WANNA BUY A BRIDGE?

Me ... on a good day

I suffer from what might be referred to in the taxonomy of the twenty-first century, a "learning disability." I'm neither dyslexic nor analphabetic nor dyscalculic or even dysgraphic. If anything my attention suffers a surfeit and my memory is as sharp as a sushi knife.

No, my problem exclusively relates to how I process information. I have a hard time believing anything anyone ever tells me. If this debility were recognized by the American Association of Pediatrics they would probably call it something like EFS.

Everyone is Full of Shit.

The first signs of EFS became manifest sometime during the Nixon administration. In those days folks tended to give our elected officials the benefit of the doubt. Nixon changed all that and this I believe is his true legacy. Forget China or the Environmental Protection Agency, the formation of OSHA or even Apollo 11 (which if you ask me, I think the moonwalk was staged), Nixon's gift to our great country was the legitimization of wholesale, guilt-free, voluntary confabulation.

No Nixon, no Facebook. No Nixon, no Fox News. No Nixon, no designated hitter rule.

If you don't like it, blame it on Nixon.

Not that this in and of itself is all bad. Quite the contrary. Imagine a world where you took everything at face value and where people traded in trust and good faith. Without lies there's no fiction and without fiction there's no Flintstones.

Or Breaking Bad.

Or Harps of Heaven.

So, as I look upon the horizon of a new year I am resolved and remain steadfast in my firm conviction that Everyone is Full of Shit.

Including me.

THE SWINGER VOTE

If you make a sharp left on Mt. Zoar Street about thirty feet west of the Rite-Aid and continue driving for about a half an hour toward Sayre you reach one of the oddest places in all of rural America. What appears on the surface as a typical Republican redoubt of disheveled virtue, anti-Euclidian hand-wringing and genteel homophobia is in fact a hotbed of revolutionary foment and closeted subversive intrigue.

I'm talking of course about Grande Trace, New York, home of the Secret Sons of Albion.

The Secret Sons as anyone who has even glanced at a newspaper in the past six months can tell you are an ad hoc cabal of middle-aged men who intend by glint of witchcraft and homeopathic magic of deposing and upturning what they call the "smart-ass urban elites."

I love these guys with their over-sized baseball caps, decrepit RV's and their fanatic devotion to forgotten poets and political philosophers. They meet twice a month in the basement of Our Lady Star of the Sea and argue until their wizened throats turn brittle with all their idiotic fury. 

I stopped by a few weeks ago - my buddy Elton is a regular - to something they call a "Bagel with Hegel," and I'll tell you, these guys are hot-headed. Someone in a weathered khaki vest and a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt was screaming about transcendence and something about finitude and duty and for a few tense minutes I thought things would get violent. But when he got up from his seat and gave this tattooed Kantian a tender kiss on the lips I knew it was all a big bluff.

The Feds think these guys are a real threat but after seeing them in action I don't think there's much to worry about. Sure they have a few guns but who doesn't. If there's any real reason for concern it's their obsession with William Blake.  Dragging "the chain of life in weary lust" is a pressing issue for them and if the "lambs of joy" can't find their way to "the Tent of God" any time soon there's no telling how the Secret Sons might react.  

But on the grand scale of conspiratorial crackpots I give these guys a 6. While they still believe in God and are adamantly pro-life they also swim in the nude and smoke a lot of pot.

Man, I love this country! 

DAMN!!

The Lord Jesus Christ revealed himself to me forty-two years ago on a dim stretch of Route 17 about 14 miles east of Corning.

I haven't heard from him since.

Not that I expected to, though it would have been nice to check in with me once in a while. 

A lot of other people seem to be keeping in contact with him but not me.

I know what you're thinking but it's not for lack of trying.

I attend church, though not as often as I used to. I pray but not with much conviction. It's not that I have doubts, though I do (who doesn't?) It's more that I don't feel like taking up the Lord's time.

Besides, what should I pray for? World peace? Now that's a laugh. If the Son of God had a dog in that fight we'd all be singing Kumbaya around our lava lamps by now. Praying for my personal well being seems, well ... a bit presumptuous, don't you think? I mean, would you call up Bill Gates to ask for tech support if you forgot the password to your email account?

So it's been like that with Jesus and me. He leaves me alone and I basically return the favor.

Unless of course I cut my finger while slicing a tomato.

COME GATHER 'ROUND PEOPLE

I'm not one for customer complaint. The wise injunction of Caveat emptor typically dissuades me from pursuing any kind of consumer dissatisfaction beyond a general explosion of vulgar invective. But I recently received the Christmas catalog of The Great Learning Company - a formidable enterprise that offers college level courses on DVDs - and for the first time in my long life I was prompted to express my grievances in the form of a letter.

Dear The Great Learning Company,

I want to begin by thanking you for filling the glaring chasms in my faulty education. For almost twenty years you have guided me like Virgil through the Underworld (Great Learning: Course no. 4907) addressing the awful omissions of my costly yet inadequate college education. As an engineering major I scarcely gave a second thought to The Greek and Roman Worlds (Great Learning: Course no. 3301) nor to The Treasures of The Uffizi (Great Learning: Course no. 4009). Thanks to you, art and the humanities have opened themselves up to me and I have become an avid life long autodidact.

But even more importantly, it was through our common interest - dare I say passion - for The Great Learning Company that my wife Betty and I first recognized the profound bond between us. From the day I noticed her at Starbucks, ear-budded and riveted to Milton's Paradise (Great Learning: Course no. 2001), I knew that I had finally found a kindred spirit. Betty was a paragon of Brains and Beauty (Great Learning: Course no. 2200) who was at home in the world of ideas as she was in The Realm of the Senses (Great Learning: Course no. 4104).

Sadly, times have changed and with the times both you and Betty have dumbed down beyond recognition. Though I fully understand the difficulty in remaining profitable in this highly competitive atmosphere it is nonetheless lamentable that your once venerable company now concentrates primarily on courses like Happiness and Yoga Therapy (Great Learning: Course no. 7080), Six Secrets to Confidence and Success (Great Learning: Course no.7309) and Sophocles and Fitness: How Antigone Can Help You Control Your Cholesterol (Great Learning: Course no. 7398).

You've not only lost me as a devoted customer but in your attempt to seize the spirit of the age you have lost Betty as well. My wife no longer has the patience to pore over the terza rima of the Purgatorio (Great Learning: Course no. 2379)  nor does she find comfort in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (Great Learning: Course no. 1980) and when she needs to monitor her intake of carbs she consults the Huffington Post and not Human Physiology and Weight Loss (Great Learning: Course no. 8093) or Decisive Diets and The Will To Live (Great Learning: Course no. 8110).

Please remove me from you mailing list or as they say in the world of social media, 'unlike.'

Sincerely,

Clement Digby

Of course I'm nearly certain that my letter will remain unread. After all, I wrote it on a piece of paper. 

SOMETHING IS FISHY IN FRANKFORT

Life is full of uncertainty but there are two things of which I am sure:

I love Chinese food and I hate art.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not your garden variety philistine. Nor am I an indiscriminate gourmand. 

Some Chinese food is better than others and some art is more easily digested than even some TV. But the general rule still holds.

Wontons - yes! 
Syllogistic legitimacy - nyet!

  
Case in point the latest theoretical flavor of the month straight out of Berlin, Professor Friedrich Einsame.

  
Yes, we get cable here in snowy upstate New York and this, from the Arts and Ideas station (#234).

I'm on to this guy.

He's the toast of left wing Europe and the darling of the Academy. He's made a career of this kind of gibberish and the smart guys here in the U.S.A. eat it up like its liverwurst.

But hey! Even us rhubarbs know a thing or two.

Sometimes a trout is simply just a freakin' trout!

I CAN'T GET NO ...

 Some days while taking my early morning walks through Danfroth Park I marvel at how an indifferent sunlight manages to tease such elegance out of the slender grey twigs of the ancient Pignut Hickorys or how the ribbed, olive green leaves of the Black Cherries fairly glisten with so little prompting.

But most days I wallow in a foul cesspit of regret having spent the best years of my life living in the boonies.

I'm a city boy at heart and for me, after a while, every bird ends up looking like a pigeon.

I love the noise, the filth and the relentless bedlam of aggressive cosmopolitan bullying. I love the armies of people rushing in that deranged choreography of urban pandemonium, the mayhem that seems to be just one tiny incident away from a broiling panic.

You can't find that kind of energy anywhere but in big cities but what you also find in these centers of sophistication and wealth are steaming mounds of pitiless bullshit.

Case in point:

My daughter Sherrie lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, is a buyer for one of the big department stores, makes a comfortable six-figured salary, has two children, a housekeeper and a wonderfully loving husband and yet she constantly complains that she is "unhappy."

Oh to live in the First World! Where is that Jerry Lewis telethon when you really need it?

Only in these charmed and lavish communities do you find people enrolled in workshops and seminars that promise to teach the fine and elusive art of joie de vivre. Sherrie is already six weeks (and who knows how many thousands of dollars) into a class at the 92nd Street Y called (I kid you not),  Fabricating Fun: How to Fashion Rapture into Your Lives and Learn to be Fulfilled Again.

The class promises to "detonate the shingles off your chagrin," and to "overhaul your hell, turning it into an authentic, nourishing and animated carnival of happiness and glee."

Gee!

I'm often tempted on my early morning strolls to ask the trees if they are living up to their ultimate potential, if they are exhilarated and animated by the delights of being and becoming, if they are vitalized by the winds and the rains and fortified by the sun.

 Have they found bliss in the sheer thrill of living or are they stressed out because too many dogs are pissing against their bark.

I'LL JUST HAVE THE TOAST

I've heard it said that life is a carnival, (see Cahoots, The Band, 1971), but I don't buy it. Unless you're an Aussie - and in that case it's completely understandable considering your criminal provenance - implicit in the phrase "no worries" is a bold face lie.

I'll go a step further.

Consider the folks you hear who thoughtlessly repeat this imported cliché and you will notice an underlying commonality. These careless linguistic pickpockets are the very people so encased in their own private world of trivial woe that to say "no worries" comes off as a futile hope or as a sad desperate godless prayer.

In contrast to the homegrown East Coast expression "don't worry about it," "no worries" with its grammatical indolence and deliberate evasion of specificity is essentially a rebuke to the harsh realities of human existence.

I can already hear you Californians out there with your cheery chorus of "what's so bad about that?" Well I'll tell you what's wrong with it - To paraphrase George Orwell, sloppy language inevitably leads to sloppy thinking.

And so it is with the no worriers. These are the same people who begin every sentence with the word so, who punctuate every mindless utterance with regular intervals of "you know" and who use the word like for every purpose save for its proper one.

We live in The Age of Mild which I suppose is preferable to an age of instability and chaos. Our tongues, with their absence of gravitas, have yielded to a pleasant, noncommittal indecision where honesty is a punishable offense.

But hey, no worries, who cares anyway!