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?

“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.

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.

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.