friends, is something very wrong here. I should be looking up to giants who can boost me on their shoulders and help to exhilarate me as I ride along the path with them. Last time I looked a whole lot of folks were milling around, counting their toes, not interested enough to even pay attention to the only above-average me. No giants around. I assure you I am not, nor should I be, much as I might wish and desire, a giant. I can’t begin to even pass for one. No matter how tall I might stand in the field of stunted trees.

Yet I find myself losing to the overwhelming idiocy of opinion that is foisted from every corner of the compass in almost every medium possible. I find the number of people who can tell me things that I don’t know dwindling to a precious few. The thing that Nimzowitch had on me was that he could scream. I find myself more and more mute. More and more at the hideous mercy of thought that is stuffed and stated in a way that is supposed to pass for considered and cogent. Radio talk show hosts pass as politically wise. Movie stars are listened to with the rapt attention that was once given to Plato in the Academy. Stylish comic books are the serious source for social commentary. Best selling novelists impersonate spiritual guides.

It seems that we the people cannot not stand to live in the mire of indecision. Makes us uncomfortable not to have a side. So some jingo raker comes along with a glib sideways profile, the gait of perfect knowledge and a patina of equanimity and we fall seduced. The rake laughs at those unable to mold, to make-up their minds into the image of a righteousness. Scorns the sitters on the fences, wish the wash, flip the flop. I urge you to stay in the tension, live in the struggle. I urge you to make a decision. I urge you to make it again. Make it again. Again. I urge you to live. It hurts a little bit.

I need you to soar. Reach down grab me by the very nape of my neck and hike me up. I might flap and make a soul filled noise, but I’ll do my part, honest.