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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How Steve (Not Jobs) and TED Changed My Life

I'm really astounded by people who want to 'comprehend' the universe when it's hard enough to just find your way around Chinatown.
                                                                                                         --  Woody Allen

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

                                                                                           --  Book of Genesis: 32, 31

It almost always begins with obsessive thoughts, wicked daydreams, about fried chicken, specifically Kentucky Fried Chicken, which also is known as KFC. These thoughts are a cautionary signal. Attention please, something is wrong, perhaps deeply wrong, in you, sir. I have not drunk any alcohol for thirty-one years. I am an alcoholic. I have not taken any controlled medications that were not strictly supervised by doctors for the same length of time. I am an addict. But as things go, today is turning out fine, and it has been a pretty good experience all around. If I am still around to experience another sunrise, I have reason to believe that I will be in a sober state. But those obsessive thoughts about certain foods during rock-em sock-em periods, they just won't let go . . . 

(You're not about to tell me that certain meats or confections are going to be outlawed, are you?) And look, see? I simply don't know yet whether to write this reflection in a freewheeling and serio-comic style that would make the perpetual neurotic Richard Lewis proud, or with a voice that invites you to consider my theme with gravity. So.

When times prove tough, ordinarily it goes like this, in the KFC drive-thru lane. A dinner box of two or three pieces, dark, original please. OMG, two sides? Really? Fine. 'Hey, do I have to take the two sides? Yeah, seriously.' 'Yeah, yeah, okay, I will take that yummy hard as a hardtack homemade Southern biscuit. Lots of napkins too.'  Does this make you think, in any way, about how a deprived and dry booze merchant approaches a sparkling bottle of 100-proof magic elixir after another mythic hard day?

Awww, why so serious?

I have been feeling moribund for four days, or maybe just over-tired physically, and I can  measure this by one simple sign, the one that follows. If I fail to make it out of the restaurant parking lot, then into the flow of traffic life before I root around in the red and white box, grab a hot and slippery clump of disaster, sink my front teeth into it (the dead poultry), then I am deep in something. A big church bell tolls from above. The clouds and sky roll over to a steely and foreboding gray. It is now quarter past the time for your inventory, sir, for you must admit the psychological dry goods that you have been toting around (barely aware) like an over-limit travel case -- for which one will be charged harshly at the airline ticket counter.

This reflection triggers a memory, words I heard from someone talking, rather creepily (but the man had a salient point) on NPR, about the predictable effects of a fried food expedition by the ordinary person. Utilizing a warning, sardonic tone of voice (with none of positivity of protein-intake even mentioned) he said: prepare for a bomb to go off.  Gulp. A big bomb of addictive salt, sugar, and fat is aiming to hit the bottom of and to explode, literally explode in, your stomach. The effects will be disorienting, palpable, as if you have swigged down three ounces of bourbon. Your heart-rate will increase and you may feel flush. Your sense of energy should go up almost immediately. You might even perspire a bit. But, a payoff awaits, for an inevitable downswing of mood and energy will descend upon you surely, like a humid fog rolling in from the bay, as the effects of powerful substances, salt, sugar, fat, and the Colonel's "10 secret spices" at least will begin to wear off. Blah, blah, blah, yakety blah.

I swear to creation that this is what actually happened today: by the time I had downed two manageable bites of a hormone-goosed chicken leg, covered generously by some wrinkly brown spiced and fried flour (the first bite taken in the Colonel's red and white striped parking area, the second bite sucked in precariously while rolling thru rush hour traffic) my sugar level was rising, I was experiencing a flush of energy, my mood was lightening, the moribund pall didn't seem so serious -- and it led to a kind of feel good moment, somehow.

Hours later . . . here am I with you. The Colonel's box holds only bones, a fast food reliquary; the lessons of Morgan Spurlock have been carelessly pushed aside (again); and I wonder if I should or should not feel guilty about not consuming those two nutritious sides and the unbreakable hardtack biscuit, carved and baked into shape as per Mrs. Sanders' timeless recipe.

Morgan Spurlock has eaten my lunch

An empty yawn of discontent and deficit, with a gnawing drive to drink it or food-bomb it away, whatever its cause, is a buzzing constant in my current surroundings. Like a neutron bomb, that yawning space radiates and swells, a salty sweet chicken meal in the stomach barely digested, atomizing the human spirit (like the devilish N-Bomb) but not causing buildings to crumble, incinerate, or disappear. All alcoholics and addicts are familiar with this. Some even admit. Some live through it. Some of us do not make it that long. It's territory that's tricky to describe and rougher to find meaning in. As Woody Allen once said well: 

     I'm astounded by people who want to 'comprehend' the universe when it's hard
     enough to just find your way around Chinatown.

A famous poet once said 'the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's soul.'  Well, with confidence, I can say that that poet was not Colonel Harlan Sanders. Yep, the noble struggle and a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, original recipe, make it, living life, seem worthwhile. But, the honest people know that real life and a rich and fatty diet engenders cavities in your teeth, dries up one's soul at times, brings on insensibly wide, yawning lonely days to mark out mere existence. As a dry drinker and planetary journeyor who has somehow escaped a for-sure death sentence (for the time being), who has drunk enough scotch and vodka to make my liver want to leap clear out of me and run for its cirrohtic life, I figure if it's not illegal or dangerous to one's self and others or against your church's hallowed teachings, give it a chance. Bite down, hold on, and try to enjoy the struggle. Like when you're getting a circular x-ray of your teeth at the dentist's office. The picture you will see when it's done is a freaking living mystery, and in any other age of humanity it would have baffled and inspired the bejesus out of the ordinary person, even driven some of them to their knees in a crush of superstition or spiritual glory. Depth-level change and meaning go just like that. Carpe seizum, as some cynics say.

A kind of strange friend from college, named Steve, and I reconnected on Facebook a while back. He started it. It was kind of interesting. What I especially remembered about him was that often he tried too hard with others (a self-esteem deficit, I suppose) and he loved to tell jokes, hear bluegrass music, and laugh at life's quirky details. He probably loved, just ate up, Richard Lewis' angst heavy comedy. After several months and sporadic contacts, Steve fell radio silent. I tried to message him but got nothing back. I did not make a lot of this. It happens. But as his abrupt disassociation got longer, I found it mildly troubling. Weeks later I got a message on FB from Steve about dawn on a Saturday morning.

To my surprise, it said:

      Hello, you are reading this because you were probably a friend of Steve ________.
      My name is Lawrence. I am sorry to have to tell you that Steve died suddenly of a
      heart attack about four weeks ago. His wife and I realize that he had a Facebook
      account and you were one of his friends. We will miss him, like you. Please join us in
      praying that his soul rests in peace and that the sun will always rise on him.

And that the sun will always rise on him? When I picked myself up off the floor, I thought for some insensible reason about Jacob and that struggle itself is enough poem. A pain began radiating outward, rolling fog again, from the core of my stomach, as if I had downed a few bites of Thai cuisine too quickly. Send not for whom the bell tolls, sir, for it tolls for thee. Some people: they're lucky enough, on some days burdened enough, to stick it out. Some people just don't have the heart for it. Explain that, somebody.

This blogpost occurred to me as I clicked on a couple of TED talks this afternoon on my PC, while was feeling especially tender from a cloudbank of resentful boredom that's been angling in from my left coast for a few days. Moribundity. So watching some TEDs?: research, I'll call it. One short piece was about innovation. One was about open-sourcing (my particular favorite of the day). One was a pioneer blogger's story. A final TED talk was about a collaborative array of ways to newly look at collaboration, a digital mindbender. Surely something stuck with me. I felt mildly inspired and like a better person, and I drove immediately to a KFC. This will lead to something, I was convinced. Like the cavity in a tooth burgeons. Like the clump of plaque inside one's carotid artery takes on new particles and congeals. Like the dull pain that radiates out and throughout, but does not blow away the body. Or maybe this experience will radiate in a different more positive vein, if you can pardon the pun.

Another high school and college friend of mine was named Tim. For several years, he was the (young!) manager of an award-winning KFC outlet. We would go out drinking each night once he got off work about 11:00 PM. I would enter in the fry room as he finished up for the day. There was free leftover original recipe to be consumed, and Tim and I had only drinking money. He would caution me about stepping about carelessly. He was afraid I would slide and fall. The flooring was so ice rink slick and slippery what with a whole day's assault of spattery cooking grease, and peppered all-around with the fried-out particles of the Colonel's secret spices, that it was hazardous. What depths of struggle one will dive into just to fill up a yawning hole in the middle.

When I think about Steve's slide into his last thoughts and feelings, I wonder what contours they took, and I wonder if he even knew that this was it. Did he appreciate that his twenty minutes for his TED talk had expired? I wonder if my thoughts will be pleasant, meaningful, ponderous, painful, irrational, perhaps scared witless when it's my time for the Big Sunset. So, here it is. With a slight limp, a bottleful of Rolaids extra, and trying to work around the slippery patches on my  life's floor, time moves on and I turn to the legendary comic Henny Youngman for the insight that only human folly and weakness can provide:

     A man walks into his doctor's office. He says, 'Doctor, help me. It hurts when I do
     that.' The doctor looks at him and says: 'Hey, don't do that.'

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Eggland's Best (Or, Is Facebook Making Me Lonely?)

An old idiom goes like this: you've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.  This makes sense, but as a truism it brings to mind whiffs of something sulfuric, something unappetizing. The thought of freshly-fried eggs, steaming hot from a teflon pan, in theory seems like a fairly commendable dietary idea. But I simply cannot bring myself to eat an egg knowingly. I can crack them, I can mix 'em up here and there, I can cook them, I can even present them in most attractive ways on a platter: but do not ask me, ever, to consume one. The same goes for bourbon, scotch, and other spirits.

So, surprisingly, I was not aware until now that I had been paying subsconsious (rapt?) attention to televsion commercials that featured fresh eggs. Yet, whenever a chipper, colored Eggland 's Best spot reveals itself on my television screen, and the spokeshands of some woman model  begin to crack open some of those pearly white shells, with the raw contents all slimy and translucent and mellow orange streaming down like a leak from a rusty pipe into a glass mixing bowl, making me think as well, incongruously, disturbingly of the gutting of a dead-swinging pig in a slaughterhouse, I surrender as a complete captive, I melt like something cold in that fiery pan: You got to mess with some eggs . . . .  as that time-tested saying goes.

Having left me deeply unsettled, it is as if some long submerged anti-social tendency, like an Edgar Allen Poe protagonist, is trying to express itself  to the world. Part of the story is this: I always feel sad when I step up to shelves of those hopeless, cartoned-up eggs, cracked and uncracked. I sympathize with their hapless donors: the chickens.

Walking in a Safeway or something, plucking up a carton of twelve eggs (large size, grade A quality please) that will pleasure someone else is a tricky thing -- it's a task not be entrusted to your average urban egghunter. Nearly everyone makes a predictable error. You must always peer in, with a keen eye, into the coffinesque foam holder before you place your eggs in your basket. This should be a required ritual in our egg-crazy culture, at the sparkly egg case, under the big word Dairy high on the wall above. For once you roll on up to the electronic scanner and your precious money gets laid down on the barrelhead: it's too late to turn your broken misfortune around.

It never fails. If your eyes did not swoop in properly, when making your decision at the frosty Dairy henhouse, there will turn out to be a cracked egg (perhaps  more than one) hidden away in a bent up little package mold. Then things really begin to go to hell.  Like your brain on drugs in the archetypal TV commercial:  Any questions . . . ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4H517oi7pU&feature=fvwrel

Hey, you: yes, you. I asked if you have . . . any questions!

This it so happens raises the whole overly examined question of using Facebook. In my case:  I feel some days like FB use is causing me to turn me into that lonely, leaking lookalike orb of an egg in that imperfect and enviromentally undesirable carton.

Are these denizens of Digitopia feelin' lonely?

In the Atlantic Monthly current issue, the tease by a copy editor eggs us on: Social media — from Facebook to Twitter — have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity . . . we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic). And the loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society. Cracked. Leaking. Weakening. My life force oozing out oh so slowly: like old antifreeze dripping down from the car's battery, or like fragments of skin at the cellular plane sloughing off minuscule and weightless to the floor from a computer user's forearm.

The author of the magazine piece, Stephen Marche, gamely takes a stab of what is the conundrum, or the stealthy fox as it were, in the digital denizen's hen house:

     We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be   lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety. Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose . . . various research studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans — about 60 million people — are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

Any questions?  Well I have about one or two dozen, grade A large ones. But I will not launch into them here. The words that rivet me from The Atlantic instead are narcissistically densely networked: wuff, that is an evocative mouthful.

I am convinced that I am over-networked. I am willing to take Step One to deal with this conundrum. In fact, like a compulsive consumer, I view myself sometimes as one of the dozens of eggs standing at quiet attention, with propped up assistance from foamy cartons in a chilly Dairy world. E-Mail, Facebook, Blogging, Texting. Hoarding new apps. Almost a 24/7 indulgence on my part. But I am not of a mind that my messy, lengthening life among the savage micro processors has been scrambled into powerlessness -- or sunk into the sinkhole valley of lonely laptop reboots. Like overeaters with their foodstuffs, I seek out the social media, and the consequent connectivity, with others: to this I plead guilty -- to the disembodied and embodied. Facebook and my Text-o-Matic smartphone are not stalking me.  There are no Crackberry monsters lurking low in my closet; they are just make-believe. Like most of my co-human beings, I am thinly cracked here, dented there, chipped in crucial places, as brittle as the ego of an alcoholic in denial: but the fissures and  the escaping proteins and the dripping sticky contents of my past and present are not always perceivable. These problems get more pronounced internally with each dawn, an ennui-inducing syndrome -- like my brain on drugs and in the line of fire for that slamming fry pan. But honestly, many days turn out pretty good, thank you. I believe I resist the penchant to stalk and be stalked. Is this a sad case of narcissistic nay-saying on my part? Hmm . . . Where is Dr. Freud when one really needs him?

Marche's recollection of a critical scene in the Oscar-crushing movie The Social Network, makes the recent Atlantic magazine piece a true keeper, a blue ribbon champ.

In that scene, its hot bitter sting lingering awhile after the film has finished up, the founder of Facebook sits alone in the dim glow of a computer monitor in a spare bedroom. Wealthy beyond fantasy, the piper at the lead of a gazillion online subscribers, a young man idolized by a new breed of digitized social communicators: reluctantly he, then impulsively he, presses down on the Friend Request command of his sensational software invention. One chick in a ponderous sea of creatures, Mark Zuckerbeg's former girlfriend, is the intended target of his Friend Request impulse. He sits. Stares expectantly. Does not move in the glow.  He is a hidden-away, cracked, and quietly oozing egg in a worldwide carton of  virtual lookalikes.  She does not reply. It's maddening. She does not acknowledge. He taps impatiently, tentatively, on his PC keyboard. Still, she does not answer: but then the movie ends. Zuck winds up with his stock still stare, like the depressingly warped and staring Bartleby of literary legend who, frankly, would prefer not to. Crushing, heart bumping, a feeling of emptiness settles in: who among the legions of desperately-seeking other good eggs -- in the depths of digital Dystopia -- has not felt that sense of unraveled and wireless emptiness and soulful longing, and a spritz of hope, for a timely response, any response, a proactive microporcessed surprise, that would validate this existential egg-ness? A person holding  a computer, which is a mechanized extension of himself or herself, part cyborg and part animal, peering in and through a flat screen, gets a show and tell on the microchip's schedule only, before all fades to dark.

The credits begin to roll on The Social Network. Psychodrama's over. The dark isolation of the movie is complete. It is time for everyone to get up and go. Blackberrys suddenly materialize in hands, as if conjured by unseen spirt guides. Check now for texts. Re-establish connectivity. U get my msg, dude? Swing back  into cyberland. One last lesson from The Social Network pairs inside the rotating film credits if you are not in too much of a rush to miss it:  the blues song "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" plays, the long goodbye, to lingering audience members. 'Hope my eyes don't deceive me?, 'cuz there is something going wrong around here.' Like this:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Y5BaurXMmMU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Greatness in song. This movie's denouement is replete with meaning. It is a symbolic mirroring of a new normal, a new take on the Beatles tune "A Day in the Life." You gotta break some eggs, bunky . . . to muddle along in this identity-squelching Digitalmerican farmscape.

The fragile egg in the foam cocoon leads me to a humorous anecdote by Woody Allen in his movie  Annie Hall, a cinematic paean to the bittersweet complications of life -- especially lonely obsession -- among all us chickens.

Woody:  My brother has been seeing a psychiatrist. He's not well. But the sessions are not doing him any good. He thinks he's a chicken.

Annie:  My goodness, that's terrible. But if it's not helping, why doesn't he just quit?

Woody:  He tells me he would, but he can't, 'cuz he needs the eggs.

Do my eyes deceive me? I think there's something going on around here. So, any questions?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The magazine article that was cited:  

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

Dick Clark: The Second Act Was Not Kind

"There are no second acts in American lives."

                                               --  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It is a fact that Francis Scott Fitzgerald, having reveled in the spotlight of American literary fame thanks to his book about Jay Gatsby and other fictional contributions, died as an indigent of sorts at age 44 in the fantasy nightmare of old-time Hollywood. His all-consuming alcohol habit actually swallowed him up. By the Christmas season of 1940, Fitzgerald was gone. No second act. He did not live long enough for it.

You may not like this idea, but it's on my mind.

Sadly, Dick Clark who was born in 1929 (82 years ago) and became famous as a disc jockey, TV persona, and "America's oldest teenager," has now shuffled off the American stage too. Perhaps, if you are of a certain age, and if you had a handy b-&-w television in your house (or at a friend's place) during after-school hours weekdays, you remember Dick Clark making his mark in our shared pop culture with the program American Bandstand -- in this way:

"http://www.youtube.com/embed/DH3N1cDphsQ"

Kitschy and cool it was. Dig that crazy beat, the white bucks, and the rockin' kids from Philly front and center: taking awesome star turns on the dance floor, moondoggies.

Or perhaps you remember Mr. Clark in this most regrettable way -- during his wretched second act, sporting a pained visage, hampered by a critical speech-impairment from a stroke, showing up in recent years on his wholly-owned, formerly clever, and annual New Year's Eve television extravaganza:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24J2VTSzcKE&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL8C8157E46B70D44D

Not kitschy and not cool. In fact, it all reeks of a year-end countdown to soullessness. Ryan Seacrest, the heir apparent to Mr. Clark on American commercial radio and television, strains a little too hard to be hospitable and obvious, subconsciously mirroring Clark's stressful diction and demeanor. The innocent-looking Philly kids and those way cool white bucks on Fabian's famous  rockstar hooves are literally out of the picture. How did we get to this point? Not the sweet '50s teenagers but some slickened New Kids (or NKOTB for a jawbreaker of a musical acronym) are making the scene. Ke$sha -- a new but not improved "Barbie lives" project with that awful neon lipstick and dyed hair -- is close to truly speechless at the living spectacle unfolding. Looking into the face of pummelled human brokenness and suffering, even through a square TV monitor, will do that to a young person like her.

Look again. The crowd on Times Square NYC is buzzing and swaying with excitement, yet far removed, exiled, from anything and everything that's perched up on that static, outdoors ABC sound-set; and that perennial preener, Jenny McCarthy (a genuine "Jenny on the block" in this case), purloining time from her low-demand sitcom guest jobs on Two and a Half Men and other insipid shows -- kept toasty warm by her furs, blonde hair extensions, and silicone trusses -- works harder, more racously and more stridently, than even the rising idol Seacrest, as if she has something (could it be the memory of Dick Clark reading his script painfully aloud a few minutes before?) to overcome. Is that colorful logo for Toyz R Us on the backdrop building, behind them all, just a cynical product placement by that company -- or did someone in the Dick Clark Productions corps spot the chance for a spot-on, post-modern metaphor and joke?

Having suffered the awful slings and arrows of great misfortune, at least one massive stroke, yet not at all ready to shuffle off this mortal coil (look, not every run of the mill blogger can dredge up timely allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet with such ease), Dick Clark pushed onward. And on and . . . on. I will forever recall the reaction of shock and sadness that a close friend and pop-music lover gasped out, like recoil of a rifle, on December 31, 2009, when Mr. Clark came into focus after an 'on-the-air' toss to him from the ever-buoyant, sparkly Mr. Seacrest. What a reminder that was of those cracks and fissures, and painful wrinkles, that have appeared in our cultural veneer since those hallowed afternoons listening to the saxophone swing of American Bandstand's theme and watching the apparently naive and unworldly Philly kids coupling up metaphorically there before our eyes. No, Dick Clark was not destined to have a successful second act.

Veneer. I guess that's what it was. Time rolls on, in fact it rocks and rolls on. There is no genuine turning back, as some still claim. Veneers wear away and all polished surfaces eventually tarnish, even finest woods go bad. Dick Clark, oh what a veneer he wrought from the raw material with which he was gifted. He had a great act, as did his perky audiences. To his last day, he was wildly rich $$$ materially and economically. Making money and creature comforts, and adulation from fans, were not the problems. Yet something kept him pushing on, . . . a spiritual void, a need to be seen and heard, whatever, and he chose to appear again on Rockin' Eve after Rockin' Eve.

Viewers looked on -- aghast at the symbol of what he/we have become, or maybe not, and yet sweetly sentimental for what once was and appears to be no more. Fitzgerald was right about there (in truth) being no second acts in American life. With his last breath, Dick Clark felt his heart break. Alas, even Gatsby the Great's favored existence hit some rough patches, then came apart. 

Maybe the real lesson here is to strive constantly for an authentic first act, all the way, without apologies or personal excuses. And then -- who knows what?

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Hopefully, We Won't Be Hearing About This Anymore

A.P.’s approval of ‘hopefully’ symbolizes larger debate over proper use of language

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/aps-approval-of-hopefully-symbolizes-larger-debate-over-language/2012/04/17/gIQAti4zOT_story.html?tid=pm_lifestyle_pop

Considering the traditional  elements of style?

Helpful Words from WordPress -- About Blogging

This is a guest post by Kristina Chang, Evan Moore, Tony Xu, and Omer Rabin. They are students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business


What makes a blog popular?

. . . . What drives page views? . . . Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations.

We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggest that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow

It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post . . . . there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Get Comments, Comments, Comments

The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: "have you ever done X?"; "do you think Y is acceptable?". 

Post Frequently and Regularly

Your blog readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals.

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook, for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

Something Savory -- Stories That Lie

Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

       http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/why-storytellers-lie/255490/

Maura Kelly is an author and commentator. She has written for the New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Guardian, and in this case The Atlantic. Here she writes about a new book called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, in which Jonathan Gotschall discusses why we humans have such a strong interest in stories, and argues that we're all storytellers — and all liars too, even if most of us don't realize it, even if most of us are lying primarily to ourselves!

Having toyed for several days with an original piece about memory and catharsis, I was really fascinated by (and learned some things from) this essay. Looking forward to reading the book.
-- Butch Ekstrom


          "Many of our memories are records of our own stories, not of events that actually
          took place."

          "When we tell (or write) stories about ourselves, they also serve another important
          (arguably higher) function: They help us to believe our lives are meaningful. The
          storytelling mind — the human mind, in other words — "is allergic to uncertainty,    
          randomness, and coincidence," Gottschall writes. It doesn't like to believe life is
          accidental; it wants to believe everything happens for a reason. Stories allow us to
          impose order on the chaos. And we all concoct stories, Gotschall notes: even those
          of us who have never commanded the attention of a room full of people while tell-
          ing a wild tale. 'Social psychologists point out that when we meet a friend, our con-
          versation mostly consists of an exchange of gossipy stories," he writes. "And every
          night, we reconvene with our loved ones . . . to share the small comedies and
          tragedies of our day."


This is Butch writing again. If someone invented a new pill called, say, Amygdalop which gave you the power to forget a painful or embarrassing memory or, perhaps, all memories (to give you a fresh start at life of sorts), would you be interested in taking that pill?

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Making Character Judgments

Trust in others, especially when it came to business matters, did not come easily to my parents. This stemmed, I believe, from their individual, working class struggles through the Great Depression and the cultural emphasis, among such offspring of European immigrants, to save, save, save (all tangible assets available) for a future unknown.

There was one life-altering day around 1950, or so I have heard, during which my parents (as yet still childless) laid down some serious money -- serious for that burgeoning economic era -- with a guy who sold them on the dream that he possessed the next best idea. Now, when I say serious money, I mean it. If it had not been for that one successful scam, I would be very wealthy today -- like I won a big state lottery drawing kind of well-to-do.  In fact, things are pretty good for me now in material terms, all things considered. But, geez, . . .  In sum, what I possess from that con job are stark memories about how disappointed my parents were in a person they had believed and trusted.

Which brings me to this: a person's admirable (upstanding) character is something to be far more prized than a pot clogged with monetary wealth. Well, I keep reminding myself of that anyway. It is built up decision by decision, encounter by encounter, attitude by attitude. If only my mom and dad had been more fond of, i.e., trusting in financial institutions post-Depression. One's low-standing character can be created over an arcing expanse of living large or frozen into other people's perceptions through one stunner of a misanthropic moment. All I know is that I have been somewhat obssessed for years by live, electrifying versions of the song "Money" (from the Dark Side of the Moon) by the Pink Floyd.

Maybe there is something in this aspect of our family history that makes me a pretty lousy judge of character. I get about half of my snap judgements about individuals right, and I get about half or more wrong. This lends me a kind of Richard Lewis sensation of being doomed to make that one unalterable misjudgment someday, I suppose. Don't you just know there is a sensitive trapdoor out there, somewhere, ready to spring open?

Which of course leads me intuitively to consider my personal experiences at Starbucks. I go through the Starbucks drive-thru lane on most mornings. I always order the same things. The relentlessly cheerful staff -- Matt, Amy, Rob, Kaitlyn, C.J., Aaron, others -- can recognize my voice echoing out of my car (and see me on the little surveillance camera posted strategically on the outdoor order board). Often, any one of the staff members can verbally complete my order, before I do, from memory. This all started, I guess, because of my quirky straw requests. Something idiosyncratic like that just sticks, then grabs the attention of others. They smile at almost all-comers @ Starbucks -- even though, on some mornings, they simply do not want to. They talk to me when I roll up to the dispensary window when I show even mild interest in engagement, introduce themselves to me, tell me how late they were up the night before, tell me about their plans for life (briefly at least -- and isn't that just so classically young adult-like?). I admire these character traits. But if they only knew what I am really like in real life, all this employer-demand chipperness and sharing, probably, would vaporize like the coffee-scented air that rolls like a light fog out of the drive-thru portal.

Clearly, I am hoping that I am batting more than .500 when it comes to judgments about these young people. I hope they are getting it essentially right about me too, despite my obvious character defects. Maybe they are pleasant because I am like the prototypical big-spender -- I always have a traceable $$ balance on my Starbucks card, dollars that I guess could ultimately be attributed in part (like time-worn Ellis Island census records) to my parents and grandparents. Or perhaps some of them youngsters @ Starbucks inherently trust that I would take good care of their pets or plants or their cherished life plans in times of need, someone who just might lead them to unpredictable well-being.

Just the other day, at the drive-up window, I wished Aaron good luck. He is a young, enthusiastic, married midwestern guy who told me he was moving along (hooray!) to a technology-based job, and a pretty good one at that. He said, 'Wait a second.' Then he fished a piece of paper out of his green apron. It had his wife's first name and his on it, plus a cell phone number. 'Here. We should get together,' Aaron says. 'I like talking to you. I think there's a lot we could talk about.'

I thanked him and replied, 'Okay, sure, good luck again.' Then I drove away with my everyday order.

But, while driving away, taking my first drink of the morning, I figured I will actually send him a text message or give him a call soon. And, of course, I could not help but admire his character judgment.

And, yeah, I mean that to be humorous and ironic all at once.

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Praxis as a Concept and Lifestyle

So, I tried to do a kind of semantic clarification in which praxis -- if not on the thither side of this divide -- was perhaps somehow between the theoretical and the practical as they are generally understood, and particularly as they are understood in modern philosophy.

Praxis as the manner in which we are engaged in the world and with others. It has its own insight or understanding prior to any explicit formulation of that understanding . . . Of course, it must be understood that praxis, as I understand it, is always entwined with communication.

                                                                                          -- Calvin O. Schrag

While praxis commonly refers to the process of putting theoretical knowledge into practice, the strategic and socio-political usage of the word emphasizes the need for a constant cycle of conceptualizing the meanings of what can be learned from experience in order to re-frame practical and operational models.

Trayvon: Send Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

Young man, African-American, in a dark hoodie sweatshirt. Very suspicious? A specter demanding self-defense?

Barack Obama said Friday that "every aspect" of the death of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot in Florida last month, must be investigated.

"My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin: if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," Obama said. "I think that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we're going to get to the bottom of what happened . . . Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids."

Meanwhile, on Friday, students at several South Florida high schools, near the Martin household, staged walkouts in protest since there have been no arrests in the case.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in humankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

                --  John Donne, 1624 c.e.

No matter what more transpires, there will be no satisfying outcome to this episode. The travesties of racial divides and barely unfettered gun violence have struck again -- and will go on. For some reason, I am reminded of the Casey and Caylee Anthony case this morning. Florida, Orlando area, power confronts naivete. Is it true, what Donne also said?

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

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"Estamos bien en el refugio," Los 33

Los 33 de Copiano

       Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
       And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

                                             --  John Milton, Lycidas


One of the great stories of perseverance, hope, and transcendence during our era. It's just that the full story of what happened . . . and what goes on still . . . has never really been explained.

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Lorcan's Heavy Heart

Alas, you poor and foolish people, what will you do now?
I have given you my heart. Who will now take care of 
you in your times of trouble? Who will come to help you?"

                                     --  Lorcan Ua Tuathail,  c.e. 1180


  A Landing at Normandy Cove 

Laurence (Lorcan) O'Toole's saintly heart was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in the Diocese of Dublin on March 3, 2012.

The Dean of the Cathedral, the Reverend Dermot Dunne, said: "I am devastated that one of the treasured artifacts (the preserved heart of Lorcan) of the church has been stolen. It has no economic value, but it is a priceless treasure that links our present foundation to its founding father."

Ua Tuathail (Laurence O'Toole) was well-known as an ascetic. Legends say that he wore a hair shirt, never ate meat, and fasted every Friday on bread and water. In contrast to this, it is said that when he entertained his guests lacked for nothing while he drank water coloured to look like wine so as not to spoil the feast. It is also said that each Lent he returned to Glendalough to make a forty-days retreat in a rough cave on a precipice of Lugduff Mountain above a scenic lake.

Due to the miracles soon attributed to Laurence either at his tomb or through his intercession after his death, he was canonized only forty-five years after his death.

St Laurence's skull was brought to England in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish who had fought at Agincourt. The bones were interred at a parish in Chorley, now named St. Laurence Church. The bones disappeared under Henry VIII's rule. Traditionally, English Christians have believed that Laurence's heart has been preserved at the Irish Christ Church Cathedral since the 13th century -- that is, until March 2012.

To Be Continued

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!