Dropping Names on my Foote

Dropping Names on My Foote by Earl Martin Pedersen, Dec. 2005

John Foote, an Englishman from Royston, Hertfordshire, England, and my oldest documented ancestor, was born in 1530. He married Helen Warren and had a son named Robert Foote (1552-1607), who married Joane Brooke, and they had a son named Nathaniel Foote (1593-1644). After his apprenticeship in the grocery business, Nathaniel married Elizabeth Deming in 1615. Her brother was John Deming, a magistrate of the Colony of Connecticut and signer of the Charter. Nathaniel and Elizabeth, probably with John Deming, sailed from London to Boston sometime between 1630 and 1633 to start a new life in Wethersfield, Conn. There Nathaniel farmed and was appointed a delegate to the Court. He was the first cousin of Sir Thomas Foote, Sheriff of London in 1649 and Lord Mayor of London in 1650. Nathaniel Foote is nicknamed “The Settler” because he is our first US ancestor. This is where the story really begins to get interesting.

Nathaniel and Elizabeth had two sons and five daughters. Their first son was also named Nathaniel (1619-1655) and his kid sister was named Rebecca Foote (1634-1701). Remember her. Nathaniel Foote jr. married Elizabeth Smith, and they had a son named Daniel Foote (1652-?). Daniel married Sarah, and they had a boy named Jehiel Foote (1687-1740). Jehiel married Susannah, and one of their nine children was George Foote (1721-1755). George Foote married Hannah Hurd, and they had John Foote (1754-1826), who witnessed the Revolution. John Foote married Ruth Searl in 1775, and they had a son named Adoniram Foote, born in Arlington, Vermont in 1780, who died in Turin, New York in 1866.

Adoniram Foote’s second wife was Emily Brainerd, whose brother Lawrence was an ardent abolitionist. His house in Vermont was the last stop on the Underground Railroad to Canada. Hon. Lawrence Brainerd presided over the first convention of the Republican Party in 1854 nominating John C. Frèmont, who won only 16 states. (Abraham Lincoln was the second Republican candidate for the Presidency. He won.) Adoniram and Emily had a son named Norman Brainerd Foote (1820-1900). Norman married Maria Mills in 1848, and their first son was Frederick Norman Foote (1852-1941). Frederick Foote married Nora French Thompson, and they moved from New York to Texas to Minnesota and then to Seattle, Washington. They had ten children, among them Gertrude May Foote (1891-1977), my grandmother. By the way, Frederick Foote’s brother John was the first graduate of Boston (University) School of Theology, which later graduated Dr. Ralph Martin Pedersen jr. (Dad) and his classmate Dr. Martin Luther King jr.

In the meantime, Nathaniel Foote junior’s sister Rebecca Foote, daughter of “The Settler,” married Lt. Philip Smith and they had a daughter also named Rebecca, who married George Stillmen. George and Rebecca had a daughter named Anna Stillmen who married a man named Hezekiah May. They had a daughter named Elizabeth May, and she married David Newcomb. Their daughter, Lydia Newcomb, married Timothy Bush. Lydia and Timothy Bush had a son, Obadiah Bush (1797-1851), who married Harriet Smith. Their son, the Reverend James Bush (1825-1889), married Harriet Fay, and they had a son named Samuel Prescott Bush (1863-1948). Sam married Flora Sheldon, and they named their son Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895-1972), who married Dorothy Walker. Now, Prescott Sheldon Bush and Dorothy Walker had a son too, and his name is George Herbert Walker Bush (b. 1924), 41st President of the United States. George married Barbara Pierce, and they had a son named George Walker Bush (b. 1946), who later married Laura Lane Welch and became the 43rd President of the United States. That makes “Dubya” and myself cousins ten generations removed.

Other branches of the Foote family tree lead to Roxanna Foote (1775-1816), wife of Lyman Beecher and mother of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher (Stowe) and Henry Ward Beecher, three of the most famous Americans of their time. William Howard Taft, the 27th President, is a descendant of Nathaniel Foote senior’s sister Mary, as is Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th US President. Coincidentally, Nixon’s boyhood barber in Whittier, CA was Jesse Elvin Strahl (my maternal grandfather). Finally, Mary Foote’s daughter Elizabeth Hewes married Ralph Hemenway, a direct ancestor of Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Ernest Hemingway.

My main sources for these incomplete notes were: Don Pedersen’s High School Genealogy Project, the Foote Family Association of America website: www.footefamily.org, Paul Foote’s site at www.geocities.com/thefootehistory, and Ernest Hemingway’s genealogy at Genealogy.com.

Now you know everything.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Do you believe any of that?
Jeff: That Pedersen’s related to the four worst presidents in American history?
Mutt: Wasn’t he supposed to be Norwegian?
Jeff: Definitely all a pack of lies. We teached him good.
Mutt: You mean, ‘we teached him well’.
Jeff: Oh sorry.
Mutt: Now that I think about it, there’s a joke about four presidents.
Jeff: Be my guest.
Mutt: Four United States Presidents got caught up in a tornado and off they whirled to the land of Oz. They finally made it to the Emerald City and went to find the Great Wizard, who asked: "What brings the four of you before the great Wizard of Oz?"
Jimmy Carter stepped forward timidly: "I've come for some courage."
"No Problem," said the Wizard. "Who's next?"
Richard Nixon stepped forward, and said: "Well, I think I need a heart."
"Done," says the Wizard. "Who comes next before the Great and Powerful Oz?"
Up stepped Bush and said: "The American people say that I need a brain."
"No problem," said the Wizard. "Consider it done."
Then there is a great silence in the hall.
Jeff: Yeah, and?
Mutt: Bill Clinton is just standing there, looking around, but he doesn't say a word. Irritated, the Wizard finally asks, "Well, what do you want?"
Clinton answers, "Is Dorothy here?"
Jeff: Not bad, not bad ... um, not good either.
Mutt: Wit happens.

Still Babbling After All Of One Year

It’s been a year since I started blogging. How’s it going? Worth abiding? (The Dude abides, you know) Well, I’ve gotten around 2,000 reads or presumed reads (the counter came late), a few comments, several hits from unexpected places like Luxemburg, Japan and India (real true friends?).

I’ve learned that controversy pays, even fake controversy. Mutt and Jeff feel underappreciated, though. I’ve learned that when you need a break from real writing, blog. I got a lot more hits after I posted a list that includes names of pretty girls. I wish I had more ‘followers’.

I thought that the Sunset Intersection blog would lead people to my musical page: Martin’s Moan and Drone, but that hasn’t happened. Could it be the name? I thought people would scold me for using borrowed images; that hasn’t happened either. All in all, I’ve had fun. I’ll keep going.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Is he going to threaten retirement every year?
Jeff: I betcha.
Mutt: What do we get out of it?
Jeff: Peanuts.
Mutt: Let’s go on strike then.
Jeff: You mean not eat the peanuts?
Mutt: No, we just won’t be funny anymore.
Jeff: Funny?
Mutt: You know, like this: One frog croaks to the other, "Time's fun when you're having flies!"
Jeff: That’s funny?
Mutt: Well.
Jeff: What is the difference between a frog and a cat?
Mutt: I’m too ashamed to ask.
Jeff: A frog croaks all the time, a cat only nine times.
Mutt: You’re right, we get what we deserve.
Jeff: Peanuts. Told ya.

The Norsky Beat

Does it mean anything at all to be a Norse-American? Even if you don’t live in Minnesota, North Dakota or Wisconsin? Most of us don’t speak the language or observe the customs or know the history. Most of us have never been to the homeland (or Lake Wobegon). And my own ethnic roots intertwine with German, Dutch, and English.

Of all the Norwegians on Earth, about half live in Norway, half in the United States, a few got lost. “With the exception of Ireland, no single country contributed a larger percentage of its population to the United States than Norway.” The second wave finally made it (ref. to Leif Ericson’s trip to N. America in 1000 a.d. and Norwegian immigration in the 1800’s-early 1900’s).

That’s an interesting list over there, huh? McGyver, Matt Dillon, Mr. Phelps, Hercules, Starsky, or was it Hutch? Hutch probably. Anyway, nothing to say, some immense TV heroes, so I’m in good Norski (correct spelling?) company. And the female company isn’t too shabby: Marilyn, Jennifer, Renée, Melanie, Liv, and did I say Paris? (I ain’t sayin’ I saw the videos, and I ain’t sayin’ I didn’t.)

Enough silliness. Oh, did I forget the other squareheads (scandies, vikes, olafs)? One stood on the Moon, one crossed the Atlantic, one Chronicled the Martians, one flew the Jefferson Airplane.

I’m impressed. I’d call my ethnic group’s contributions ‘distinguished’. And there are many more not on my list. Yeah but, what does it mean? What passes from the roots to the tree?

Is my character Scandinavian or just my name? Those roots are stronger than you think. When I was in Africa a friend asked me: “Is it true that there are black-skinned people living in America? Who are they?” But every African-American who’s traveled back has the same experience: Recognition. Returning home after generations. Once I flew to Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and everyone on the plane had my hair! My people.

So if I’m not smiling, if I don’t speak much, if I keep my thoughts to myself (not much fun to argue with), if I don’t go for showy sentimentality, I’m hyper-critical, moralistic, melancholy, conscientious, competent, pragmatic, creative and conservative—am I those? sort of—it’s because I silently but impatiently await Recognition.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Glad I’m not some herring choker.
Jeff: You’re telling me. No sense of humor in those doom-and-gloomers.
Mutt: Met a nice blonde Swedish lass once.
Jeff: Stacked I imagine.
Mutt: Didn’t notice.
Jeff: I noticed a herring who for many years swam along with a friendly whale. He showed up one day without his companion. When asked where the whale was, the herring replied, "How would I know? Am I my blubber's kipper?”
Mutt: Back to my Swede please. There was once a wise man who loved a beautiful maiden, but she lived in a marsh where his car always got stuck and, besides, her father had a gun, so he never did get close enough to tell her of his passion. However, she had a more energetic suitor who purchased amphibious tires for his car and, when her father was asleep, speedily carried her off.
Jeff: Yeah, so?
Mutt: Treads rush in where wise men fear to fool.
Jeff: Third strike. Grab some pine, meat.

Neal Bites the Pulp

At the hip left-wing bookstore there are lots of little rooms full of theme-related books: Marxism for the 21st Century, Feminism for the 21st Century, the history of the union movement (for intellectuals to read on the summer beach), Gramsci, Trotsky, De André, non-violent children’s books, the Sexual Orientation room, the Che Guevara room, and the Little Magazine Room. Every month, Neal likes to get a certain music mag to follow Bob Dylan’s latest shenanigans.

I waited outside on the sidewalk. The people who worked in the cooperative bookstore (the workers) were so chronically depressed and grouchy that they put a funereal pall over whatever brightness might have come from the collected works of François Marie Charles Fourier.

Neal went straight to the back to get his magazine. The political and musical magazines were arranged on a handsome tiered wall-rack of tan wood with low slots so that they all faced the customer, staggered down to the floor like a strip mine. There were hundreds of flimsy, over-priced publications in that rack, all balanced, upright and beckoning. Someone had arranged them like flowers.

With his characteristic enthusiasm, Neal reached out his arm and grabbed his favorite from one of the top shelves, but the corner of Neal’s magazine touched the corner of the magazine next to it pulling it forward. And that one nudged the one next to it and so on.

Talk about dominos. The magazines falling from the upper shelves tapped the ones below and they cascaded downwards onto the floor at Neal’s feet. To his credit, he tried to stop this periodical avalanche, first swatting with his hands and then, since the magazine rack was inclined, he tried to keep a couple magazines from falling by holding them with his knees. “Help,” he muttered meekly to no one. Neal was alone in the magazine room.

Panic. The hundreds of magazines were clicking down one by one to the floor like a Jacob’s ladder toy. Neal spread out his arms to try to hold some in place, save the savable at least; he even held some with his elbows. His legs were bowed outwards like a rock climber on sheer granite.

Then Neal lost his balance and could not remain vertical any longer. On tiptoes, he slid forward about a foot, against his healthy belly, just enough so that he could not return upright. His forehead resting against the magazine stand, saving the last few magazines, the main pile around his ankles, he was stuck, unable to right himself. Neal whispered, “help,” again.

I think I’ll leave Neal spread-eagled there, pressed against the magazine display in an extremely compromising (criminal and/or sexual) position with his left hand saving La Rivista del Manifesto and his right hand saving from the fall a photocopied collection of love poems from prison by Francesca Mambro. Kissing the rack, so to speak.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Good day to you, Honorable Jeff of Leisure
Jeff: Thank you, kind sir, and another happy day of leisureliness to you too.
Mutt: It wasn’t always like this, you know? I used to be a transplant surgeon, but my heart just wasn't in it.
Jeff: I used to be a train driver, but I got sidetracked.
Mutt: I used to be a tailor, but found the work to be just so-so.
Jeff: I used to be a hotel clerk, but then I had reservations.
Mutt: I used to be a shoe salesman, till they gave me the boot.
Jeff: I used to be a carpenter, but then I got bored.
Mutt: I used to work at an orange juice factory, but I was canned because I couldn't concentrate.
Jeff: I used to be a marathon runner, but couldn't stand the agony of de feet.
Mutt: Well, I used to be a baker, but I didn't make enough dough.
Jeff: Well, I used to be a nun, but I got expelled because of my dirty habits.
Mutt: Really, seriously?
Jeff: Absolutely. Like Pedersen, I’ve spent most of my adult life a broad.
Mutt: Poor thing.

The Post-Modern Blues

Pedersen sez: I stick by every word.
But sir, you said one thing then totally reversed yourself, ‘against’ and ‘in favor’?
I know, and I stick by every word.
Is this some kind of semantic joke?
No, it’s the post-modern blues. Either/or, you’re out the door.

Not the truth, but no longer the post-Obama black and white only truth. Not Orwellian doublethink (or maybe it is):

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. [Nineteen Eighty-Four. p 32.]

Not the two sides to every coin. Flip it fast and see them merging. Heads, tails, both, neither. A pretty vase or a woman’s face? No, this is a case of such a broad topic that both opposing opinions fit comfortably inside it. A shoebox full of leftover pros and cons. Yes, at the same time.

In sum, the music of the 80’s was, objectively measured, of inferior quality, AND the music of the 80’s was, subjectively measured, some of the best of the century. It moved people, myself included, got the feet moving and the head nodding. But ethno-musical history is only an example. (Oh sorry, can’t use obj./sub. dichotomies any more. Oh sorry, dividing the past in decade blocks is an artefice.)

Syncretism is the technical term. I don’t want to go too far into philosophy with its illusive jargon and autoerotic complexities. But just think of the one you love most on earth. Ahhh. Most of the time. Is that love always white, never black, never gray??? Checkered? Striped? Cappuccino? When you love and hate the same person, usually first one then the other, perhaps no outer cause can be found, your feelings just inverted, or you feel both clashing feelings at the same time. Pinch.

I know, it was easier to experience reality when every question (or daisy) had an A answer and a B answer (check one only), but then we saw that that was a childish distorting viewpoint. We saw that, right? When that poor tree in the lone forest came crashing down, it made a tremendous noise AND it made no sound at all. Then again, how would I know?

Does Santa exist? Come on, fess up. On so many levels. Like being on trial and the judge says: Just answer yes or no! And all you can think of is how badly you need to explain your answer because it’s not as simple as yes or no. ‘Please can I …’ ‘NO!’

Does God exist? Angels, ghosts, aliens?
Does Mr. Death exist? Mother nature?
Do you exist? At home or Lost on an island?
Does any truth exist? Justice? Right, wrong?
Does this universe exist? In a glass snowball?
Prove it.
And disprove it.

Debate used to be considered a noble sport and a fine practice of the intellect. Can I believe in mine, and allow you to believe in yours? Think Islam-Christianity. Often tolerance is a mask for ‘I will allow you to be wrong, because I can’t convert you’. Whatever happened to ‘I will defend to the death your right to your opinion even if I disagree’? Bull, you say. Bull, I say. At least we agree on that.

Nowadays everyone, including me, is spouting off all the time in public, but who’s listening? Who is quiet? Is there arrogance or shame in continually expressing oneself, ignoring the counterpart of silence?

Pete Seeger said, “An open mind is a wonderful thing. Just don’t let it become a tunnel of winds.” In the end you need to say what you believe, this is my yes and my no, line in the sand, which side are you on, this is what I will fight for, however hard it is nowadays not to see both sides at the same time with our immobilizing po-mo cross-eyed perception. Thanks a lot, Martin Heidegger!

Here’s a song from my Myspace collection: http://www.myspace.com/emartinpedersen:

The Postmodern Blues

Talkin’ out both sides
Hi ho the derry-o
You get it all and its contrary
In frequency modulation stereo.

chorus: Oh, Foucault
Daddy’s got them post-modern blues
Don’t Derrida me
Just hand me down my deconstruction shoes.

Reductionism’s my top ten
Ding dong the derry-o
But to ride a pony into the wind
At the Alamo theme park near San Antonio.

I fear the noosphere
Hiddy hiddy hiddy ho
Professor Eco get me out of here
As I spinning down the vortex go.

With “and/or” tattooed over my ear
A-bee bop a lula
Hello, goodbye, life, death – aloha
She’s my baby, dancin’ the hula.

Wars of the worlds of uncertainty
Sing ring around the rosey
All absolutes fall down (crash bang)
That’s the way the monkey goes-y.

Embrace me ambiguity
Pop! Goes the weasel
Put your tongue into my mouth
And paint your nude on top of my easel.

Epistemology – I thunk, I thunk
Hey diddle diddle me, please
Your implosion of my meaning
Could collapse my theoretical hierarchies.

Placeless, nameless, postness, sameness
Rain rain go away
A paradigm won’t buy you coffee
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, you’re so passé.

© E. Martin Pedersen, 2009

And lastly, I got 200+ hits on my blog during the 80’s music debate, so you’re stuck with me for a while. I did not, however, get thousands of hate mails; that was a lie. One leap ahead of the truth.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Police arrested two kids yesterday, one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks.
Jeff: Let me guess. They charged one and let the other one off?
Mutt: A chicken and an egg, lying in bed side-by-side, each smoking a cigarette.
Jeff: I know, I know: "Which came first?"
Mutt: There were two ships: one had red paint, one had blue paint. They collided.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah, the survivors were marooned. Jeez!
Mutt: A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France …
Jeff: Oh, really?
Mutt: Linoleum Blownapart.
Jeff: That’s just wrong.
Mutt: Two peanuts were walking in Central Park, one was assaulted.
Jeff: Man, that one was old when Adam was pinning leaves and picking fleas. Don’t you know any new jokes?
Mutt: All jokes are new in Amnesia.
Jeff: Are we scraping the bottom of the barrel yet?
Mutt: Not even close, pal, not even close.

A Rant in Favor of the Music of the 80’s

E. Martin Pedersen is under attack. Thousands of angry music-lovers have been sending him hate mail including threats on his life. He may go into hiding, but first this note.

The 1840’s & 50’s were a great time in American popular music. Stephen Foster wrote many hit songs that we still sing, Dan Emmett wrote Dixie, Old Dan Tucker and so on. The minstrels appropriated the slaves’ music and melded it into the common idiom, honoring it at the same time they interspersed it with racist jokes and gags. Negro spiritual choirs were performing around the world raising money for the abolitionist movement. The country was struggling in music with the issue that would tear it apart.

The Gay 1890’s were another rich period in song. The barbershop quartets sang the classic songs of Tin Pan Alley. Orchestras of all types were formed (banjo or mandolin orchestras, for instance). Pianos, guitars and autoharps filled parlors. Marching bands played the Sousa hits. Vaudeville variety shows replaced the minstrel shows. Immigrants brought their sounds from around the globe. And ragtime was being invented by Scott Joplin.

In the 1950’s rock and roll, founded by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, swept aside the crooners. But it came to full form in the 60’s and hit its peak in the 70’s. Then what happened?

These things go in cycles. That’s clear. And technology can have an effect. Radio didn’t exist in the first two periods I mentioned above, but songs were extremely popular, sold as sheet music, sung in theaters and around the fireplace. In the 1950’s single 45 rpms could put the A-side in the top 40. Radio was king; TV didn’t come to our house until the 60’s.

In the 1980’s the two new shocking technologies were video commercials and CDs. The walkman also replaced the transistor radio, but that just gave the listener a bit more choice. However, recording technology also changed, meaning that a single person with a computer and keyboard could make records in their basement. See Todd Rundgren, Lindsay Buckingham, Enya and many others. Some of those multi-track recordings could not even be played by a band in public. Even singers could modify their voices unnaturally, better than live. Electronic music swept the world like a wildfire.

I think this made the 80’s the “infancy” of a new musical era with new intricate tools, a reaction against the amplified acoustic sound of the past and an experiment for the future, which is now. Plus, almost for the first time, young people had money, lots of money, to spend on music.

So to judge the results as immature is unfair, to compare to before or after is unfair. The 80’s were essential … and fun as hell. Cyndi Lauper bouncing around was fun!!! Michael Jackson’s Thriller was fun! Devo was a blast! Alice Cooper. Culture Club. We Are the World.

Ignore the copy-cats and parody-artists, anyone who can make others feel good is doing valuable community service. The war is over, let’s dance!

There were plenty of truly great singers in the 80’s: Whitney Houston, Elton John, Lionel Ritchie, Tina Turner, Bobby McFerrin, Sade, Annie Lennox, on and on.

Yet maybe the major contribution of the era is in hard rock: AC/DC, Black Sabbath, The Clash, The Cure, Deep Purple, Def Leppard, Genesis, Guns n' Roses, Iron Maiden, Journey, Judas Priest, KISS, Megadeth, Metallica, Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, The Police, Rush, Sammy Hagar, Scorpions, Thin Lizzy. Not stuff I listen to every day, but high-voltage music that changed the world.

Oh, and rap, sorry, RAP! Hip-hop. And all-girl bands. And boys dancing and harmonizing a cappella. New Wave, New Age, Newgrass … and, my favorite, Funkytown.

A good song is … one that you like, no matter how silly. If you were young, just starting out, when you heard it, it will remain with you for life. A good song lives in your head. If I say Kim Carnes, Betty Davis Eyes, you can hear the opening chords and the electronic drum beat, right? Try this: My my my my …

MY SHARONA! (I see you. You're shaking your head to the beat.)

Things are so bad right now (they aren’t really, but we’re told they are), that everyone on earth is suffering severe depression, impotency, überangst. We need the good-time music of the 80’s more than all the pills in the medicine factory. Didn’t MTV recently invent MTV Gold a channel of 80’s music (see also VH1 Classic)? Isn’t the biggest Broadway event of the current decade a re-visitation of Abba songs? (Mamma Mia!) Forget raves (way too 60’s), this year adolescents (and former adolescents) are having 80’s parties. Wine coolers and Hall & Oates: what could possibly be wrong with that?

And Cyndi baby, thanks for one of the best songs of all time … Time After Time.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Just covering his ass.
Jeff: Like always.
Mutt: Heard any good jokes lately?
Jeff: Nope, the usual duds. You?
Mutt: Sorry. Did you know the Energizer Bunny got arrested?
Jeff: Really?
Mutt: Charged with battery.
Jeff: You know, Mutt, if you want to practice safe eating, I say use condiments.
Mutt: I agree. Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.
Jeff: I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded.
Mutt: Oh well, I used to have a hangover, the wrath of grapes.
Jeff: And a pessimist’s blood type is b-negative.
Mutt: And a Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean your mother.
Jeff: I used to work … oh, I said that already. Corduroy pillows are making headlines.
Mutt: Banning the bra was a big flop.
Jeff: Sea captains don’t like crew cuts.
Mutt: Without geometry, life is pointless.
Jeff: A gossip is someone with a sense of rumor.
Mutt: When you dream in color, it’s a pigment of your imagination.
Jeff: Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.
Mutt: And finally, if electricity comes from electrons, does that mean that morality comes from morons?
Jeff: Maybe, but if ‘pro’ is the opposite of ‘con’, what is the opposite of congress?
Mutt: Ha Ha.
Jeff: Yuck yuck.

A Rant Against the Music of the 80’s

MTV and drum machines ruined music. My wife is at a party tonight with all her high school friends dancing to music from the 1980’s. I’m home pouting.

MTV and drum machines, indeed, and CDs, colder than a witch’s teat.

Whatever your tastes let me reel off a few names from the 60’s and 70’s: Janis, Jimi, The Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Morrison, CSNY, Beach Boys, Creedence, The Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, Joni, Elvis, Aretha, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, Bee Gees, Bob Marley, Queen.

Now a few from the 80’s: The Knack, Kiss, Madonna, Prince, Spandau Ballet, The Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, The B-52’s, Aerosmith, Blondie, Boy George, Simple Minds, The Bangles, New Kids on the Block, Adam Ant, Wham.

Point made or not? Young people in the 80’s, not only girls, rightly just wanna have fun, but most of their songs turned out as jokes. So what? What’s wrong with a decade of comedic music? Oh, did I forget Devo? How could I forget?

The best album of the decade, Paul Simon’s Graceland, was a serious opening to world music, but look at the texts. They’re bizarre and funny, weird and coy. Still some sort of joke.

I can imagine the early years of music videos filled with directors yelling, “Dance around, honey, do something colorful. This is video! You’re not just singing songs anymore!” The actors got silly out of take-75 boredom (And since when was music ever boring? Don't like it, turn it off. No need for funny hats.) Then the MT videos got choppy and neurotic, and the line between a commercial for a song and a commercial for cornflakes disappeared.

Now we have these Gaga mega-concerts with disturbing flashing lights, dancing girls and boys, dancing singers, sets, costume changes, smoke fog and bubbles. If you don’t like to go out and pay money, it’s all over invasion tv too. As if that were music. That’s Ziegfeld’s Follies, Cirque du Soleil. Often it's soft porn. But is it music? What’re those empty words they're chewing on? Is the drummer playing with his hands or a memory card? Anyone under 50 remember Leon Redbone, who plays sitting down, singing softly?

Can someone—pick a card, any card: Maria Muldaur singing Midnight at the Oasis—do it for you without the tricks, give you the love that songs are for without any medicine show con-artist mirrors and distractions? Somebody like Christina Aguilera has the pipes, but is she singing a song or just shouting: Look at me, over here, everybody, check me out!?

Here’s a good song. A really good song.
By whom?
Dunno.
Not interested.
No sexy video either.
Double not interested.

Here’s a good song from the 60’s and 70’s: Let It Be
Here’s a good song from the 80’s: Walk Like an Egyptian
(What? 80’s music, jokes? Says who?)

Nirvana came along and saved us all. Pearl Jam. Dave Matthews. Ben Harper. Natalie Merchant. U2. Green Day. Dido. Chili Peppers. Black Eyed Peas. Oasis. Shakira. Plenty of decent stuff came after the 80’s. I’m not stuck in my high school/college years, too much. Okay, we all are to some degree [I posted Born to be Wild on my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/emartinpedersen], but if you can consider my point without nostalgic prejudice, I may be onto something.

Or I may not. I may just be trying to provoke any reaction, because I don’t get much response to my blog, and I’m wondering whether I should continue writing if no one’s reading. My brother says: if you can’t be good, be controversial. I’ll be watching the comments box for infuriated 40-somethings who feel their beloved music’s been offended. Give me your best shot.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: He does like trouble.
Jeff: Masochistic retrograde song terrorist.
Mutt: Got a poem for you, my man.
Jeff: Have at it.
Mutt: Here.
"The attributes
Of bathing suits
For lasses of lithesome limb
Make me inquire
If this attire
Is worn to slink or swim."
Jeff: For the love of Mike, that’s a zinger!
Mutt: ... well?
Jeff: Okay.
"A bachelor is a cagey guy.
He has a load of fun.
He likes to check out all the chicks,
And never Mrs. one."
Mutt: Oowah! You win. Uncle! I can’t stand it anymore.

Dr. John to the Rescue

I’m listening to The City That Care Forgot by Dr. John. It’s a record of anger and sadness, cutting deep, about the shameful response to the disaster in New Orleans. I find myself shaken, moved by the harsh beauty of the raw. Sometimes a song can hit a nerve you weren’t expecting. It’s happened to me before.

It takes a good writer to tell a tragedy without melodrama or vanity. I can’t do that very well yet. I’m working on a set of songs I wrote the day my mother died. So far they seem pathetic, verging on banal.

So I remembered other songs that have struck me, provoking an excessive response when compared to my emotional reaction to events in my life or in the real world as shown on TV. For example, I was shocked and enraged when Katrina happened (worst natural disaster in US history, as you know), but even more so by the songs of this noble spokesman for the nearly 2,000 victims.

Here’s a list of songs that, for whatever reason, drew blood:

City That Care Forgot, Dr. John
Enola Gay, Utah Philips
Prison Song, Bryan Bowers
Follow the Flag, Randy Newman
Love Sick, Bob Dylan
John Brown, Bob Dylan
Motherland, Natalie Merchant
California, John Mahal
Where is Maria? Greg Brown
Miss Ferris, John Hartford
Blue, Lucinda Williams
Beloved Wife, Natalie Merchant
America, Paul Simon
City of Immigrants, Steve Earle

If you put those together you’d get too many punches, but you’d see what I mean, or just meet my nostalgia. Tell me, if you like, what’s the saddest song you ever heard? When did a song choke you up? Anybody remember Johnnie Ray who sang Cry every night of his life and cried every time?

While we’re all under machinegun attack by the vendors and liars, tragedy milkers and two-for-one dope dealers, at least we can still let ourselves be affected by a few simple words and a soulful tune.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Which is the most feared of the forest inhabitants?
Jeff: No idea, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.
Mutt: Well, a hawk claimed that, because he had the ability to fly, he could attack anything from above, and his prey wouldn't stand a chance.
Jeff: Okay.
Mutt: But then a lion pridefully said, "Due to my strength, no one would dare challenge me!"
Jeff: Right.
Mutt: The skunk, incensed, said, "I need neither flight nor might to frighten off any creature!" So the trio were debating the issue, when a grizzly bear came along and swallowed them all ...
Jeff: Yeah?
Mutt: Hawk, lion and stinker.
Jeff: Oh man, did you just cut one?

When I Too Played the Game

I only played ball once, one night of my life. I went 3 for 4, and my team won the championship with my contribution. I was not myself, however. I was another guy.

Staying down in Tulare with my brother, Don, one summer, and someone, his wife I seem to remember, suggested an afternoon snack of cold milk and warm cinnamon rolls from Costco. If you don’t know what these are, they are the best tasting, partially baked globs of sugar, butter, flour, dense cinnamon swirl, sugar and butter, with white frosting half an inch thick, that exist in the modern world, and they are as big as first base. Finishing one was a challenge that I met. I triumphed. I poured fifty pounds of sweet cement into my belly.

Then we went over to the softball park for the big game. All the teachers from Don’s school had a team, and they’d got to the finals of their town championship. The last game of the World Series in miniature. I drowsily sat on the flimsy wooden bleachers and waited for the boys to take the field. My stomach was churning like the cement mixer of my worst acid dreams. Never again give in to temptation, ugh.

So I read a paperback waiting for the mythical shout (PLAYBALL!), around 5, when Don called me down from the splinter repository.
“Hey dude, you got to do us a favor.”
“Uh.”
“You got to be Greg Mendez.”
“What?”
“Yeah. We’re one guy short. If we don’t have Greg we forfeit. It’s the finals, man. Come on.”
“But I’ve never played softball before in my life.”
“On the job training.”
"And I look like a Greg Mendez to you? I don't even speak Spanish."
"You don't speak English either."

I went out to center field, with my gut full of wallpaper paste bobbling up and down, and Don explained the game to me.
“You don’t have to do anything. Don’t try to actually catch the ball, just don’t let it get past you (there was no back fence). Then always throw it in the general direction of second base.”
“And when I have to bat?”
“Just take some hacks. We’ll do the rest. And … thanks Greg.”

We gathered in the wire enclosure that was a sort of dugout, a monkey cage. I thought I might be arrested for impersonating a softball player. Then Don went up to the ump and introduced me as Greg Mendez. He also introduced me to his teammates,
“Guys, this is not my brother. This is Greg Mendez, our friend. He just looks a little different today. Like my brother.”

All the guys said ‘Hi Greg’ and the game started. I got through the first half inning just standing in center field. Wow, I thought, lucky nothing came my way!

Then we were up. When I stood at the plate, nervously holding the bat as tightly as I could, my teammates (none of whose names I knew) were yelling, ‘Go Greg Mendez! You’re the man!’ and other sarcastic encouragements. The slow pitch came in respecting its arc, falling to my doom. But as it got square in front of me I blanked out a second or got natural inspiration or let all dull care go, anyway I got a solid hit—donk—over the short stop. As I ran towards first, I thought ‘drop the bat, drop the bat’ and I did. And made it safe, without even a throw. Fooled everyone on the field and in the stands. They thought I was a ringer.

Or maybe Greg Mendez. Except that his wife, Betty, and young kids, Garth and Chelsea, were there watching. I met them after the game and almost wished I really was Greg Mendez. Earth calling Martin, come back down.

The next inning a ball came to me on the roll, and I scooped it up and tossed it weakly towards second base. I was 40 at the time and Don was 30. I wasn’t sure I could raise my arm over my head to throw a baseball, but I did. Some people in the stands, I heard later, thought that Don and I were twins because we both had the same short beards. That was a nice compliment. Twins ten years apart, they called us afterwards.

At the plate I got two more hits into the outfield, one past the moved-in fielders for a two-bagger (actually I got to first and stopped but my whole team yelled at me to keep going). In later innings I caught two balls, watching them arc up and get closer and following them with intense concentration into my glove with both hands. Almost the first baseball glove I’d ever worn. Greg's glove, that is. I've never owned a glove myself. Anyway, it worked. I tried very hard, and didn’t make a fool of myself.

You know why we all love pro baseball so much, don't you? Because sitting in the stands with your official MLB uniform on and glove in hand, you hope and wish they'd call you down. Hey Martin, Pablo Sandoval's not feeling too good, can you fill in today? Sure, be right there. No other sport makes something so hard seem so easy. In our fantasy lives we're all baseball heroes.

The P.E. teachers on our team were real softball studs and hit the big home runs into Kern county, driving us all in. It was a high scoring game. I came across the plate all three times that I got on base. It was 19-10 in the last inning, with two outs.

I stepped up to the plate and nodded once again to the umpire. I peered out at the pitcher swinging his arm like bowling for … a strike. Gripping the bat with white knuckles, here it comes, wait wait, now, swing! Strike one, whoof, I nearly threw out my shoulder. Why did I miss? Swing too soon, too late, too high, too low? I should have just whacked it like I had before. Nope. Hmm.

Second pitch coming. Whoosh, whiff, strike two! What? I’m losing my touch. Shouts from the dugout: Come on Greg, knock it hard! Go yard, Greg! They were giggling, mocking me.

Then the pitcher lost his timing and threw three clear balls in a row, two not even getting to the plate. Full count, here it comes, stay calm, WHOOF again, strike three. Out. Game over.

I’d lost my own timing and badly let down the boys. Guilty of pride. Even though we won, I watched dejectedly as we were given the big trophy for the school. I still can’t figure out what happened, trying too hard I guess. Like old Matt Williams in the 90’s when every swing should have been a homer, but most just moved some air, inspiring the Candlestick winds. And he bit his shirt collar and cussed himself until he got traded to Arizona with a buck-and-change average. Might Casey …

Well folks, my batting average was and still is a respectable 750. Three runs made, two catches made, one embarrassing strike out made. We won. Couldn’t have done it without you, Greg. Hey, everybody out for Chinese food!

I excused myself and walked six blocks home alone, hoping to settle my stomach still churning that sugar goo from three hours before. I felt even worse once I arrived in the bathroom and spent a good long session praying to the god of porcelain, with disappointing results. Your brain knows it’s better if you hurl, but you can’t force mother nature or Costco.

Then I stretched out flat on the floor in the dark, swooning. Don and the partiers came home, and eventually I fell asleep. The next morning my belly still hurt, not to mention my shoulders, arms, legs, neck, butt and hands, but I also went to the breakfast table for coffee and grapefruit knowing I had played the game and not badly.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Ahhh. She was only the moonshiner's daughter, but I loved her still!
Jeff: Was that a shotgun wedding, Mutt? As in: wife or death?
Mutt: Marriage, my friend, is the mourning after the knot before.
Jeff: Let’s see: aisle, altar, hymn ... thought the bride as she entered the church.
Mutt: And please allow me to express myself in poetry.
Jeff: Be my guest, sir.
Mutt: An ode to marriage:
He goes to adore
He rings the belle
He gives his name to a maid.
And He's taken in.
Jeff: A gem, a gem, you’re a true artist, a true artist. Now can I tell a conjugal story?
Mutt: By all means do.
Jeff: A man and his wife were on vacation on a remote Caribbean island. The man was lying under a palm tree relaxing in the shade when his wife walked over. "Honey," she said, "let's go snorkeling now. There are many fascinating sea creatures for us to see." To this he replied, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"
Mutt: Oowah!

Boomer Angst, Back Again

A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. (Henry James)

Come here. I’ll let you glimpse in the window at my mid-lifeness, for Mr. Jim Houston told me, quoting William Morris: “Writing is finding out what I didn’t know about what I knew.” Apply liberally to self. Because I don’t know what’s wrong with me or why, but I do find myself asking myself, “what do you want,” several times a day. Though sometimes the question is: WHAT DO YOU WANT!!!

The severe thing is that I have no consistent answer. The severer thing is that the answer may be that I already have what I really want. It’s become a path to a pathological question, one that everyone I know can eagerly debate to infinity, except those who’ve brainwashed themselves, or are anesthetized, or sold-souls, or are so busy they don’t ask, don’t tell.

There’s a new lottery in Italy that pays a good monthly wage (about triple mine) for life. No millions raining from heaven, but the common sense of paying bills and having a little left for a summer trip or a new bicycle. This is a country in which the wages are so low, they call it the fourth week problem. You can eat pasta and fagioli and keep the lights on for three weeks, then the cash runs out. Most bank accounts contain hundreds of euros, alternating red - black. Squeak.

So do I want dirty money? Financial security, 10-weeks salary a month, the relaxation response? My buddy Mike has always accused me (correctly) of searching for the leisure life, riding the gravy train, taking it E.Z. Would that reduce the tension? But, wait a sec, the poor people I’ve met around the world are often the happier. Couldn’t I just trust that the cash flow will keep flowing like the water cycle and peace out?

So is it spiritual bliss I want? Hell yeah. Only I’m not on any spiritual track so finding something I’m not looking for is gonna be extra hard. I think enlightenment takes more work than luck. Plus I lost my faith about forty years ago. Other than that …

Or do I confuse bliss and peace with tranquilizers and neck massages? Maybe I just want the stress to go down a notch or two, not all the way to zero like a flat line. That sound dangerous, huh? Plus I’ve become a coffee drinker in my old age. Awakeness please.

So I want movement, excitement, rock and roll, shit happenin’, hoppin’ and boppin’? Yeah, I guess, whatever. A rise in my Levis? Hey, let’s not get into that. A hot actress? A wonder woman? My buddy George once said to me, “it’s not that big of a deal.” Extreme wisdom in seven short words. Not worth chasing the bunny’s tail round the track every day.

And while it’s been scientifically proven that men think about sex 99% of the time, I believe that to be high by several points. As Dr. Jane Goodall said, more or less, “Yes, chimps have wars, but that doesn’t mean humans have to have wars. We have the instinct, but we also have self-control.” And self-denial, I add, and self-pity and self-centeredness and self-loathing.

So where’s the power? What big big dream is left? I want … um … I want the Nobel Prize for originality, the Olympic Gold for being me. Will I be a great school teacher? (1970’s) A folk singer? (1980’s) A scholar? (1990’s) A novelist? (2000’s) I can have all these lives in one, but then I can’t have one in one. And I may have passed the expiration date for each career. I am now older, for example, than every player on my baseball team, every player in all of baseball AND the Giants manager (ancient Bruce Bochy’s 4 months younger than I). So though I may train and dream, it is unlikely I’ll make the team. Another job I’ve cut myself out of.

Is it ‘work sucks’ versus ‘find a job you love and never work another day’? To paraphrase Confucius (read ‘confusions’). A promotion, a career, a position of prestige, recognition of professional excellence? Well, in this funny country prestige is bought and sold; professional excellence is punished; a career is a sick joke. So maybe the Sicilians are right: work less is best. Get out of anything you can, the smartest avoid the strenuous. But you can’t get out of one thing.

“What’s that, Martin (tell us wise guy)?”
“You can’t not be yourself.”
“Clever.”

If you alone feel a sense of duty, pride in a job well done, a foreign sense of the just-ness of credit earned and given, then you can’t “do as the Romans do.” You gotta be yourself (to be true) simply because you can’t be/do any other way/one. There’s the wild dog metaphor again. In Italian work jargon a “wild dog” is someone who doesn’t play by the rules, someone out of control and, therefore, dangerous. Grrr.

What’s left (he asks in his questioning, questionable anti-sermon)? Dunno. I’m spinning around the Merry-Go-Round without getting anywhere, and the colored lights, the painted horseys, the flashing mirrors, and the tinkling music I liked so much when I was young are giving me the creeps, about to make me puke. I’ve auto-diagnosed some pre-freak-out form of epilepsy. It was fun while it was fun, then it became the Twilight Zone. Dudududu dudududu.

I think more than one person has concluded that we girls just wanna have fun. Then the question becomes, “What do you like?” But I’m a Norski, so the answer is elusive, and the question's unintelligible. We’re worker bees, not lazy street dogs rolling on their backs moaning for a scratch with their legs spread apart. We’re Scandinavian protestants on a mission, not He-Done-ists. Back to the grindstone, boy, like it or not. And a sugar cookie on Christmas. Back to rolling the grindstone up the muddy hill, that is. Sissy.

If I were alone in this feeling of taking myself hostage—mime in a phonebooth—I’d call myself crazy and shut up, but recent conversations with friends my age tell me it’s a crowded boat with no rudder, oars or sail (and no boat). We’re all seasick with no land in sight. Let’s play Charades! I know, let’s sing BINGO!

Hyla Bolsta put it best in her essay (scroll down a couple months). And re-read Ken Kesey’s spiel on the Mystery (also below).

Well, I’d like to blabber on some more, but I gotta get back to work. As Surmelian said: "... writing out of his own bleeding wounds; knowing he is probably the most absurd of men ..."

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: So tell me a story and make it good.
Jeff: A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named Amal. The other, who goes to a family in Spain; is named Juan. Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his natural mom. Upon receiving it, she tells her husband that she wishes that she also had a picture of Amal. Her husband responds, “If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amal.”
Mutt: I don’t get it.
Jeff: Tough.
Mutt: Here’s mine, watch out. There were two skunks—Out and In. When In was out, Out was in. One day Out was in, and In was out. Their mother, who was in with Out, wanted In in. “Bring In in,” she said to Out. So Out went out and brought In in. “How did you find him so fast?” the mother asked. “Instinct,” he replied.
Jeff: P.U.

Origin of a Scar

A British friend, let’s call him Neal, had an accident many years ago in Germany. He’s a big burly guy, from up North. He doesn’t talk or dress like John Steed, but he has a gentle charm and can tell a great story. Here’s what happened.

Neal was getting off a train, walking along the platform, when someone asked him directions in English. Being an extremely obliging chap he turned to help the English couple find the exit. Neal speaks fluent German and can read the long signs. He felt a warm glow in his heart for having helped his countrymen on their way in a strange land. As he proceeded down the platform, Neal, who’s about six feet two, wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings, still glowing with pride for his small Samaritan act, and he bashed his head full on into an overhanging sign.

Why or how the Germans could leave a sign hanging over the railway platform low enough for a tall but not basketball tall fellow to crack his head on is a question with no answer. The fact is that Neal hit his head so hard that he blacked out, fell right there on his back, blood gushing from his forehead.

A thin German woman, not unattractive but clearly quite shaken, was the first to offer assistance by kneeling beside Neal and trying to rouse him. "Geht's dir gut?" Maybe she thought he was dead. However, as she bent over his bleeding face it was too much for her, and she fainted and fell onto Neal with her beautiful bosom right on his face. I cannot say that this felicitous position was what finally aroused Neal’s spirits, but he did come to and awoke under the weight of a strange woman’s boobs.

Naturally, he could not really comprehend the situation, and so he carefully pushed his helper’s limp body off his own, lifting her upwards with his strong arms. His arms may be strong, but Neal was just as sensitive to the sight of blood as his passed-out German friend was. When he raised the woman and saw that her entire chest was covered in blood dripping down onto his face, Neal thought that she was the one bleeding, and the sight made him faint again.

I think I will leave the couple right there on the train platform, wilted but still breathing, sharing their bodies in a ritual of intimacy, the bloody embrace. Not unlike the couples in ancient ballads or Hammer films. Rather touching actually.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Today is Thursday, you know what that means…
Jeff: A special guest? Annette? Spin and Marty?
Mutt: Definitions!
Jeff: You mean like “Alarms: What an octopus is.”?
Mutt: Dockyard: A physician's garden.
Jeff: Pasteurize: Too far to see.
Mutt: Toboggan: Why we go to an auction.
Jeff: Enough. If you want anymore, go look ‘em up in our book: Mutt and Jeff are the Funniest Guys on Earth by Mutt and Jeff.
Mutt: That’s the one. It’s about voyeurism.
Jeff: Right. A peeping tome.
Mutt: Did you know that reading while sunbathing naked makes you well-red?
Jeff: Boy, am I glad I can’t read.

Peekaboo, I see you.

A close friend just had both eyes operated on. My spouse recently got new custom-made contacts, and I got new, very progressive lenses for my fashionable yellow spectacles. We can all see better than ever before. It’s a coming into focus from the slightly blurred vision of so many years. It’s a high-definition miracle of new, improved eyesight. It’s a shock.

The houses I see from my balcony all have lovely clear lines; the windows have curtains, and behind the curtains I can finally see dancers, partiers, and couples making love and fighting and murderers disposing of bodies. I can see everything I couldn’t see before, the gold pot at rainbow’s end, the guy in the hood hiding around the corner. Those roadsigns jump out at me, telling me where to go and what to buy. At long last I can tell a strike from a ball even sitting in the upper deck.

There’s a problem with seeing too clearly. 20-20 vision is considered normal (called 10/10 in Europe), but 20-10 is too good, it’s very disturbing to the psyche. Blind people who have had sight restored through surgery, for example, often have serious neuro-perception and adaptation difficulties. Cataract surgery has been around since ancient times, bringing sight to the partially and totally blind. About 3 million procedures are done each year in the U.S. The new awareness is both a joy and a burden.

... she was permanently blind in that eye. A disfiguring layer of scar tissue formed over it, rendering the previously outgoing child self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to poetry writing. Although when she was 14 the scar tissue was removed—and she subsequently became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class—she came to realize that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out." Who said that? Alice Walker.

I’ve read about people who kill themselves after losing their sight, but also about people who kill themselves after regaining lost sight. Some of the ex-blind become dependent and weak, refusing to socialize. Some continue as if they were blind in a tactile world, ignoring their new sense. The longer they’ve been blind, the harder it is to see. The eyes say yes, the brain and heart say no.

On a small scale, new glasses cause headaches. All those details to process, all that sensual bombardment. It’s tiring for the rusty old wheels. It takes growing into.

Peekaboo [the baby game] is thought by developmental psychologists to demonstrate an infant’s inability to understand object permanence. Object permanence is an important stage of cognitive development for infants. Numerous tests regarding it have been done, usually involving a toy, and a crude barrier which is placed in front of the toy, and then removed, repeatedly. In early sensorimotor stages, the infant is completely unable to comprehend object permanence. Psychologist Jean Piaget conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age. Infants before this age are too young to understand object permanence. A lack of Object Permanence can lead to A-not-B errors, where children reach for a thing at a place where it should not be. (from Wikipedia)

You’re getting my drift, right? All this can be taken metaphorically (duh). Hard to see crude reality, reaching in the wrong place, etc. You can make poetry or philosophy or horror stories from the sight/insight motif. Better wise and weighted-down, or light, happy and stupid? Oops, answer’s in the question. (It is?) As always, the eyes have it.

When I was eight years old I went to visit the Blind Camp, and I was the only sighted kid in camp. But, heck, I’ll tell you about that another time.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft it sank, proving once and for all that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
Jeff: I’m sorry for you.
Mutt: Whatever for, my dear friend?
Jeff: You’ve got it all wrong.
Mutt: Well, lay it on me, brother.
Jeff: The husband of Kate was called to court on a charge of bigamy. Kate told the judge that her husband’s other wife, Edith, was causing too much friction in their marriage. The court ruled that he could not have his Kate and Edith too.
Mutt: For the love of Mike!
Jeff: Quite. And I propose we should quit right there.
Mutt: Fine. This one is true though: a polar bear, a giraffe and a penguin walked into a bar. The bartender said, "What is this? Some kind of joke?"
Jeff: Joke? What’s a joke?

The White SUV of Pershing Avenue

That big sweeping S-curve on Highway 5 just after the Pershing Avenue exit is where this happened. On the northbound side there’s a brown sound wall. The Red Roof Inn is on the other side of the freeway, but don’t look. Don’t get distracted; it’s raining really hard. You know what really hard means on the freeway? The rain beats the wipers in a race for visibility. And the thick spray that shoots up from the tires of trucks and cars in five lanes across of traffic (each way) is just as bad. You get pounded from above and from below, but mostly from straight ahead.

Me and my brother Paul took Mom’s ashes over to El Cerrito to the Sunset View Cemetery (I’m not making up that name to go with this blog) on my last full day in California. It was raining, but it didn’t really pour until evening when I took some papers over to Stockton for Dad to sign.

In the car I was listening to NPR, somebody bitching about something, and, though I take conscientious responsibility for being an informed citizen, I couldn’t take that anymore. I switched to classical music from Sacramento to sooth the savage beast within. Perhaps classical music’s comforting effect saved my life. I’ll give it partial credit.

So dark and pouring that the lights on the Stockton freeway gave no light, headlights looked like fireflies, the red brake lights prismed and strobed, so loud and wet it was like being inside an automatic carwash with no escape, like the metal roof might cave in. Five lanes full of traffic, cars and trucks, flying blind. I’m in the second lane, trying to go as slow as is safe. Alert but with plenty on my mind.

A white SUV streaks across from the fast lane, cuts across all five lanes and, sideways but still skidding forward, is suddenly right in front of me. I watch it careen diagonally skating, spinning clear around, going up on two wheels thirty feet ahead showing me its tender white flank, slamming down gracefully, struggling against the pull of momentum to keep itself from flipping numerous times at seventy miles per hour (killing the occupants and maybe myself), steering into the slide, as they say, and, finally, righting itself in sort of a forward direction by slapping up against the gray car beside mine which ricocheted off to the right banging against the brown stone wall as if attempting to climb it, but not flipping completely over either and coming to rest in the emergency lane, while the culprit white bully caromed off and spun back over to the left and halted against the center divider.

I was at the head of the pack of trucks and cars, pickups and vans watching fate play its hand right in front of us. We couldn’t stop to offer assistance. We couldn't talk it over amongst ourselves. The two cars involved were sitting safe and stopped in opposite off-highway lanes. We came out of our brake-slowly-but-don’t-slam-your-foot-down-or-you’re-dead mode (there’s always a big danger of creating a famous Interstate 5 multi-car pile-up from behind), so we put the foot back on the gas and gingerly pulled forward away into the black tempest. I took the next exit and drove through town a while.

What was I thinking at that slow-motion, surreal moment:

My Mom just died so if I slam into that white side door, who cares?

Nothing to worry about; I have classical music on.

That car is sliding forward sideways at the same speed I’m going, so I’m not actually getting any nearer to it. How weird.

Those two cars just crashed but didn't make any noise.

That driver did something extremely stupid to get into this mess, but he (maybe she) is doing pretty well to get out of it alive. Stunt driving, I’ve seen this on TV.

Am I invincible, immortal?

Brake slow and don’t move that steering wheel. Better to plow right into him than flip your own self. (Remember Don's whole family unharmed thanks to seatbelts after fifteen rolls thanks to an exploding Firestone.)

And lastly, this is going to make a great story.

I watched through the windshield like on a television screen, calm throughout the dream-sequence; panic out-trained from me, as my friends told me happened at the World Series of 1989. 50,000 people kept their seats, waited until the roads cleared, left when called section by section in an orderly fashion. So it does work. All that jumping under your desk at school, the drills. Boy, are we ready for the A-bomb!

The white SUV of Pershing Ave. was a moving target, swimming away from me, not a white buffalo in the middle of the road, ka-bam. It wasn't a ghost either. And it wasn’t O.J. Simpson’s get-away car or the white SUV in the Jennifer Hudson tragedy. But it was a car type that Hollywoodists like. The Stockton country club parking lots are full. Well, I’m glad this one was only scratched up a bit (to say 'you deserve it, ya rich bastard' would be excessive and mean). When I drove back by an hour later both cars were long gone. Yet there is a sort of class struggle symbolized by my 1992 faded gray Toyota avoiding contact with a brand new pearly white luxury car. You don't have ALL the luck.

I’m grasping for meaning, obviously. Many lives could have been ruined forever. Yet, in a sense, I enjoyed the dance, the swoop and swoosh, like full shopping carts on ice, like some Takeshi's Castle game or the planchette on a Ouiji board. I was happy to have had an original experience. Hey, man, there’s something you don’t see every day. Moby Dick up close.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Good thing we'll never run out of math teachers.
Jeff: Why not?
Mutt: Because they always multiply.
Jeff: Old mathematicians never die, they just disintegrate.
Mutt: Old number theorists never die, they just get past their prime.
Jeff: Did you hear? The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.
Mutt: Don’t interrupt. Old numerical analysts never die, they just get disarrayed.
Jeff: Old bookkeepers never die, they just lose their figures.
Mutt: Old accountants never die, they just lose their balance.
Jeff: You know, if you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.
Mutt: I know. I used to sell computer parts, but then I lost my drive.
Jeff: Old hardware engineers never die, they just cache in their chips.
Mutt: Old programmers never die, they just branch to a new address.
Jeff: Is it math week or something?
Mutt: No, why?
Jeff: These jokes.
Mutt: What jokes?

(Mutt and Jeff salute Don Pedersen teaching math in a new school and badly in need of new material.)

Will the Circle be Unbroken?

Mother nature, mother Earth, mother tongue, the motherland—what goodness the one who knew us first and best.

A time for clinging and a time for breaking away, recalling embrace and no one there to embrace anymore. Chilliness, missingness, wrongseemingness.

‘Member the water cycle: evaporation-precipitation? The tears she shed when I left in 1978 I reused when she left last week, shivering under a shadow blanket on a Delta airplane that, though racing at 550 mph, could never make it on time. No point in even going to the hospital. And, yesterday, in visiting the cemetery I was too early—no marker yet, no ashes. Incurable bad timing, forgiven I know.

Well-accompanied by Dad (stronger than he looks), three tall brothers and a sister who’s really a cousin. And well wishes, many messages of affection—maybe she’s telling me to can it with the invisible man fantasy. People aren’t blind: they saw her; they see me. I am her son. I can do better.

They didn’t all see her as I did though—my only mother (thanks to me), her only son (for a couple years), but they took note despite the quiet and private. I was impressed how good ol’ Ma impressed them so. It’s not the squeaky wheel after all.

I heard less “better place” nonsense, and it angered me less than I expected. Still I am angry Mom can’t just be here like before. Like always, to count on. A part of me. Bye.

And finally I might know what this means:
Happy trials, Martin


Mutt and Jeff will return next week.

Lessons from Zimbabwe - part 3

I’m walking down a path outside the centre, by myself strolling around, probably whistling, and I meet a man or woman or child: “Mangwanani,” I say. They respond “Mangwanani, marara sei?” I answer, “Ndarara mararawo,” and they respond, “Ndarara.” Usually this also involves a hand shake, or hand grasp really, with one shake maybe. It all takes about thirty seconds. If they greet me first, I’m the responder. The problem is that you must go through this rigmarole with every single person you encounter. Imagine walking down a busy sidewalk and stopping for a greeting ritual with every single person. And that’s good morning; it changes to good afternoon and good evening as the day progresses, and if you meet a group you can’t say hello to the group, you have to go through the routine with each individual. Africa teaches you to slow down, which is the secret of time. Whatever you’re rushing off to do, it’s not as important as greeting the person in front of you right now.

I’m walking down a path, and I meet a boy about seven years old, one of the many children too poor to go to school and learn English. He has a ball he’s kicking made of some stuffing, grass or cloth or cardboard, completely covered in duct tape. It wasn’t very round, but he kicked it as he walked. When he stopped twenty feet in front of me, without a word I made a slight gesture with my head, and he kicked the ball over to me. I kicked it back as best I could. The day before I’d been laughed off the soccer field at the school because I couldn’t pass to my teammates. My stupid response was, “Wait till baseball season!” Now with this little boy I did better, blocking and kicking back, over and over. We played for at least half an hour then quietly went on our ways. I’ve never told this story because I don’t know what it means, but it has always stuck with me.


The pastor of the little church where the beautiful hymns were sent up to the heavens organized a dinner in my honor. Sadza, like polenta, was served with vegetables and sauce. We honored guests also had delicious stew meat and gravy with our porridge. Outside there was quite a struggle over who was allowed to sit and eat with us and who was left out. My good friend, Israel Chisosa, a young teacher, and I talked vivaciously the whole time. It was a great party. Then I was formally thanked for my visit and more songs were sung. Every single person had to shake hands with Baba Pedersen afterwards. Many were worried because I was not married. They wished me many children.
On the way home I was thoroughly happy, and I asked Baba Finster what meat we’d had that was so exquisite. “Don’t ask,” he said. “You mean it was goat?” I insisted. “They rarely eat meat. It was in your honor.” “What was?” I really didn’t get it. “That they killed the family dog.” Oh.

After I left in 1975 the war got worse as independence loomed. My friend and host, Bishop Abel Muzurewa, was the peace-making leader of a transition government, before the oligarch Robert Mugabe (1979). The freedom fighters, drunk on homemade beer, came to warn the Finsters to leave. The Dendera Community Development Centre was taken over by the rebels as a base camp, and they destroyed everything there. Now nothing remains. Well, a great deal remains actually. I carry some around with me all the time.


Happy trials and Fambai zvakanaka, Martin


Mutt: Hmmm. A contest then, a duel?
Jeff: And I’ll give you first strike.
Mutt: You’re on. Acupuncture: a jab well done.
Jeff: A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.
Mutt: The dead batteries were given out free of charge.
Jeff: Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
Mutt: A will is a dead giveaway.
Jeff: A boiled egg is hard to beat.
Mutt: You win. I give. Uncle!!!
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix. A gentlemen’s draw.

Lessons from Zimbabwe, part 2

Besides Dendera I spent several days at the Nyadire Hospital with its nursing school and teacher training college. I spoke to all the classes, had great political discussions with the young people my age (I was 20), and we enjoyed an afternoon of tennis (with very dead balls). The Finsters and I stayed with a Finnish nurse who helped out there (no doctors), and she taught me to play Mah Jong. One evening we were playing when Anika excused herself to go operate on the pregnant woman I had brought in. An hour later she rejoined the game. Mother and baby fine. In Nyadire health care is urgent but matter-of-fact. (This was before the AIDS epidemic.)

My grandmother’s cousin, named Alice Whitney, has always been a legendary figure in our family. She was a missionary for many years in Nyadire where she founded an orphanage. Many mothers died in childbirth so their children were cared for at the orphanage for a couple years and then returned to their families. Alice Whitney met with me in Berkeley before I went over to give me letters and photos, messages and instructions on who to greet. In Nyadire I met the head nurse who had been her assistant; I think her name was Joyce. She was happy to have news from Amai Whitney, now an elderly woman, but she explained to me that she wasn’t feeling very well that day: a malaria attack. I got the disease myself a few weeks later.

On our little tour of the two-room orphanage I noticed that the naked babies came and went from the dirty outdoors to the filthy tiled indoors. There was even some excrement and urine on the floor. I didn’t say a word, but Joyce explained that they had had a problem a few years prior when some Swiss nurses had taken over after Amai Whitney left. They had sterilized the surroundings and kept the entire environment sanitized. The babies were much healthier. As soon as they returned to their families in the villages, the children died from lack of antibodies. Now they kept the orphanage only semi-clean and encouraged the kids to play outside on the ground.

Another tragedy had happened before my arrival. The year before I went, another young American man had volunteered to work the summer in Dendera. At the airport he met with three European nurses he was to accompany into the tribal lands and drove them in a borrowed jeep. While barreling along the bumpy highway toward Mozambique he saw a rabbit in the road, swerved to miss it by instinct, flipped the jeep several times, then crawled out yelling, “Is everyone okay?” All three of the nurses were dead. Could have been me.

In Mtoko one day, where we stopped to get the mail, a little boy brought me an mbira, the wonderful thumb piano of the Shona. He had carved out the inside of a board and burned a pattern on top. The tines were bicycle spokes beaten flat. I gave him a little money and was initiated into the music of the mbira. First thing I did back in California was get the only record of mbira music available (The Soul of Mbira, recorded by Paul F. Berlinger). Music as beautiful as any I’d ever heard. Music as spiritual as the wind blowing, a creek flowing, or the tiny birds in the baobab trees. I didn’t see Victoria Falls, but I heard the sound through the mbira. I heard the now-vanished antelope herds. Suffering and resistance. Listen to this record and compare it to the singers at the Grammy Awards. They have no idea what singing really means deep down inside. All their narcissistic vocal gymnastics cannot compare to the simple voices of Africa.

Happy trials and Toonana mangwana, Martin


Mutt: Remember Bertha? With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
Jeff: When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.
Mutt: She fell onto an upholstery machine and was fully recovered.
Jeff: She was a geology professor, right?
Mutt: Yeah. Until she discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.
Jeff: No, I don’t remember Bertha.
Mutt: Me neither.
Jeff: Did you know that when fish are in schools they sometimes take debate?
Mutt: No. But I know that a bicycle can’t stand alone, it is two tired.
Jeff: Okay, I’ve got one to shut you up. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Mutt: Oowah!

Lessons from Zimbabwe, part 1

Zimbabwe is suffering: AIDS, inflation, hunger, dictatorship. It was when I was there too, thirty-five years ago. In 1975 I spent a long summer in the Mtoko Tribal Trust Area (Chief Johnny Mtoko’s land), in the northeast corner (of then Rhodesia) near the Mozambique border at a place called the Dendera Community Development Centre. It was run by a couple from Sacramento, California: Bill and Esther Finster. Bill was a forestry manager hoping to bring back the trees that the locals cut for firewood, a losing battle in a desperate, parched land. At the center we had a clinic (with a nurse and an aide), a church, an adult literacy program, and an agriculturalist teaching farming/gardening in perpetual drought conditions. There was a reservoir that, in the dry season, women would walk even 25 miles to use, sleep overnight on the ground outside our house, then carry a jug of water home on their heads another 25 miles home. The precious water was infected with bilharzia, a parasite. Across the big pond there was a public school. Since it cost a dollar a year to send a child, most families could not afford it. They had no income.

And there was a civil war going on that was a decade old. We heard fighting nearby, but our center was protected by both sides. Probably because we treated both government soldiers and freedom fighters at the clinic (I was told to stay away when they arrived). For civilians I drove the ambulance (a right-drive Land Rover) on the long trip (about 4 hours) to Nyadire Hospital along the main A2 highway, a horrible, non-maintained dirt road, while another driver named Joseph would drive the smaller roads and trails around our area to pick up people because the roads were mined by the guerrillas, and Joseph knew where the mines were.

I helped Bill and Esther (Baba and Amai). I boiled oil drums of water. I tended to the chickens, fast little devils. I gathered the pawpaws. I washed clothes on a washboard and took showers outdoors from a sort of watering can on top of a ladder. I drew posters for the nurse to teach mothers how to keep their children alive. I recorded the beautiful singing of our friends who gathered in our living room after curfew (risking arrest). I unpacked barrels of books donated by the Americans and made a library.

One day I was supposed to meet with the school children, and I was very punctual (naturally), whereas their teacher was an hour late. So while waiting I grabbed a picture book from the new untouched library and read to them. It was a popular book among American kids: The Bear’s Christmas, all about snowmen and reindeer. The African kids seemed to enjoy it, all sitting up close and staring wide-eyed at the pictures (I couldn’t tell how much English they spoke; their native language was Shona). I ended with the usual, “Any questions?” and one brave soul asked, “What’s a bear?” Oops. I tried to explain. A furry animal big as an ox that lives in the forest. “What’s a forest?” Um, a bunch of trees, big trees. And then the killer question: “What’s snow?” The teacher arrived and saved me from further embarrassment.

Baba Finster had built all the buildings in the complex himself, including their small farmhouse with a kitchen table next to the window with yellow curtains. The people that Amai helped as she could would sit on the ground right outside that window. Women and their nursing babies mostly. They would not beg or demand, just sit there. Hungry. Starving. Watching us eat. Every day. We had simple food, much of it canned (no fridge), fruit for dessert, orange squash and coffee. We saw the starving, dying people a few feet away and ate our meals while trying to get radio reception (it came and went) for our only contact with the outside world. We ate so we would be fit to continue helping these gentle, warm folks. They all have names, you know, all those babies that die. Their families love them all and cry at their funerals. The Shona are good, kind people who just don’t have resources.


I was eager to do something important at Dendera so Baba showed me the closet full of weird stuff sent from America. One thing struck me: a volleyball and net. He said skeptically, “You want to set it up? Go ahead.” I worked with Thomas the handyman to set up two poles and boundary lines, all measured precisely. Then I pumped up the ball, and, in the evening, after the clinic and school closed, I invited everyone to come play. I showed how to serve and hit, but the Africans were not bothered by regulations and technique; they liked to have ten on a side (or fifteen) and just hit the ball around and laugh. Keeping score became unimportant or impossible. I saw all these friends, who had lived in hardship all their lives, come every evening before sundown to play a chaotic volleyball game. The shouts of joy could be heard all around the complex, but we also heard bombs, grenades and gunfire from over the copse. Sometimes the nurse excused herself to go treat an injured fighter. The Shona lived in a country at war with itself (1965-1980). Nothing could stop that, but volleyball did raise a smile. A bizarre normalcy.

I had virtually no contact with the ruling white minority during my time spent in the tribal territory. I only drove through Salisbury (now Harare) on my way to the airport. I experienced a lot and learned a lot. I gave away most of what I brought from home (a frisbee, a flashlight, a harmonica), but I took with me a lifetime of lessons learned in only 3+ months. Maybe being there for a short time clarified the events for me; after 30+ years in Sicily almost nothing is clear, and I feel I have almost nothing to share about this culture. I’m not the sociologist in the family.

So what were these great lessons I got from this enchanting, unlucky, once-glorious people, the Shona? 1. Know your context. 2. Look after yourself, then others. 3. Find a reason to laugh. That’s kind of a phony list of platitudes. You can do better. We don’t need the slogans, but we do need one another’s stories. And we need to meet others to know ourselves. So, young people, go to college but also go to Africa and say, “how can I help?” Once the great continent’s healthy again, it will teach us all about how to live.

I’ll put some of my field recordings from Dendera, Mtoko, Zimbabwe on Martin’s Moan and Drone.

Happy trials and Toonana, Martin


Mutt: Did you know sir …
Jeff: Uh, oh, here it comes.
Mutt: That the roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference?
Jeff: Jolly good, old chap. Did you hear about the butcher who backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?
Mutt: No. But I did hear about the dentist and the manicurist who fought tooth and nail.
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix. I heard that when the smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.
Mutt: Oowah! I heard that when a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
Jeff: Please stop, for the love of Mike. My calendar's days are numbered.
Mutt: Help!

(Mutt and Jeff salute old friend Paul Dirdak currently in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.)

Who’s Mutt and Jeff Anyhoo?

The official story:
"Mutt and Jeff were comic-strip characters from the early 20th century. A precursor to Laurel and Hardy, they were two working-class everymen -- drinking, gambling, and getting in hot water with their wives. In 1907, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist named Bud Fisher ...
By 1915 Mutt and Jeff were a national phenomenon. Many people consider "Mutt and Jeff" to be the first daily comic strip.
Mutt was a tall, lanky man with a penchant for the ponies, while Jeff looked like the Monopoly man after a rough weekend. Mutt and Jeff were affable losers -- the guys in the cheap seats at horse races on a Wednesday afternoon. Characteristic catch phrases used by Mutt and Jeff included "Nix, Mutt, nix!", "For the love of Mike!" and "Oowah!""

Officialer story:
Many years ago I lived alone in a shack by a canal. The plaster was rotting and the mould stinking so I usually left a door open when I was inside the one room kitchen-bedroom-study. There were two cats from the neighborhood who would walk into my house like bored housewives in a shopping mall, stroll around, sit a while, eventually traipse off till the next day. I called them Mutt and Jeff. I talked to them often. Maybe they understood English, or maybe they thought they could pick it up from listening to me.
Then one spring day a tragedy occurred. Mutt and Jeff, my only two buddies at the time, were in front of the shack where I could see them through the glass door, and what they were doing shook me and shocked me. Jeff was on top of Mutt (or vice versa) from the rear biting his neck and they were both screeching in intense pain, wiggling to get free, and ecstatic. I finally realized that one of them was a female and felt so strongly “in the mood” that I could smell it through the closed door. I’m not sure which, since I could never tell them apart. I bet they knew which was which.

The real true authentic story:
I hate Mutt and Jeff. They always criticize me and make fun of me. I wish they’d leave me alone. I’m very sensitive and can’t take it anymore. At least they don’t listen to my songs on the other blog (Martin’s Moan and Drone), or there’d really be some hooting.
And what are those jokes? I don’t get them. It seems they mean to be funny, but come on! Humor, to be humorous, must be much more intelligent than their weak one-liners. Example:
A punster entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns with the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, NO PUN IN TEN DID.

Ha, ha. Now that’s funny. Get it? No pun in ten did.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: For the love of Mike!
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix!
Mutt: Oowah!
Jeff: Oowah!

Talk to us, you old grouch!

We who loved J. D. Salinger’s books passionately are sad, of course, that the old man’s finally died, but we’ve carried around for decades a sort of ambivalent admiration for his reclusive resistance, a model non-conformism with ourselves as victims, mixed with a longing for his voluntary muteness to end so that we might once again hear our favorite songster hit the high notes.

In the late sixties—that era of youth being youth (living like there was no tomorrow, against all parents and pigs), loud colors, assassinations, moonshot triumph and Vietnam debacle—I survived adolescence (without finding the sense in it, however) thanks to Salinger, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Tolkien, Conan Doyle, Herbert, Saroyan, Fleming and Thurber. There are others that don’t come back to mind after forty years, but these writers kept me going; I systematically read every book they wrote.

I’m sure high school would have been dreadful anyway, but it didn’t help that I was almost two years younger than my classmates. The girl sitting next to me in sophomore English dropped out of school because she got pregnant, while I asked myself what precisely that meant and how it was accomplished with no answer forthcoming.

I bought my copy of Catcher in the Rye at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. It was covered in butcher paper and tape, still a banned and shameful book in many places. The thought of someone hiding forbidden-nastiness with fifty strips of scotch tape was hilarious and pathetic. I left the paper on and read Catcher again and again. Then I graduated to the Glass family books, which I liked even more. In 1997 my dear copy of Catcher fell off the trailer while I was moving and vanished. Wonder what the finder thought.

They say that Jerry has been writing all this time. When will we get more (“want it, need it, gimme gimme gimme")? Times have changed; I’ve changed, could be a colossal letdown I suppose, yet I believe I will enjoy the next Salinger book more than just about anything. After all, I liked Cat Stevens' new record (Yusuf Islam, An Other Cup).

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
Jeff: Let me tell you, if you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.
Mutt: Oh yeah, well if you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
Jeff: Okay, show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.
Mutt: Well, when you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.
Jeff: And not only that, you’re stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.
Mutt: Y’know, we should be on TV.
Jeff: Hell, we should be on Mount Olympus looking down.
Mutt: Don’t forget: when two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.
Jeff: That’s us.