My Life as a Cyborg. And How Is Your OCD Problem?

     You feel lonely, anxious, somewhat depressed, maybe even (and this admittedly is not the norm) tap-dancing on the beveled edge of mental illness. You somehow sense that you have turned dumber without trying during recent weeks.

     Get ready for the bad news. Your laptop, notebook, Crackberry, EPIC smartphone, iPad, and Facebook buddies may be the main causes of your troubles. (Damn, I knew I was allowing too many FB friends in!) The source for this data blast is The Daily Beast web blog -- July 9 (2012):

     http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/08/is-the-internet- 
     making-us-crazy-what-the-new-research-says.html

     "Now . . . . the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed  
     research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet
     blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the
     Internet  -- portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive -- may be
     making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious,
     prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even
     outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts,
     and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways."

Or maybe it is not.


We Are All Cyborgs Now?

      A cyborg is a merger, a blending, an interdependent connection fashioned between the human and the machine. Like in the old D,C, Comic books and the newish Superhero, Comic-Con films. It may sound strange. The term cyborg implies relationship -- and there are burgeoning numbers of relationships between the human and the non-human. This may seem a little disturbing. Or like unto an Orwellian conceit. Or pure bullpunky. It may rock some peoples' fragile worlds. But cyborgian states of life are pretty common these days.

     Now, don't judge me, but I became officially a cyborg during December 2009 as post-Christmas carold wafted around my hospital ward's floor-- with the help of a four hour surgery (which I snoozed through completely, missing all the fun) under the scalpels and bone-cutters and stapling machines and gooey superglue strips utilized by a razor-sharp team of licensed medical geeks in wintry Arizona. The goal I had was to emerge with a stainless silver, implacable, and insentient titanium elbow and shiny new fore bone planted into my left arm.  During my two hospital stays through all of this, I must have heard over 100 times in my imagination the words: 'We can rebuild him -- stronger, faster, better than before' which older readers will remember from the cyborgian fantasy TV show, from decades ago, called the Six Million Dollar Man. So, yes, I have been rebuilt. My cyborgian merger of the human and the mechanism is a permanent feature of me. Stroner, faster, better than before?

     To extend this reflection, I will go on record as saying I wouldn't want to set other features: my laptop, cell phone, Nook, TV remote, and other digitized toys aside either. We're a match unyielding, and that's the way it is and the way it's gonna be. You see, I got me a special relationship. Actually, a collection of them. Correspondingly, my brain (probably yours too) is being 're-wired' in certain ways, my gray-matter chemistry is being remixed like the ingredients of a Baskin Robbins milk shake, and this -- by implication -- will change things between us humans who are conditioned by the 'connection addiction' irrevocably.

     The piece in The Daily Beast notes:

        . . . the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not “just”   
        another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a
        digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning
        instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.

    Get that? The mind as 'spinning instrument panel.' Tres cyboriffic. As the really hip psychological therapists all want to know, "How does this stuff make you feel?"

Getting Past My OCD and a Nagging Chapstick Addiction

     Since I long to be an alpha adopter of as many hip, new terminologies as I possibly can, I would cautiously label myself among the new cadre of 'Ultra-Web Users.' But, please, don't call me Captain Crackberry. Another astute commentator has labeled this cyborgian, non-12th stepping condition as an iDisorder. That I like. So, I probably have an itty-bitty compulsive personality characteristic. I might have to have my smartphone lying potently nearby -- in case I get a text message or something -- for 24/7 of my time. Maybe I sense a frisson ping somewhere down deep when I am awarded a "Like" for something off the cuff on Facebook. These don't add up to mental illness. Do they? C'mon, you can tell me. We're just here, hanging in cyberspace, alone . . . together.

     Well, the literature on this is not real encouraging. Think about these:

  

     The brains of Internet addicts look like the brains of drug and alcohol users

     

      Research in China hints that internet addiction may shrink the area of the

      brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control,

      emotions, and other information

      The more the brain gets affected by internet dependency the more it shows

      signs of atrophy

      The overall increase of global technology usage may possibly be linked to
      the rise in OCD and ADHD diagnoses

       An indicator of internet dependency (accepted by some researchers) is
       spending 35 hours or more a week online. By that definition, many are
       "addicts" by Wednesday morning, even Tuesday during certain weeks

Have you tried to quit or cut down by choice on your cyber-tripping, but found that it just seems impossible? No, I never have either . . . Isn't the gift of denial just great?

My Prefrontal Cortex Is Altered Better Than Yours

      Some observers liken the experience of cyber-community, like one adopts via Facebook, to living alone in a ginormous metropolis -- with few real human connections, hectic scheduling, multiple priorities, daily pressures. Some individuals thrive, really do okay in such contexts, and some persons crack into a ncystalline etwork of whacky pathologies.

      Some cultural and digital-world observers say the internet, at best, should be encountered like life, with a healthy and balanced outlook and a penchant for thoughtfulness, good judgment, and critical reflection. That article from The Daily Beast says:

         . . . all of us, since the relationship with the Internet began, have tended to

        accept it as is, without much conscious thought about how we want it to

        be or what we want to avoid. Those days of complacency should end. The

        Internet is still ours to shape. Our minds are in the balance.

Meaningful critical reflection as a maturing human person (coupled with bouts of good judgment) is different from that pejorative and out-of-control 'new mental environment' (by dipping into the cyberzone) that was mentioned above.

     Being a cyborg -- the human blended with processors, linked to chips, conjoined with digital hardware -- may ultimately be destiny for many (most?) of us. But a self-induced mental and emotional mangling, you know -- the whacky condition of  iCraziness as a recent issue of Newsweek magazine calls it -- most certainly does not have to be.

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Telling Your Best Stories Right? (It's Hard)

After months of reflection and work, I feel stymied still. The outcome from being existentially clunked down in a rather inflexible and otherwise uncomfortable sitting chair. Like many writers, I sometimes think this way: I have a hint of what I want to do or where I might want to go (with this story or along that character's path), but the roadway to realization (at a level that I can accept --which is the curse of absolute perfection) just will not light up, it will not disclose itself.

There are two short fictional stories that I long to complete. And I believe I will wrap them up soon. One has had the title "A Dark Star" for some months. When I tentatively admit to myself that yes -- it is (probably) done, I find that I cannot fully let go. Heigh ho, heigh ho, back to wordprocessing I go. Some mysterious force will often whisper to me almost inaudibly in shaded sunrises and sunsets that there is something I must have missed or managed to misstate, or have crazily mischaracterized. "A Dark Star" is one of the harshest, most emotional "made-up" pieces that I have worked on for a long time, maybe ever. Its theme of evil actively at work in apparently innocent and bucolic settings in medieval Western civilization, to the point that the sinisterness begins acting in a persecutorial way to get that which craves. Personally (and I am biased, biased, biased here) I think the Dark Star tale holds a thought-provoking and subversive set of symbols and metaphors layered into its texts, that will aide readers toward the ghastly slice of real life about which I decided to write. But will it all ever suitably conjoin?

The second story has long held a working title "Leaving Normal." I first thought of it about Fall 1972 or '73. Its theme centers on the struggle to do what is right, despite one's predilections, dark desires, relationships, cultural temptations and other uncontrollable outside forces, because every person has at least a spark -- if not a veritable blowtorch --  of conscience that favors doing 'the good.' The fictional resolution of "LN" today, in 2012, looks and sound so very different than I first thought it would during the initial drafts I penned about 40 years ago. I guess that's okay, isn't it? Well, it just is. Well, I can see different points of view on that main theme of the work. Perhaps I am geared up to wrestle into a resolution about  a way to "Leave Normal" (which I definitively did flee decades ago) but only in such a way that the major point and denoument will have relevance (i.e., something to say or to caution) about the viability of life in this hardscrabble culture of the early 21st century.

Now, dude. Quit gazing @ the dark stars. Roll back into that normal pattern; make a sentence for goodness sake. This means now, jack: back to work.

I'll Trade You 4 Tweets for 2 Txts and a PM on IM. Deal?

Life's Too Short for So Much E-Mail

Looking to be less stressed and more productive? If you listen to certain work-product and workplace satisfaction experts, they'll tell you to dump the E-Mail habit in your life. Or, at least, learn coping mechanisms to control the e-mail problem that you probably have. No doubt you are affected by the e-onslaught. Some analysts claim that 107 trillion electronic messages (e-mails) were generated in the material world during 2010. That's 107 trillion. I personally feel responsible (regarding the sending and/or receiving end) of about 250 billion or so of those e-messages -- it could be many more, but I eat and sleep regularly and take a real vacation now and then.

On average, corporate employees send and receive 105 emails per work day.

If you could keep only one of the following: E-Mail, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Instant Messaging (a.k.a. PM), Texting, or the Old-School Office Telephone -- which would it be?

If each of these social media tools were to disappear suddenly which, if any (of them all), would you miss?

For me, it would be easy to discern. Goodbye to you, Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell. Howdy and hello to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook feels now like my interpersonal communication drug of choice. The phone still feels like too much (work and) effort, after all these decades of occasional dating.

Does the fact that I have never been attracted to the boxed-up "discipline" and restrictions of Twitter-ing (the keep it terse messaging done via 140 lonely characters max. and a cloud of dust), like some random pop culture haiku, make me some kind of Smartphone-toting pariah? Too bad. My die be already cast, mate.

Any way you look at the overall subject of communicating to/with others via social media, the concept of overload on one's already taxed to the max system is bound to rear up. Overload is the key theme in all of this banter wbout life being too short for . . . . (you fill in the blank). This constant facor got me interested in the blog post below. It appeared on the internet (I found it on Facebook as a Share item) just a few days ago.

A Blog Comment by Nick Bilson

Overload . . . . people who do not look at e-mail regularly at work

appear to be less stressed and more productive than their colleagues

Just thinking about my e-mail in-box makes me sad.

This month alone, I received more than 6000 emails. That doesn't include spam, notifications or daily deals, either. With all those messages, I have no desire to respond to even a fraction of them. I can just picture my tombstone: Here lies Nick Bilton, who responded to thousands of emails a month. May he rest in peace.

It's not that I'm so popular.

Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion emails were sent. A report this year from the Radicati Group, a market research firm, found that in 2011, there were 3.1 billion active email accounts in the world. The report noted that, on average, corporate employees sent and received 105 emails a day.

Sure, some of those emails are important. But 105 a day?

All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with email. What's more, I don't believe it can be fixed.

I've tried everything. Priority mail, filters, more filters, filters within filters, away messages, third-party email tools. None of these supposed solutions work.

Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke.

Meanwhile, all of this e-mail could be increasing our stress.

A research report issued this year by the University of California, Irvine, found that people who did not look at e-mail regularly at work were less stressed and more productive than others.

Gloria Mark, an informatics professor who studies the effects of email and multitasking in the workplace and is a co-author of the study, said, "One person in our email study told us after: I let the sound of the bell and pop-ups rule my life."

A Main Problem with E-Mail: No Off Switch.

Mark says one of the main problems with email is that there isn't an off switch.

"Email is an asynchronous technology, so you don't need to be on it to receive a message," she said. "Synchronous technologies, like instant messenger, depend on people being present."Although some people allow their instant messenger services to save offline messages, most cannot receive messages if they are not logged on. With email, it is different. If you go away, emails pile up waiting for your return.

Avoiding new messages is as impossible as trying to play a game of hide-and-seek in an empty studio apartment. There is nowhere to hide.

Is e-mail simply a social media tool for old people?

I recently sent an email to a teenage cousin who responded with a text message. I responded again through email, and this time she answered with Facebook Messenger. She was obviously seeing the emails but kept choosing a more concise way to reply. Our conversation moved to Twitter's direct messages, where it was ended quickly by the 140-character limit.

Later, we talked about the exchanges, and she explained that she saw email as something for "old people"." It's too slow for her, and the messages too long. Sometimes, she said, as with a Facebook status update, you don't even need to respond at all.

Since technology hasn't solved the problem it has created with email, it looks as if some younger people might come up with their own answer — not to use email at all.

So I'm taking a cue from them.

I'll look at my email as it comes in. Maybe I'll respond with a text, Google Chat, Twitter or Facebook message. But chances are, as with many messages sent via Facebook or Twitter, I won't need to respond at all.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/lifes-too-short-for-so-much-email-20120709-21qkn.html#ixzz20DyBD9MV

Blogs: Why Good Blogs Live, Why Many Die

I found myself writing instinctively this morning, via a quickly typed blog response, to a young professional man, J.R., whom I met about 7 years ago. He seems to have a lot that he wants to say to and about the world as his career and family life unfold, particularly on spirituality themes and leadership topics.

In that J.R. produces a lot of blog and other content at his age, he truly reminds me of what I was like back then. After publishing 8 books, contributing pieces to many more, and publishing over 250 articles, essays, commentaries, and reviews, now I maintain two blogs actively. The first is a professional blog on the labors of my office and the projects of my work colleagues. Kind of a ho-hum, it's Thursday and tomorrow promises to be Friday kind of mission.

The other blog is a different kind of animal. It is personal -- and you have discovered it somehow (I don't really publicize it much or actively seek followers), if you are reading this paragraph. The second is called A Big MonstEr Blog. (You'll see that that's for various reasons, but mainly because the possibility -- and now the reality -- of expedited, immediate self-expression to and with others will not shut up and leave me alone. The temptation to bridge the gap is always there -- prodding me to get busy, tell a story, make a point, even on some of my lower than low days.)

Fundamentally, what I wrote to my young blogging friend today was that the wisdom on which he had drawn for his blogpost today was insightful and cogent. Here was the gist of it:

One

The main reason reason a blog lives and grows is that . . . the person producing the blog productively mines the fruits of his or her (or their) experiences. Then they write something interesting about these experiences.

Two

The chief reason why a blog falls apart or dies is that . . . . the process of creating compelling content that flows from honest and unflinching reflection on life experience is a heck of a  challenge. As my young friend admits in his understated way, "It can be difficult to keep up."


Speaking of challenges. During recent years, I have found that the most fruitful and meaningful ways by which I can process life, issues, questions, worries, etc., is to write about them symbolically -- in fictional stories. As is often the case with Stephen King and others, from my purview, the right kind of story or the novel should never be what it seems to be about at all.

Almost  an  Afterthought (but Significant)

The ability to give your blog pieces attractive names is an important skill to cultivate. I really work on it. Maybe I am improving at this, but I wonder. Like the clever and snappy term or phrase that sums up an advertisement or a commercial, the title has a make or break kind of quality. Make it if you can an inviting doorway thru which potential readers will want to walk, rather than a come-on to a fresh but boring Hell ('Sigh, here ya go') or a poly-syllabic buzzkill that suggests, 'Go away, not anything of value for you to see here.'

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Questions Your GPS Won't Answer

Two bright observers on the spiritual-writing scene today -- named Allen and Rolheiser -- have commented recently on the deepest issues that confront persons enfolded in Western, secularized cultures. Their work has led to an articulation of "ten struggles" that have come, like a correction note, stapled to your ticket to modern life. Having read the list of ten over and given them a bundle of thought, I think this is the way to say what they are getting at, which are the . . . .

. . . . Mystifying challenges on how to get from here to there, wherever there is:

1)  The all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present Creator of the cosmos -- the One that previous generations believed that they knew so very much about -- has apparently gone completely AWOL, and no one seems to know where to begin to search.

2) To accept that human life is a profound and anxious struggle (or, ironically, a very meaningless set of exercises) through which some wounded individuals and some passionate humans in community still strive (in hope) for sincere goodness, healing and wholeness, peace, justice, compassion, and a true sense of purpose.

3) To let go of the compulsion to control other people -- their thoughts, feelings, relationships, direction(s), to consume oceans of intoxicants, and to control vast quantities of material goods so that one can actually surrender to what is truly and ultimately of value to our minds and hearts.

4) To find a way to consistently express one's authentic personhood, in all of its mysteries and subtleties, with responsibility and courage.

5) To keep my head, heart, and hands centered on building a sustainable culture of life and my eyes on the world's horizon, and not on the vast array of digitized screens and other cultural distractions that threaten to over- stimulate and knock us off the wise and proper pathways of life.
6) Value and seek personal health and well-being in all aspects of adult existence in exchange for the driven and restless desires for ambition, position, power, wealth, and recognition.

7) To be challenged but not defeated by fear, worries, paranoia, personal failures, the complexities of life, others' immorality, and lack of clear directions (such as blacks and whites) on difficult matters.

8) The struggle to confront the many kinds of loneliness to be found in life and to seek an other, or others, who will walk in genuine companionship and in a spirit of honesty, truth, and love.

9)  To remain an upright and just person in all phases of life - and to work each day to support and encourage those who fight the many kinds of poverty and impatiently seek happiness and justice for all in this world.

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One Last Peek Behind "The Wall"

Roger Waters -- The Wall Live                                        L.A. Concert Review

The Hollywood Reporter

Dateline: May 20, 2012

The ambitious show refocuses the 1979 Pink Floyd album as a                      political statement with vivid imagery and technical wizardry

Roger Waters has created the rarest type of stadium concert: one where the seats farthest from the stage are as good as any.

But calling The Wall Live a “concert” is something of a misnomer. It’s an experience, and our

editor recommends it.

That’s because this show has to be taken as a whole, rather than just watched and/or listened to. Visually stunning and sonically astounding, the mega-production is sheer spectacle – rock concert as performance art. There really isn’t anything to compare it against.

Therein lies something of a conundrum: It’s an impressive, immersive, ambitious show that must be seen to be described -- but was it a great concert? Yes, with a few qualifiers.

Saturday’s show at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum certainly was memorable; its indelible images – including faces of military and civilian war victims dating to World War I -- and the utter scope all but assure that. The familiar songs were performed flawlessly by an ace band that mostly replicated the album, with a few tweaks. But the music is so entirely secondary as to be borderline inconsequential. Whether that’s a problem is strictly personal preference.

With so much to look at, the singer is no longer the focus, which makes it easier to please a giant crowd.

To his credit, the 68-year-old Brit is in good shape and was in terrific voice when he was featured, especially during “One of My Turns” and “Run Like Hell.” The latter cut was much meatier than on record, really the only time the music not only trumped the visuals but overwhelmed them.

The erstwhile Pink Floyd frontman has refocused The Wall – tied for third-best-selling album in U.S. history by the RIAA’s standards – into an overtly political statement. Much of the nuance and ambiguity about the dangers of conformity and blind faith (and blind trust) takes a back seat to anti-war sentiment and government distrust. Those whose interpretation of the 1979 double album focused on the wall between rock star and audience must have felt slighted. Maybe Waters sees that an anachronism in the age of social media.

Whatever his motivation, he made the decision to go all-in, and the show reflects it.

The projected imagery is vivid -- often grotesque and abhorrent, sometimes festive and exhilarating, occasionally disturbing or borderline seditious. An example of the latter: The “bombs” deployed from warplanes in “Goodbye Blue Sky” included symbols of governments (hammer and sickle), religions (Stars of David), financial oppression (dollar signs) and open-to-analysis (the McDonald’s Golden Arches). There also was animation familiar from the 1982 movie of The Wall: the marching hammers, the fighting/fornicating flowers, etc. All the while, during the first half, bricks fill in the wall, which spans nearly 500 feet.

Saturday’s performance got off to a rocky start, when Waters abruptly halted the production during “The Thin Ice” because of a technical problem. “We’re gonna figure out why that mic is not on,” he told the crowd. Following the dramatic and attention-getting opening with the song "In the Flesh?", it was jarring but excusable.

Along with all the eye candy, there certainly were musical highlights, which predictably included all of Side 1. The helicopter sound effect in “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” was chilling as it crept up from behind and got louder before it “settled” in front. A group of local kids was trotted onstage to yell along to “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” to which a non-album acoustic coda was added. And “Mother,” among the record’s most affecting songs, was a joyous/ominous show-stopper. It featured projected sound and video of Waters performing the song live in London in 1980. He played along on acoustic guitar as he invited the crowd to watch “poor, miserable, f---ed up Roger from all those years ago.”

Many folks were seen shaking their heads (in amazed disbelief) at the beginning of intermission.

Later, a clanging cowbell introduced “Young Lust,” which followed “What Shall We Do Now?” – a track that was cut from the album at the eleventh hour but has been part of subsequent live performances. “Waiting for the Worms” began with sparkling Beach Boys-like harmonies – supplied by Pat, Mark and Kipp Lennon of the veteran L.A. band Venice -- and its middle section channeled The Doors’ “Five to One,” much more so than on record.

It was all quite thrilling, but -- like the album -- the second half didn’t match the first. But if this is to be the template for future stadium extravaganzas, the bar undoubtedly has been set high. . . . Really, few acts have the wherewithal (let alone the money, motivation and popularity) to attempt anything like "The Wall" live. That alone made this show – this concert – a singular musical experience.

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Pardon the Disappearance Please

          I've got electric light, And I've got second sight.
          And amazing powers of observation . . .
          I've got wild staring eyes, And I've got a strong urge to fly.
          But I got nowhere to fly to.
          Ooh, babe, when I pick up the phone, There's still nobody home.

                                        --  Roger Waters,  "Nobody's Home"


      As I watch this blank blog screen materialize, let me tell you, I did not mean to be off this grid for such a time. I have been away for about 18 days, and this actually amazes me. They have been full and at times difficult days. However, if I were to casually tell you that I have been busy working away, there would be some truth in that. If I were to tell you something else, such as I have been lost in thought at times and/or stuck on a story twist and a plot turn that is eluding me in my quest for the perfect sentence and the perfect paragraph and the perfect collection of original stories, there would be some truth in all of that too. What in the world could be more daunting than a blank screen which (as life unfolds) ought to be filled up with some pinpoint strokes and keystrikes of meaning? Truth be told, I have missed you. Yet I do not wish to show up at our occasional meetings empty-handed, like an ungrateful and uncouth dinner guest.

      Sometimes a piece of fiction, a story, blooms to life organically. It buds up through the gray cortical stew that is one's brain and begins to breathe its own existence as the keys to the keypad snap and clack, taking shape via the energy of inner dynamic forces: a lot like a child evolving with passion into an older kid. I used to believe that all imaginative pieces should come to fruition in another way -- and that would be: slowly assembled by referencing constantly a master plan laid out in note form outlines that had been sewed into place on stacks of papers or, alternately, by checking a few painstaking charcoal sketches at hand as if I were Dr. Frankenstein piecing his biological creation together in the vainglorious hope that someday it would rise, live, breathe, walk, and amaze the world as it trudges along in giant size. This then would probably be what went horribly off the rails with my very early collections of fictional scribblings (literally scibblings on yellow, lined legal pads long ago, slapped into 3-ring holders).

Einstein it is said once got off this good one -- logic will get you from A to Z most of the time, but imagination will get you everywhere.

The sloppy manuscripts made for slightly interesting backroad maps but they usually lacked the imaginative energies and character developments that bespoke of a life force underlying, straining and groaning to get out and wander in others' psyches. That and the fact that I was too young of an adult (read that: naive, clueless, and inexperienced) to take on such serious writing prospects at the time. No organic blossoming was at the time at play? Hack down the plant(s) and toss the dross away. There is my hard-won and humble motto.

      Besides a complicated and mournful business roundtrip to Washington, an uplifting legendary rock concert, one very funny live performace by the comedian Bill Maher, a presentation (by me) of national award to a long-time colleague at a big national whoop-de-doo, and some discomforting dental work, as the 18 passing daylights have quickly approached 19, most of my other recent time and mindfulness has been centered wordlessly on extending my research and reflections on the monstrous sexual abuse case caused by (the Rev.) Gilbert Gauthe in southern Louisiana that came to national light via the New York Times way, way back in the early 1980s. Why such a hideous and pain-riddled subject, seemingly so out of date? It appearsvery directly related now -- if only in my mind -- to the conflicts and crosscurrents that buffet colleagues and me almost every day in our continuing mission to try to get a few things done before retirement bells ding aloud.

      It is a far better thing therefore, I have surmised, to think about then write about highly sensitive, painful, argument-inducing topics by means of fictional metaphors and fantastical characters and angular plot lines than to tempt fate, let it all hang out in a public forum, by means of a prose tale that could rile powerful people up, those personages who clutch temproal powers hotly in their fists, and into a tizzy. But carefully it must be done. Tempers are extremely short, tolerance for honest truth is lacking, defenses are riding high, and well-intended forays into the land of clear disclosure are rarely greeted magnanimously, much less cheerfully, in today's repression-ridden institutions. I have been on the receiving end of wrathfulness one too many times in such contexts because I have attempted to say something 'like it is' to be willing to welcome a repeat of that process.

      So, laying it out again -- Sorry to have been away; please pardon the disappearance; I've missed you. I have been wandering over my keypad, and researching, and reflecting, and painstakingly writing away word by freakin' word, like an endodontist poking around inside a tooth that needs attention, on an original and hopefully (in the end) engaging and meaningful tale that here on my MonsterBlog carries a working title with the oddball term Seussical in it. (The story should not be named anything like that when it's done. If it is ever there.)

     Do you ever get the creepy sensation that something important to you will just never get accomplished? That you should throw it into the bloody bucket with your list of to-do's as dead on arrival? That you may as well declare with forthrightness that you surrender, and that the white flag needs to be waved to the world at large, because you see it just never will bloom in completion? Me too.

     So that's where I have been if the truth has to be told. Not a particularly happy or good neighborhood to set down in, if you ask me. I noticed for the first time today before I sat down to this that an amazing coincidence is afoot. It's about the house full of murky characters who live next door to where I reside. On their mailbox, out by the easement and the stone walkway, there is a family name embalzoned boldly by a tense and shaky hand. The clan name is Frankenstein. The letters are scrawled all over the postal container in a color that looks just like blood red.

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The Pyrrhic Victory of Godfried Geisal

     "One more such victory will undo me!"

                                                 --  Pyrrhus
     You have brains in your head, You have feet in your shoes, You can steer yourself,
     In any direction you choose.
                                                                                                        --  Dr. Seuss

     The church scandal haunts and enrages him . . .“When my involvement with (it) ended, I no longer   
     recognized anything in my life. I never questioned my faith,” he said. “My spirituality is stronger
     now. I am not a Catholic. It all left me feeling empty." All these years later, when reminded of
     this, the same (sense of) emptiness returns.

                                                                               --  Ray Mouton, Attorney, quoted by
                                                                                     Jason Berry, Lead Us Not into Temptation

Pyrrhus of Epirus

In the middle of a warm and sultry afternoon overhung by partly cloudy skies, Jones did not yet admit to anyone that his once cherished game of all eyes on the future was already at an end. This made him feel hollow as he drank his first coffees after lying in their unmade bed late and listless and that dull ache of unrootedness grew like a swelling balloon inside  of him as each day ticked toward its conclusion. He found himself without setting a firm plan for his day suddenly sitting semi-isolated in a dark green painted seat in the middle of the lower stands in left field, which baseball lore has assigned a title, the bleachers. Jones had no clear memory of aiming toward the baseball park and though he had paid $25 to pass through the bank of expectant attendants who held beeping ticket scanners and said welcome and enjoy the game under the red canopy with a big P over a main entry he could not recall how he got there. Jones had been drifting for days and nights around the cracked and subsiding downtown sidewalks. Only a few hundred other paid entrants, the completely hooked baseball fanatics who show up as soon as the place is unlocked with their branded teamwear in place and their leather gloves of all shapes and sizes and trademarks mashed onto their catching hands, were wandering around (in fact most of the early arrivals were congregated in front of Jones down by and leaning over the left centerfield fence), praying that a slightly scuffed white Rawlings baseball would land like an explosive device in their laps. Jones began to think about his exhiliration in years past -- youthful, sports-loving years -- to be sitting with energy so close to the inviting playing surface of the outfield and yet vulnerable enough, God forbid, to get banged by a whizzing hard ball and knocked into a stuporous and cracked heap.

The baseball park's sound system blared uptempo but inoffensive rock and hip-hop tunes that echoed around the cavernous, unpopulated ballpark. The music like the interplay of two teams reminded Jones that the baseball game though it might be vigorously well-played today the outcome would not matter much, or at all. He was drawn to an earnest and melodramatic sermon that a middle age volunteer coach explained to a trio of  'if you say so' Little League boys about an oldtime Hall of Fame player named Richie Ashburn from the rollicking 1950s. Masterful in his judgmen  about balls and strikes and his choked-up bat control, Ashburn was legendary for being able to go deep into the count during his at-bats, then spoil about a dozen or more pitches by fouling them off, before he could coax the pitcher into curveballing his way into hurling ball four or a high hittable ball toward home plate. Coach said 'Now always be careful, guys. These balls come at you real fast here in the stands.' The man went on about a mythical day in the major leagues when Richie Ashburn lined, actually rocketed, a screaming scary foul ball with his ash color bat into the seats above the third base dugout, the twelfth of twelve such foul shots. A graying matron whose reflexes had experienced far quicker days gone by was just beginning to register the red alert of panic blaring on and off with a fury in her mind's eye, her hands down helplessly and wrapped around a red-and-white striped popcorn box, when the line drive by Ashburn smacked into her cranium just above her left eye. Blood spurted forth into the popcorn box and part of her eye got squished out onto her face. Her brain shorted. She slumped motionless, like a flexible, wornout old mannequin, bleeding over the painted seat back in front of her, her arms and hands now lifeless, dangling all the way down.

Worried onlookers thought at first that she was dead. But she was not. Long minutes later (and skipping over many lurid details here), play resumed a bit breathlessly. Ashburn fouled two more pitches straight back. Ushers in ancient, fraying usher uniforms and straw hats with American flags on them carried the victim precariously upon an army green stretcher up some stairs toward a breezeway exit. The woman was blood-smeared and completely unresponsive as the crowd cheered gamely for her. Her face looked doughy and very pale, plus it was turning a sickly blue and black.  A few police officers tripped up the steps alongside the ushers carrying the stretcher; they tried to seem helpful. As the cheering died down, as the third pitch since the mishap reached the batter, Ashburn sliced a loud foul ball that went cutting and ripping  down the first base line. With the ominous crack of his bat, everyone (stretcher crew included, but not the out-cold woman) flinched and gazed back grimacing toward home plate. Ashburn growled with displeasure as he saw the ball bounce into the bullpen in right.

Then, something that strains one's ability to believe in anything good in this world happened. The pitcher released another pitch -- a change-up, a very flatline pitch, one that truly did match the obsolete, Abner Doubleday era label of slowball, that inched its way over time toward the plate and batter. Time in the ball park stood still. Ashburn held back. He pumped his bat down then up. He waited patiently. The pitch faded away from him. The catcher reached wide to snag the errant pitch. The chief umpire was raising his left hand to call "Ball four." Yet suddenly, Richie Ashburn, a hall of famer and legend to forever be in American sports, dropped his ash bat with lightning quickness onto the rotating ball (actually, the pitch that had mostly passed him by). The ball launched off Ashburn's bat like a missile strike from a modern war drone into the third base seating area, up behind the dugout. The awful foul hurtled toward its primary target. It crashed like a brick hurled from a high bridge into the poor insentient woman's jawbone -- which instantly cracked into many pieces with a horrifying, tree-splintering smash. This baseball then gently rolled from her chin after the electrifying impact and settled onto her slack left arm. Then it departed the ballpark right beside her on the stretcher. Everyone around seemed afraid to touch the ball. It has been often reported that nothing of this sort, this two lethal fouls for one ticketholder during one at-bat, has ever been repeated in the recorded history of major league baseball, which has a lot of chapters written in it.

'That kind of thing can happen at any time, men!' warned the leader of the young trio. 'So heads up. Keep your eye on the ball all the time. Your whole life can change with something just like that.'

The boys nodded but looked vacant then confused. The moral of the story from their coach had yet to sink in as they replayed the lurid images in their minds.

Jones vhaguely eard the slight sound-delayed but mighty thwack of a wooden bat as he thought about this. A fly ball, hit by someone he never would be able to accurately name, which just might have the distance, folks, came arc-ing toward him high and black in the partly cloudy sky. Jones is sitting semi-isolated in a painted chair half the way up the rows of seats in left field. Only a few other people, the hardcore baseball junkies and souvenir fanatics, were assembled this afternoon like an unruly lot, the aimless Israelites waiting for Moses to reappear on the mountain, straining down and leaning over the left field fence. A cheer went up because they suddenly believed that this leathery rocket smacked out of the batting cage would stretch its arm all the way to their gathering spot. Jones had judged otherwise. He was therefore distracted for a few seconds by the improbable image of a long-haired skinny guy walking by, like a misplaced and sneering biblical prophet, wearing a hometown ball cap and carrying a blade carved placard that proclaimed, Repent, the end is near! John 3:16. Go Giants.  The batting practice homer suddenly exploded on the painted stadium chair next to Jones. He felt a rush of emotions as he figured out what had just happened. At once a number of people young and old were around him. Exhiliration gave way to shock and a tremble of fear. Jones scolded himself for such bad judgment. He envied whoever got that baseball.

'You coulda got beaned really really bad, buddy,' a fan with a Boston accent nearby yelled at him. Yep, then I'd a been rendered forever stuporous and regretful Jones said to himself nervously. He imagined he would have felt much like that poor old lady on the rude and painful receiving end, twice, of Richie Ashburn's offensive wrath. No one else paid much attention to him though. They all seemed distracted completely, chasing after the BP stamped baseball. This included the trio of boys and their coach-chaperone. Another sound-delayed but mighty thwack of a wooden bat shook his world. This long ball was racing up into the left field sky with a vengeance. Danger was stealthily, relentlessly, aiming toward him, on its relentless way, once more. He sat very still.

Then, Jones smiled. This moment reminded him of something. His professional and personal life had been changed during a similar moment twenty-eight years before. A harmless-seeming flyball in the guise of a news feature came flying through the haze and slammed down onto the respected front page, above the fold, of The Examiner before his eyes.  Jones' professional and personal life, and the lives of millions of persons, barely reco gnized the haze setting in. They did not feel the full fury of the game change -- but they were perversely beaned, beaned really bad, like the passed out and bleeding old lady who was heading up Row 13 behind the home team's dugout. Yet they never felt the slam at the time. The sky was empty and gave no signals to Jones. The sting and the aches and the bone breaks would be revealed later.


Gilbert Geisal:  These balls come at you fast here



To be continued


"On An Island"  --  David Gilmour

Remember that night, the warmth and the laughter
Candles burn though the church was deserted
At dawn we went down through empty streets to the harbor
Dreamers may leave but they're here ever after
Let the night surround you, We're halfway to the stars

Is Your Job Affecting Your Health?

During recent years, I have been on both sides of the picture -- employment and unbidden unemployment. I have learned that one can be happy or sad, fulfilled or unfulfilled, while experiencing each firsthand. There are many (subtle) implications in this truth. 

The title of a blog piece on The Atlantc caught my attention as soon as I saw it. The title is "Is Your Job Killing You?" Somedays the answer is yes. What do you think?

Here it is:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/is-your-job-killing-you/255719/





Everything That She Ever Wanted Herself to Be

I was driving home in my car from Wal-Mart, a bag filled with prescription meds and some food staples on my back seat. Frozen on my seat by a long red-light back-up, he came walking down the median toward me and the idling, persistent autos all around. In his left hand he clutched a predictable cardboard sign. He was  unshaven (by a few days), tall (about 6'3"), dressed in black khaki shorts (dusty), a gray tee (sweaty and too tight around the middle), and a decent pair of gray socks with New Balance shoes (dude, what are you doing?) -- and he looked to be about 50-60 pounds at least, maybe more, overweight. I studied the spectacle for a moment. Not many others in cars and trucks seemed to notice. Apparently conditioned to this sort of encounter, the man failed with most of present a symbol of hunger or neediness or anything triage bad on this afternoon. I relaxed my hands on the wheel a little. But I prayed to anyone who happened to be eavesdropping on my Sirius channel that this guy would not seek eye contact with me.

I furtively peeked at his cardboard. -- On the Way Home on the Road. Need Money. All Will Help. God Bless.

I groaned lightly. In a few words, this stranger had managed to sum my life story with a Sharpie and a box top. Yours too I ask you?  I memorized the words of this roadside plea. On the way and need money. Get in line, my man. All will help. Next time, don't dress like an underemployed but superfed supplicant. Planning is crucial. Nonchalance takes points off one's final panhandler grade. The cardboard stalker had nothing apparently in which to collect his random contributions. So, he was not anticipating a big haul that day.


This was somewhat like an incident years ago, when I was performing in small spotlights here and there, when a young woman named Becky approached me between acts. Several hours had flown by since the lights had dimmed and all of us had first gathered for the show. 


Becky was suffused with color. She informed me about what kind of work she did. Smiling she said 'Thanks to this night and you, I now know what I want to do.'


'What's that?' I asked with little enthusiasm. I am an introvert. Breaks between acts are almost always welcome. Putting myself out there on the line in front of others usually knocks me down and twirls me to a loopy state, even just a smidgen of putting it out there.


Becky paused, grinned coyly, sought eye contact. 'I want to do everything exactly like you do it. I now know. I want to do what you do.'


Silently I prayed, ever the cynic on my Sirius frequency, 'O Lord, why is it always this way?' -- To my new best friend I said: 'Becky it's a good thing to want to conquer something one loves to do. You look like a can do person. It takes one thing after another after another, girl. How do you get to Carnegie Hall the old joke says? Practice. Practice. Practice.'


With just a hint of stale and conventional humor one often can squeeze out of such sticky predicaments.


Later, when someone else had finished performing back in Becky Town, she called me on the cellphone. She told me that the same Becky had turned up for a weekend late show with a boyfriend. She seemed to get into it with vigor. But behind the curtains, amidst backstage shadows, while fingering inquisitively my friend's CDs for sale, 'She said that when she saw what I did and you did it looked so wonderful, like everything that she ever wanted for herself, for her own career.'


'Oh Lord,' I prayed again in a whisper, gazing at my long-time friend's furrowed brow. 'She has no idea what a ride she might be in for.'


'Dude. Word,' my professional pal noted.


As my car idled at the red light today, I realized this would never actually take place. But to contemplate it is a rush. I push out of the driver's side door, leaving it ajar and the motor still running Toyota softly. Someone nearby says from the inside of a rumbling Ram truck cab, 'Hey, what's the deal?' I accost the road wanderer. He steps back with one foot, his mouth comes open slackly, and the man drops his sign. It slides into the street. I subject him to a pithy harangue of two or three sentences at the most which I have not rehearsed: about social conformity, predictable stereotypes, and failing to give one's all, total focused effort, till the last scene in the final act of the drama. Then I get back in my vehicle as horns honk all around and other car operators negatively salute me via their middle fingers. Road rage begins to turn really ugly.


An unsmiling but sincere lady approached me quietly in a hallway at work the other day. Having observed two brief presentations that I have conducted during recent weeks, she asked me about this technique and that technique that she thought she saw me using, and inquired about how I had learned to put them subtly into practice. Surprised by her close observations, I mentioned that she was pointedly correct. She said she wanted to know because if she tried this and that it could make her way, way better at what she offers to the world. The amazing factor to me was that she was still trying. Not in a perfectionist way that I could detect, and I am no expert on such things. A professional like me nearing the end of the year-after-year dusty and sweaty road of workday journeys, she was seeking to get better at what she does and what she should do well. C'est bon. Let it go, all the way, push downfield. I envied her energy and her inquiring mind that yet wants to know.


So there it was instantly before me when I caught sight of that miserable, third-rate cardboard wish list in the guy half-trying to squeeze society's generous hand. You, sir, must stop it. Trying. Improvement. Effort. Striving. Wishing. Just do it. But no  cheap grace and no lethargic cons will be permitted on this side of the street. All of us are taking the long walk and heading some place that's a veiled mystery. Sometimes I wonder what became of earnest Becky and her easy smile. As it goes in the touching books and movies, we are each On the Way Home, On the Road. Need Money. All Will Help. God Bless. Hopefully it is not the fabled road to perdition. Contributions to the cause can all be handed to me personally and/or sent to my post office box. Or, better yet, all goods can be aimed electronically into the sweaty tee of my direct deposit account (and thus my debit card, instantaneously), like the archer's arrow true.

My cardboard sign declares -- Need money, need more time to do it all, here; don't we believe at times that it is so? All you give to the great work will help. God bless you, brothers and sisters.

##################

The Time I Met the Real P.F. Chang

(Blogger's Note: I am taking time out from scripting my latest mystery/made-for-TV movie screenplay call "The Curators." This interruption is either a subconscious ploy so I can seal my personal failure @ telling this pretty good tale, or it's just another vestige of a restless mind in my head that keeps annoying me with self-disclosing vignettes that simply won't 'take a number' and wait patiently. Again, I have been writing pseudonymically, as I have managed to do for years, like with Stephen King's use of the pen name 'Richard Bachman.' My latest false front may well be Paulie Dent because I want to say something about teeth. But then maybe I should re-name myself Cliff Hanger instead. The anonymity that I gain by cloaking my actual name in the papers and journals is very freeing -- I'm so anonymous in this Nook book culture that when I look into a mirror or gaze into a store window, to assess the damages that time and hard living have done, I often do not even see a reflection.)

There's something in the air in Hollywood
I tried to leave it but I never couldShine your light now 'cause this time it's gotta be good,
You get it right now (yeah) 'cause you're in Hollywood.
                                          --  Madonna, "Hollywood"


Having just consumed a full plate of Wok-Charred Beef with Colorful Vegetables, peppered up by a spoon-on sweet red chili sauce, my mouth is now a menacing, fire-emitting weapon. It's so hot still that you may want to sit back a little if you're leaning in. Accidents do happen. This story may actually get hot. (Minutes ago, when I came out of a P.F. Chang's restaurant, the breeze off the ocean hit me like chilly gasp. The mellow vibe of the mango-tinted walls and honey decor and indirect lighting of the chic eatery, boosted up by trendy tile flooring, was left behind. I had stuffed in too much pop Asian cuisine as often happens at Chang's. On the spot, I resolved, no, I took an oath, to never eat a whole wok-charred beef platter like that again.)

The gasp of air in my face brought to mind an episode a few days ago when my older friend, Gino, and I were languishing on some stuffed arm chairs in main passageway of the upscale Glendale Galleria, an ode to capitalist extremes situated near Chavez Ravine, old Hollywood, the home of the stars, and the famous city of Los Angeles. People-watching at the Galleria was a sane response to a bad condition. It was about 100 sizzling degrees outside that day. Any old refuge from the warm is the way Gino and I were thinking: that was the plan. Most chairs in the mall are the kind in which a person can comfortably sink. We were lounging thus by main entryway to a Neiman-Marcus , Needless Markup is what Gino always calls the place. His company is now and then a bit tedious. But it almost always is a learning experience.

My career goes well as the agent and personal manager of a small herd of pro athletes, mostly basketball players who are clinically depressed, making millions each year on my periodically summoned contracting, stubborn negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills. Gino is a retiree. He worked for over 40 years as a locker room then on-field trainer for a collection of NBA teams. His one book, an autobiography that was ghost-written in full, was titled My Life Among the Giants: The Sweet Meets the Sour. Between us, we have lots of time almost year round on our hands.


A man of about 75 years (I reckoned) walked up to Gino's side slowly from the cloud of idle strollers that suddenly was drifting through this wing of the galleria. The man was smiling, a bit ruefully I thought. He stuck out his wrinkled hand to Gino.

'O-o-o-h-h-h my Gawd!' Gino exclaimed as began to push himself up with hard effort. 'What in the hell are you doing here? It's been years. Hasn't it? How many? Christ.'

'Yeah. Five or six at least I'd guess. I'm picking up a little something nice for Claire. Her birthday's coming down the pike,' said the newcomer.

Gino introduced me to the his friend, a man named Dick. They proceeded to do some 'old times, good times' chit chat, the Army during the Korean Conflict was mentioned, other pains and pleasantries were exchanged. Yet these two old warriors clearly were not close acquaintances nowadays. The new guy, Dick, a frequent mallwalker it seemed, was very casually dressed, desert tanned from weekending in Palm Springs, and slightly bent forward like most of the older gents who were shuffling hither and yon in this Glendale bunker. Not wishing to disappoint his beloved Claire . . . as he talked, she was a woman whom I suddenly pictured as a silicone enhanced and bejeweled Revlon blonde sporting a dangerously killer thin figure and who looked to have a serious Maybelline issue, a bit younger and more agile version of the actress named Julie Bowen (of the TV show Modern Family). Dick  soon went on his way amiably. Call these observations mere intuition on my part.


Gino let himself down gingerly, since he is wracked by lots of arthritic aches and pains now that he's pushing 75 too.  The cushions on G's chair exhaled heavily, like a soul fleeing toward one of Dante's hot and heavy circles, as he plopped down the last few inches. We sat. To extend the unserious chit chat I observed: 'Seemed like a nice enough person.'

'Oh, hel-l-l yeah. He is indeed, genius,' Gino replied. 'A lot like the other older guys  around here, most of them anyway. By his looks you'd never know that he was loaded. He's got the bucks. I mean he is really lo-lo-loaded.' (His eyes lit up a bit, like a small blaze had been ignited behind his eyeglasses. His body flexed slightly.)

'I did notice that monster ring and those were like $200 docksider slip-ons Dick had. But really? You know that Dick he's a super rich guy?,' I said.

'Wha-ho-ho yeah. Yeah-h-h. Real into the Hollywood social picture and his overstuffed bank accounts,' Gino said knowlingly. 'But you'd never know it to look at him. They all look around here, the shuffling set, they look like they don't have a pair of effing pennies to rub together. The old women throw themselves at these creepers trying to get their bony old hands in their pockets.'

Several people passed by and we each took note of them. All in all, mall foot traffic had subsided suddenly. First to go by was a Khloe Kardashian lookalike, her mahogany hair all lustrous and shiny and her vacuous face ever so slightly turned upward, towering gawkily over her high-spiked red heels. I told myself that surely Khloe was beelining toward a dress rehearsal in the Elizabeth Arden boutique of Neiman's for her show Keeping Up With the Kardashians. 

Too hot to keep up with me, boys?

The second in this parade was a very old man, pitifully red-faced and wheezy. He was shuffling along in poorly fitted canvas loafers and he was towing one of those maudlin air tanks with an IV style tube winding loosely up, pumped full of oxygen, and inserted into his whiskery nostrils. Wrinkled and faded shorts (khaki), a food spotted Hollywood Squares tee shirt, soiled wool socks, and a droopy bleed-em-blue Dodgers ballcap pulled down low over his eyes constituted his fashion selections for the day. In the hand that was not pulling the air cylinder he held a long cigar. It had not been fired up thank goodness. The old guy was compulsively twitching it up and down between his index and middle fingers like the infamous George Burns, a.k.a the dead God Almighty, used to do on stage.


The third person to amble by was (no kidding here) the comedian Richard Lewis, who was nearly as pale as Casper the friendly ghost. He wore a black suit jacket that proved two sizes too big for him, black pegged jeans, a ritzy black crew neck tee shirt, and black and white Chuck Taylor vintage canvas shoes., though Lewis has probably never launched a basketball at a hoop during his life. His dyed-black hair was puffed up fluffy thin and flounced around his head as he trudged. His hands were thrust deep into his pants pockets. He too leaned into the air ahead of him, but way over forward, like he knew he might suddenly begin to roll down a hillside. I was thrilled when I saw him. Lewis seemed to be heading for the entryway to Bloomingdale's. Without thinking, I raised a hand and waved. Lewis noted that. "How are ya?" he intoned without missing a step, in his New Yorkese, and with an 'I'm doomed' hangdog expression pulling on his face. I watched as the comic walked briskly, his Chuck Taylor's squeaking on the polished mall floor, down toward Bloomie's. Momentarily I imagined he was late for an on-camera rendezvous with Mr. Larry David and the cast of Curb Your Enthusiasm in men's accessories.

A piece of advice my father gave me long ago instantly came to mind. Son, never get out in front of the parade so far that you cannot hear the music.


'Yessir, that's Dick.' Gino spoke up. 'That guy you just met? One would never know it to look him in the face. But he got ser-eee-ous-ly rich in churning real estate after the blowup in Korea here in the fabled city of the angels, well in El Monte and San Pee-dro to be exact. You know, he needed to do something with all of his cash besides pay a stable of lawyers to divorce his first wife. So Dick bought into the restaurant game, among other things. In fact you know what? -- Dick is the real P.F. Chang. The real deal himself."


That surprised me. My attention locked on Gino. His thick, untrimmed white eyebrows twitched a bit. I watched for an 'Awww, just shitting you, guy,' Gino smile. Dick had not looked to be Asian. In fact, as I had just heard it, he had in his time slain a cast of thousands of Asians in the Korean hills back in the 1950s. 


I asked, 'Dick? That Dick? The Dick who just went by? His name is Dick Chang?'


'No-o-o-o. No. No. No. Nope indeed,' Gino said reprovingly. 'He's from effing Oxnard. He's not like that, the Chinese thing, that's just marketing a la mode. Clever deal. Pretty sharp, huh? It's a business thing, an investor's dream. Dick is the guy who got the idea for P.F. Chang's franchises. So, he is like the real P.F. Chang. His partners, also load-ed and tired of killing strangers, got outta the service and he, Dick, thought it might be a good idea that would work for his closest buddies and him. The bunch of them hired companies to write the menu, design the look, make some big white plaster horses and off they rode. Hi-oh, Lone Ranger. The P.F. stuff is just a made up thing. I know he's made stacks and stacks of cash. Like I said he was doing okay during the years before.'


I reserved my thoughts. This was a beautiful American fable. Warm mango and brown woods, honey colors, sizzling sounds, fragrant foods, crisp and friendly young wait staff and inflated dollar signs as far as the eye could see. Textured painting all over the walls. Tile floors to beat all. Feelings of envy welled up in me.


'Some people. They're just born with the winning lottery ticket in their hands or by hook or by crook get the big payoff,' Gino sighed.


'And on the night he was born the angels did sing, shepherds knelt, Korea fell, and a brilliant shining star rose in the west?' I laughed. 


'Something like that, young buck,' Gino played along. 'Something exactly like that.'


Of course the story went on though Gino and I were done for the day.


Two days later, an expensive dental crown (with the ghostly remnant of the original tooth still inside) cracked off in my mouth. Three days later, another crown, with tooth fragments still lurking, cracked off in a similar fashion. I spit it out when no one was looking into my fist. Later, at home, I took both castoffs from my pants pocket and placed them in a small plastic baggie. I placed the bag on a shelf where I keep my walking-around things. The pair of relics once affixed to me appeared miserable and forlorn. Getting old and losing's one's looks is a witch, they say.


The misery dragged on. Four days after meeting the real P.F. Chang a divot got carved out out of a top front tooth and it went AWOL. I began to hate God secretly. The back teeth that had long been missing I could fake. But this clipped front headlight was going to try my patience hugely.


Then, normal disbelief strayed way of my rails. On day five, as I enjoyed a Hershey Bar with whole almonds, after I greeted P.F. Chang, I should have known better than to bite down with my front teeth. Almost all of the tooth next to the chipped front guy came down onto my tongue.


I closed my mouth and looked around foolishly to see if anyone had noticed. I again heard my dad's old admonition about not getting too far out in front of what's good for you. A searing feeling that I had been experiencing for days, but to which I would not admit, black-clad mourning itself, seized hold of me, like a mistakenly chewed and swallowed whole red chili pepper will blow up one's inner electrical boards. Up from my pocketed iPod, racing through the tracer cords of my super-bass earbuds, the song "Yet Another Movie" by Pink Floyd poured into my ears.  I frowned. As far as I could discern, no one had caught on to my Day Five mishap yet. Mournful. Rueful, I was. I was not sure I could hold on -- that I wouldn't lose my slick composure right there. As a distraction, I began to contemplate synonyms. Part of speech: adjective. Mournful. Rueful. Gloomy. Bleak. Disheartened. Dismal. Melancholy. Somber. Ch-ch-ch-cheerless. You get the gist of this exercise.


I once again hated God at that moment, who appeared to me like a pixie George Burns. At that moment, God whispered to me, at least it sounded like God: God said "Dick!"
'This's gotta stop, dammit all,' I said to myself with shallow conviction. Mentally calculating quickly, I realized that this shedding of teeth would have to end if it raced on like this. I only had twelve or thirteen of my originals left. You are only allotted so many hairs on your head, so many whiskers on your face, and so many teeth in your mouth for life's parade. Drop right off or out many of those teeth do. Eventually, even the luckiest of persons, especially stock car daredevils, wartime bombadiers like poor exploded military guys like Snowden, and stunned lottery jackpoteers clutching their little tickets, run out of luck.


Quick examination told me that the latest shard of tooth resting in my hand showed signs of disease.  My disease. The kind of malingering evil that John Updike had assigned to Freddie the Lothario Dentist in one of his American ennui novels. It, the broken tooth, was a sickly gray around its edges and tarred yellow from years of the nervous cigarette smoking I did long ago. I extracted a paper receipt from Starbucks from my khaki shorts. In it I carefully wrapped that broken piece of me. I felt sad, mournful, rueful, etc., etc. So, I stuffed the wadded paper with its little dental secret into the iced tea cup that I had drained (Lord, it was hot, hot that day too in L.A.). I replaced the plastic lid and green straws onto the cup. Then I dropped it all ruefully, sadly, mournfully, cheerlessly: Goodbye and adieu, amigo, into a trash can. In my imagination, I pictured what a burial on the open sea looks like. I wondered if God had taken a disliking to me.

But seriously. If I told

you the rest of the story I

would have to hurt you.

++++++++++++++++

'You remember Dick, don't you?" Gino asked me on Day Twelve after my ludicrous tooth mishaps had begun and as we once again sat perched on the same Galleria chairs. "I'm going to his funeral tomorrow."

'No. No really? P.F.? Crap. What happened? Dick looked pretty good," I was surprised. Then the mental picture of a traditional Chinese burial with U.S. military color-guard struck me as humorous.

'For a man his age? Yep, yep, yep. Got it. Yeah, Dick's a goner,' Gino chimed back. My friend is growing old and he recognizes that. He worries every time he's in some enclosed space or takes an Ambien. Mourning makes him teary and sentimental. He once confessed that he has a snarky little script that was implanted in him as a midwestern Protestant kid: Now I lay me down to sleep and so on. Some people get to escape such slithery worries and premonitions. Gino secretly is scared that one of his nightly drifts into drugged sleep in the dark of his room will lead to his final rational thought but he won't know it.  

'The Dickster purchased the farm. Yep. The other day, or night.,' Gino noted. 'Get this, genius. He gets found dead, without any clothes, naked as  a jaybird. Claire found him dead in their California King before their beach run at dawn. She was all Nike'd up and looking to conquer that new running track that leads up into the hills by their house. Then she wondered why he wasn't stirring like his usual self. We always said she was way too young for him. Looked like he woke up, took off his pj's beside the bed, then flopped from a heart attack face first into the high thread counts on the mattress, his long scar from the war on his front side imprinting a path in the sheets. Sad thing to think about him going that way. I would not want it!'

'And thus another legend in the Hollywood hills fades into the sunset,' I said. 'Cue the theme music for Mulholland Drive: The Movie. He seemed like a nice enough person. I'll be the first and last to tell you he could really wok 'n roll the Chinese takeout.' This elicited a smile.

'He was the big Korean war hero, you know' Gino said. 'Me, all I did for my two years duty over there was type. Friggin' bombshells bursting in air around us all day and night. Not giving us a chance to sleep. I slept for two effing whole months when I got back. You know how good I was at the office work, I had a head for it. Type. I typed a bi-i-g stack of military forms 'round the clock. They must of totaled about 10 feet high all stacked. I didn't go into battle like other bunker fodder. No real blood and guts for me. Till one day. Dick, he was the real-l-l-l  deal-l-l-l, brother. He got the Purple Heart. He got the Medal of Honor from the President himself at the White effing House.'

This was all news to me. It smacked me like a knuckles-bared blast in the mouth. I recalled something I had missed in real life. Dick, old P.F. himself, dressed all the way down to the dregs of the crate and barrel just twelve days ago had some kind of big ass medal, which I had casually, stupidly overlooked, pinned to his chest.

'That medal he was wearing the other day was what?,' I asked.

'Medal of honor from Uncle Sam. You guys that never served. Who never-r-r-r  even for a minute put your tender asses on the line . . .'

'Like through those awful firestorms of typing?'

Gino stopped and laughed.

He went on, 'Dick came to hate all the Asians for their animal ferocity, as enemies on the battlefield. Then came the business front during post-war days. Koreans? He hate-hate-hate-ed them especially. It was his killer's instinct, the training, it looked like, the kill or be killed feeling unleashed in the service, like a banzai blast, deep in his brain. Led his company and him to race up hillsides to wipe out Koreans' sniper nests. Then they boated back to the States and some of them including Dick, Mack, and Jack dreamed up the trendy Asian food game of P. Effing. Chang's . Dick, he mellowed a lot as time went by. His money partners and silent backers did too. They loved his plan. Their inside joke zeroed in on flogging a bunch of real-deal Chinese recipes into something that spoiled, American restaurant goers would at high, higher, highest prices (A) stomach and buy, as if it were the real thing, and (B) profit from, because their war-weary asses were still intact by some miracle, freaks of the lottery, by the time they got back here and they were hungry. It's all a war, cub scout, the game of life, in the end, a P. Effing War. You give-give-and give more. You get. Only sometimes though do you get. Seems to me like everybody somehow loses in the end since the house always scoops up the last bets left on the line. Now not Dick's kids, everybody says, but Claire is gonna spend P.F.'s hu-u-u-ge fortune.'

'Medal of honor,' I whistled. 'That's big time. Serious. A real war hero. Made for Hollywood and TV. Coulda fooled me about Dick, old-timer. What did the guy do in Korea?'

We decided to have lunch at the Chang's place in Glendale by the Galleria in Dick's fallen honor. The signature, riderless and oversized white horse of the Emperor Chang stood as stoically, an eerie guardian, as ever by the door. I felt mildly dizzy when we ambled sweaty and thirsty into the pleasantly air-cooled melange of faux Asian-deco ambiance. When my eyes adjusted to the dim indirect lights, I spied the real Khloe K. and Julie Bowen sitting hunched in a back booth, holding hands tightly and having an intense liquor-laced girl talk. No kidding. I reckoned that Dick the War Hero, a.k.a. the Emperor of this dynasty, would have felt proud at that moment, his square shoulders thrown back, his chest puffed out, his conqueror's medal gleaming on his military green and carefully ironed shirt, as he stood by the warm and fuzzy liquor bar.

I ordered a full-order of spicy House fried rice, no chicken, no fried egg. Gino asked for Wok-Seared Beef with Colorful Vegetables and white rice in the lunch size. Damn, those professional menu writers can flash the linguistic talent.

'What's your problem, girlfriend?' Gino asked.

'My dentist told me to go easy on these freshly built up teeth he fixed for me. They gotta set for a while he says,' I replied. I impulsively pulled up my lip then showed him the front teeth that looked at last normal having been drilled and sculpted and pasted into acceptable shapes by Dr. Kim Wang, the Korean endodontist to the stars in Beverly Hills. The Lady Gaga song about fetish problems, "(Show Me Your) Teeth," occurred to me.

'Now who's going Hollywood?,' my friend chided me.

We decided to toast the real P.F. Chang with passion fruit iced teas. Neither of us handle alcohol well. The ice in the tea glasses tinkled lightly. Wonder what Khloe and Julie are drinking?, I thought.


'How did you meet, P.F.?,' I asked.

'Damnedest thing of 'em all,' Gino said. Were those the front edges of tears he suddenly was displaying as the brass tabletop turned his face an unnatural shade of brown?  'The man saved my effing life. I tell you he was a great one. His company and him dragged in one smoky dawn to our base camp all muddy and wet, bayonets still fixed, half slaughtered and half asleep because they'd been deprived so long, bloody smears all over their fatigues, right into our camp. They had just come off some fierce night firefight. Dick was an NCO, so he came in to report this unplanned descent to our clueless presiding officer, who told him to lose those bayonets on their guns right away, pronto, since We weren't the enemy, soldier!'

'So-o-o-o, there you sat there during this? Typist of the year in your spiffy soldier suit? You said, what? Hi and saluted or something?'

'Never got that far, genius,' Gino chided me slightly again. He rubbed his eyes as if the smoke from the base camp was searing them again. 'Somebody outside the office shanty yelled hoarsely Incoming, Incoming, Down, Down. Just like that. You could hear the bazillions of tracer rounds coming in at us like a swarm of killer bees searching for some sweet treat. Then the massive whizz bang concussion of a hu-u-u-ge artillery shell went off earsplitting nearby. Dust and boards and everything else that was that office building began to fall down on us. I saw a big flash of fire from the bomb's blowback. Dick right away jumped on me and covered my body. Knocked me right off my chair and smashed me into the floorboards. I was typing, I'll never-r-r-r  ever forget this, cubbie, at that very moment --We regret to inform you, blah, blah, blah. The whole damn hack-shack of an HQ came screaming down on us. The P.O. died in a sec. He was sliced clean in effing half by a broken off bayonet whirling into him like a mad copter blade. Clean cut through at the waist. Just pants and combat boots were standing there. Blood bubbled up a and over his belt for a little time. Then what was left of him flopped. Those last words of his, Mister, we are not enemy!, were still hot on his charred lips when he got cut in two.'

'And then? What?' said I impatiently.

'Well, obviously, we lived. Genius. Me, I didn't suffer a scratch,' Gino said. 'The recoil and the crashdown cost Dick most of his teeth though. A wood plank from the roof came bearing down on him like a trident missile and got into his upturned mouth. The man, my newest best friend in the world, bled all over me. Spurts went everywhere, I'll tell ya, in my eyes and in my ears, up my nose.  A piece of something that had been the HQ tore Dickster open deep from his neck to his balls. It took hours of MASH-like surgery by Hawkeye and Trapper John, M. effing D., to mold Humpty back together again. The docs kinda swept all his liquids and solids into a squishy pool and dumped it all back into him. From then on Uncle Sam, and to what was now the Dickster's dying day, bought Dick the best denture plates on the planet whenever neede, the best that modern dental science and our tax money can buy. Gave him his war-hero medals too.'

'Why is this a secret?,' I asked.

'Because he was like this. He made me, a stranger, swear an oath not breathe a word to anybody about what he had done for me. He told me he would rip my ass in half if it took him forever to hunt me down if I talked to anybody about his bravery. I didn't like it, this under the table deal. But I believed him, his intensity. crap I was alive and I decided I would always honor that request by the man who saved my life that day.'

We thought to have a toast to Dick's heroic secrets again. 'Well, here's to P.F. The real deal, no chinks in that armor. The legend behind the legend,' I said.


We drank. We laughed. I added, 'Wow. What a story! This damned Hollywood life -- seems like all mirage, no jackpot, no payout, nothing real to grab on. You never know who you're gonna meet in these hills, Dynasty Dick like, or what you're gonna rub up against. This place sucks so much but it feels so frosty cool to the touch.'


We squinted across the dining area. I thought I spied Khloe raise her long-stemmed melon martini in mango colored smoked glass. Some rumours say that she is not really a true-blue Kardashian child but the product of an illicit affair had by her mother. Now, Khloe Whatshername was offering a midday toast to someone or something -- and then she turned her head and winked at me, just me.


Gino remained uncharacteristically quiet. After a long pause he said, 'Well, nobody sure is gonna throw a ticker tape parade for me and the thousands like me. I hear they will have at least a small band and the 21-gun salute for Dick at his funeral. Military color guard too. Plus Mack and Jack will be around. Proves one thing I guess. The most real things in life are those you cannot see. God bless America.'

U.S. Medal of Honor (Army, Modern)

'Whoa. Poet, philosopher, typist of the year! You are the total package, I reckon, sir and we are not the friggin' enemy.'

I smiled and stabbed in the air at him with two hands, mimicking a thrust with a bayoneted rifle.
'That's what they say, young buck. Whatever. Nobody's gonna throw a parade for us who scrambled out from under the bloody guts of the war heroes. But no need to be reminded of that,' Gino replied gruffly. 'That's what they say. Now! Where's my effing beef and rice?

A few minutes later, I scooped a generous bite of House Fried Rice, no chicken, no egg, into my mouth. Gino grunted with pleasure over his lunch plate of charred beef. I bit down. I felt a crack trace up an incisor like a fault line signalling a minor earthquake. Opening my mouth, I spit out bits of peas, scallion scraps, rice pieces, and a chunk of sharply-pointed tooth. It fell onto the table, hitting it firmly. I feared a big divot would dig into the brass. But it did not mark it. Gino raised his bushy eyebrows in alarm.

I held up the remnant of the incisor between my index and middle fingers in the dim light, like evidence extracted from a mistress's murder nest in sparkling Hollywood. Looking at the lost piece of me, I felt that old, familiar mournful churn, somber, dreary, bleak ch-ch-ch-cheerless, gloomy, vulnerable, disheartened, etc., etc., rolling in my stomach.


'Hoo-oh-oh, whatzthat?, baby brother?,' Gino inquired with a rueful grin. 'Another one? How many is that? You, my man, are falling a-a-a-a-part.'


I sipped some cold passion tea. Fruity flavor, no dental pain to speak of. So far.


Gino said loudly when our chipper young waiter came back to our table, 'Well, well, well, strike up the band and bring out a cake. Bring the whole damn brass band why don't ya? There oughta be a Souza march playing. My Gawd, look here at the genius, he's cracking up fast.'


To the waiter Gino added, 'Do you all have a wheelchair? Can you call 911? I think the cub scout here is gonna need assistance in getting outta here.'


Sound of the denoument:  "Glory Box," by Portishead  --  Hear it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8AvvaC8sZk&feature=related

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