Philosophers Deli

The Long Depression is coming to a store near me and you. This( these days ) is the part that will subsequently be referred to as “the good old days.” Why is that? Are we not tapped out? Have we not spent our last dime and tasked our children with picking up what we can’t pay for?

Well, yes. We’ve done that. But if I owed you a lot of peanuts, I could take a peanut, open it, cast away the shell, give you the two peanuts inside, and say that I now owe you two fewer peanuts.

So that’s what we’re going to do. In fact we’ve started. Of course we owe more than peanuts, but that what our creditors are going to get. We’re handing out peanuts. There is no secret. Right now, everyone who has followed our recent descent into fiscal paralysis know just how we’re going to manage to pay everyone we owe. We’re going to print more money.

Now there is nothing special about the number of dollars in circulation in the world. That number was once thought to be tied to the amount of gold held by the government, or something rather like that. If we owned 100 ounces of gold and valued gold at $32 per ounce, we’d print up 3,200 one dollar notes, or the equivalent, and get those dollars into circulation.

While it never worked precisely that way, it is a reasonable, though simplified, explanation of how most people feel we once tried to tie the number of dollars in circulation to some measure of wealth.

That was then; this is now. Now, the dollar has value only because I can use one to take a bus ride to the strip mall where I work putting lamps and chairs on a sales floor, for which effort I am periodically given more dollars than it costs me to get to work.

Here’s the important part. If, when I got on the bus, the bus driver told me that the cost of a ride was two dollars, I would have to pay, but I would think less of the dollar. At some point, if my landlord and my grocer  and my wardrobe designer all were to take similar actions, I would go to my employer and say that while I truly love going into the back of the store and bringing lamps out to the front of the store, I am going to have to ask for more dollars to do that.

The reason that this is important is that my employer’s response has changed. In times gone by, my employer and I might discuss the situation. Eventually, however, the employer might, perhaps to a very limited extent, grant my request for more dollars.

Today, I would likely be told that while I did a fine job of bringing out the lamps, many other people wanted to bring out those very same lamps to the front of this very same store, and were ever willing to bring out more lamps per week than I am bringing out. Each of these people, my employer would explain, is willing to do this for fewer dollars than my employer now gives me.

And so, if I had no other way to get more dollars than by bringing out lamps from the back of the store, which you could pretty much assume anyway from the fact that few people grow up with that employment goal in mind, I would have to make changes. I would have to tell my clothing designer that I have enough clothes for the time being, but I’ll call her when I want more. I would have to consider whether it might do me some good to walk to work, or sometimes use a bicycle. And I would have to stop buying lamps for myself, even if I truly believed that you can never have enough good lamps.

That’s what now is like.

But I still need to add a bit more clarity to the situation. My employer, now selling fewer lamps because bus rides cost more, would eventually come to me and tell me that even though I was quite good at putting those lamps in just the right place, customers were not moving those lamps out of the store as quickly as before. Somehow, in ways he could not even begin to imagine, people were getting by with less illumination in their lives . So, although he was quite saddened by this turn of affairs, he is going to have to give me fewer dollars for my shining efforts. Or perhaps even let me go.

Now, in a reprise so brief I wouldn’t print it if it were not true, not long ago our present administration sought to change this picture by giving banks the money to lend to stores to build even bigger lamp showrooms, which both the banks and the stores knew were not needed. So they did what prudent people would do in a similar situation and paid their debts, bought other banks, or lamp stores, that were attractively priced for pennies on the dollar, and socked the rest away an case even fewer dollars would be coming their way in the future.The store owner is now in the process of lowering his price for lamps. Here comes Christmas, and if other stores sell lamps for less, he’s not going to be able to pay his bills.

Well, that’s about it. Lamp prices are falling, wages are falling, we’re printing more money, and other countries are telling us to stop printing money or they’ll have to do it, too.

What we are hoping is that if the dollars we print in any way correspond to what we have for sale and how much we’re asking, more dollars will mean that other countries will be able to spend less of their money to get dollars to buy our lamps and we’ll sell more lamps and I’ll get my job back at the lamp store and the store might even hire someone to help me with the lamps.

But there sure are a lot of lamps in the world, and you know? This country doesn’t even make the lamps we sell. China does. So we want China to make lamps, sell them to us cheap, let us mark the price up a lot, and then have China buy back the lamps from us. They’ve actually done this for a while to help out while we got our act together. They have also lent us money at very low rates to build lamp stores and pay me and other folks to bring lamps out from the back to the front. So in a way they’ve been nice to us. But they have a lot of people to feed, and when you get right down to it, China makes lamps and wants to sell them, too.

Let me make clear that this was not my idea. This plan came out of the University of Chicago’s School of Economics. Makes you wonder what else they have in mind.

The private economy does not have the capital, or the credit, to jump start business.

“Well,” you could say, “business seems to be recovering.”  And that’s sort of true.

But this is a recovery without jobs.  Both sides of the aisle are at fault. Americans want to work, and Americans need to work, but in every meaningful sense of the word,we have slipped into a Depression.

There is not enough private capital or private confidence to lead the way, to create the jobs we need. This will hurt education, public services including community health services, and drive us into war after war to prop up a few big employers.

Wouldn’t we be better off spending some Federal money on roads and bridges, hospitals, some more on education so that the next generation is smarter than we are, and perhaps on loans to small businesses.

We can’t buy everything and we do not have enough private capital to launch a recovery. It’s time for our great Uncle to stand up and lead.  No education means no jobs means no future. Employment can no longer be “at will” because we cannot afford an abstract legal principle in the face of disaster.

Blame who you will, but face the future with a “can do” attitude and a brisk pace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately. I’m a bit surprised at myself. He was a man I didn’t know, and someone who, when I was young, I thought didn’t want to be known. He said little to us during the course of the week. If he was on the night shift, he’d sleep most of the day, then read the paper when he got up, have a cup of coffee, make us dinner during those years when my mom worked, and then go off to work. Sometimes he’d work two shifts in a row. Sometimes three shifts. 24 hours. The summer I got out of high school I took a job at the same factory. You got 2 fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. The temperature inside the place never dropped below 90 in the 4 months I worked there.

There was not much talk at home. No conversation. This was remarkable when you consider the great social upheavals that were taking place: Kennedy elected, the Beatles, Kennedy shot, Vietnam, MLK, Lyndon Johnson’s social programs, the Beatles again, then along came Yoko and it was all over. Beatniks and the Chad Mitchell Trio had become pudding and John Denver flying an airplane into the water. But my dad never said anything about any of it. He did suggest to my sister that she become a doctor, which she almost did, and to me that I do something with computers, which I sort of did. I don’t know if he ever suggested anything to my brother, but he turned out ok too.

 He never told us how he felt about anything, and was the only father I ever saw that was like that. Silence. Some dads had a silence that covered a smoldering anger, a rage at their lot in life, a fury born of looking forward and seeing thousands of reflections of today, seeming to fade into the distance like the infinity point of a renaissance painting, somewhere in the middle of the picture, where these dads saw a gravestone instead of just nothing. But his silence wasn’t an angry silence. It was just silence.

 He had an eidetic memory in the short term. Sometimes, not very often, when he came home from work, we would get him to amuse us by reading to himself some article from the newspaper, and then handing us the paper and reciting what he had read, paragraph after paragraph, while my older brother checked for any errors and my sister and I looked on, not knowing whether to be astonished, or proud, or curious. He never made any mistakes.

 He was born on Mott St. in Manhattan in 1898. At the time it was a cultural mishmash of Italian, German, Jewish, Russian, and Chinese immigrants, who shared only poverty. The “culture” part was just the occasional piano or violin you could hear from an apartment as you walked the streets of lower Manhattan in those days. Culture used to isolate, to separate, to hide in public. As a child he spoke all of the languages of the neighborhood, although he could only read Italian and English. My guess is that he didn’t finish high school. I never asked him. He’d have told me if he wanted to. But not just because I might have wanted him to.

I know that at 16 he lied about his age and joined the army. His first job in the army was taking care of horses. But after a short time in uniform, his appendix went bad on him, and during surgery it broke. This gave him peritonitis, which he survived, and a medical discharge from service. Other than that he would likely have died somewhere in Europe still in his teens.

 He did the entire “get a job, get married, have three kids and raise ‘em” thing twice. I was in the second bunch of three kids. I grew up without knowing about the first wife and bunch of three kids until I was almost thirty. My mom, who was Catholic, lived with a lot of guilt all those years, even though she was tricked into marriage. But we never even guessed. That’s how smart we were. Had I known, and explained to her the canon law concept of a putative marriage with respect to bigamy, she would only have felt worse.

 I never understood the isolation, of course, and that’s some of what’s behind this piece. My mom had no friends, and we didn’t know why. My dad had no friends, and we didn’t know why. We had no contact with relatives we knew we had, and we didn’t know why. We didn’t entertain, and we(kids) didn’t know why. Had we been wealthy, or concerned about the cost of entertaining, that would have been something. But in our social strata, entertaining meant a few burgers, a few beers, soda for the kids. We could have chipped in our allowance.

 So one thing that happened was that we, the kids, never got socialized properly. I know that school’s supposed to do that for you, but when we came home it was as if coming through the door rubbed off any socialization that stuck to us when we left the school. We saw each other, and went back to being “the kids.” We developed strange senses of humor, which are unmodified by time. And we never developed an interest in being successful, in the usual sense of the word. We had no interest in participating in the world. In being the next Albert Schweitzer, or Albert Einstein, or Albert anything. Unlike most kids growing up, we were happy when the phone didn’t ring. We all had Latin, and that was a good thing. You have to be able to think in another language to feel the plurality of the world. And the world is a very plural place, for now.

 Writing this piece has confirmed for me the strangeness I still feel at being here. I could feel its source and power as I wrote. It feels at once natural and unnatural. So let me tell you now of how this has settled in my mind. My dad got up each day and went to work. He worked a hard job, physically hard. Sometimes he came home injured, but every day he did come home, and once a week he brought his paycheck with him. Unlike myself, he has a place in the cosmos of Albert Schweitzer, who once said that a man can only do what he can do; but if he does that each day, he can sleep at night and do it again the next day. My dad worked as an unskilled laborer until he was 78. He died at 92. He didn’t fish or hunt. He never went off to India to find himself. I believe he knew himself more thoroughly than any man I’ve met.

I just wanted to make a brief point concerning the financial meltdown on Wall Street. Over the past summer, there was a really hot day. I forget which one, but it was the hottest. My wife said it was the humidity, but hey, who knows.

My pockets being empty, I looked in the freezer where she sometimes hides the money. There was a Fudgsicle! My eyes almost popped out of my sweat-soaked head. I grabbed it quick before anyone caught on. I ripped off the wrapper and inhaled the deep, rich, and cooling aroma that only a Fudgsicle can provide. I took a small bite. Oh, God! Oh, Holy Assurbanipal! But I had to stop with the praying cause the Fudgsicle was starting to melt. These opportunities don’t last forever. Plus, some one might want some of the Fudgsicle, although now it was MY Fudgsicle. It started to drip. I started licking the chocolate goo on my hands, but I couldn’t keep up. It was so hot. I shoved the whole thing in my mouth and stood there in bliss as cool Fudgsicle juice slid down my throat to a happy tummy. My eyes rolled and rolled unfocused.  I seemed to drift in and out of Castaneda’s realm of nonordinary reality. Much too soon it was all gone. Gradually my eyes settled on the freezer in a vain search for more Fudgsicles. My wife walked into the kitchen. She asked me what I was doing standing there with the freezer open and two Fudgsicle sticks in my mouth. I spat them out and gave her a glowing look of confidence and determination. I smiled and hoped that she felt reassured that I was in command now. Then I lost it.

“I must have Fudgsicles!” I began running around in circles of pop-eyed desperation.

She stared at me in disbelief. I said, “Hurry, the store closes at two on Sunday. Give me all your money, quick. Other people may be buying the Fudgsicles right now. Hurry! Hurry!”

She didn’t give me any money for Fudgsicles. If there is a god up there in that great land of lakes in the sky, I hope he has Fudgsicles. Each night, before I close my eyes, I pray to Whatever- Is-Up-There( and I hope It is generous ) that it puts aside another Fudgsicle for me. If I live for another fifty years and my prayers are answered, I will get 18,250 Fudgsicles when I die. You can cleanly split a Fudgsicle in two. If I do that, and only have one piece of Fudgsicle a day that will last me only the first 100 years in the afterlife. Obviously, I want much, much more but if Assurbanipal hears my prayers I don’t want him to laugh at me, considering that there are poor and suffering people down here.

I think I understand the ancient Egyptians better now. Like me, they probably worried that they were going someplace hot. And they didn’t have Fudgsicles. But they did have tasty, icy deserts. You had to start with like five tons of ice from Kilimanjaro just to get the equivalent of a single Fudgicle by the time you got to Main Street, Giza. In their ancient writings they refer to this as the “trickle down effect.” But the Egyptians thought big and were very persistent. Long before boats full of penguins brought Fudgsicles to Plymouth Rock, the Egyptians probably filled the pyramids with Kilimanjaricles many times over. Maybe they figured out a way to take it all with you. They certainly didn’t leave any for the rest of us.

When I was young, there was a local newspaper you could buy for a nickel that enjoyed strong popularity. Other means of delivering local advertising had not yet developed, and people had the time to take an interest in local affairs. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the publishers would happily have given the paper away if there was no impact on ad revenues.

Well, sometimes things got slow. Sometimes the newspaper needed filler articles to thicken it to the point where you, the consumer, thought it was worth the five cents. There were a number of set pieces for this, but my favorites by far were the “Rudy the Nudie” stories. They were front page fillers. Rudy, a flasher who was never caught, would always make his appearances at night. Clad in a raincoat, hat, and shoes, he’d pick outlandish places to flash the public. Sometimes it would be in front of billboard lights on highways. Often, bridge overpasses. Occasionally a story would picture a raincoat clad man wearing a fedora running from the camera in a park. The articles always reminded readers who saw Rudy to immediately call the police, and the police always experienced a high number of calls when Rudy was active.

I never found out why he was called Rudy, or why, if there was flashing going on, it had to be one person multiple times as opposed to several less active flashers. But the whole point is that it was fun reading about it. The Rudy articles were an enjoyable part of a sometimes boring day. Rudy was our own hometown UFO.

This was many years ago, and Rudy undoubtedly has hung up his raincoat for good. And as time passes, memories of his escapades fade. And while he really was only a small part of what it was like growing up fifty years ago in New Jersey, he was a real dot on the mosaic that reflected those times, partly the enjoyment of life, partly hot days when some dads had to work in factories or under a scorching sun, and almost no-one I knew lived in an air-conditioned house. I am thinking of what today’s mosaic would look like. Holding these age descriptive mosaics side by side, differences become apparent at a distance, and then startling up close. The air conditioned train into town on a hot day vs grabbing for a soggy leather strap or a basket-weaved seat, fumes and bugs and waves of heat pouring in windows opened in a hopeless attempt at comfort. The climate controlled SUV vs the DeSoto that looked like a large roasting pan. Different in many ways.

If I am sometimes of a mind that life was simpler fifty years ago, I usually recall that my uncle, a successful businessman despite not having finished high-school, died on a hot summer day, struck down by a heart attack while hanging onto one of those leather straps, heading to work. He was 49. He left a wife with no job skills, two beautiful daughters who would require several more years of education, and a rather large mortgage on a house on Long Island that was now too big, too remote, and too depressing to raise children in.

I don’t think the world will ever see another Rudy the Nudie. The impact would not be the same. Since Rudy, we have had Viet-Nam, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Selma, Alabama, Iraq under Bush I, Iraq under Bush II, creepy pedophile priests, homophobic religions and other similar horrors. Why, I’ve only now got the feeling that the next horror is just around the corner. Has a preceding age of innocence passed us by, or were there truly ugly events that were just hushed up?

If the youth of today are skeptical of the role of government in their lives, that skepticism is also based on a mosaic, the little pieces of which differ markedly from the one of my youth, mentioned above. When I was young, jobs paid a living wage, although just barely, and my dad worked in a factory while my mom stayed home raising us. A less affluent version of Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving comes to mind, if you leave out the year our rather large dog hopped up on the dining room table and ate the turkey while it was cooling, all of us in the parlor catching up on life.

A few years back, while working as a math tutor in a largely minority school, the subject of Thanksgiving came up. I was working one-on-one with a student and as we were winding down, he asked what I’d be doing for the coming holiday. I replied that with my kids now grown and scattered all over the country, and my parents and my wife’s parents having passed away, we wouldn’t be making a big deal out of it. Probably just look at some old photos and recall years gone by. Well, he couldn’t wait to tell me the good news. You see, he lived with his brother in law, and his brother was going to come over and bring some hot dogs and French-fries. It would be like a real family get-together.

“Hey, that’s great!,” I said, groaning inside, wondering where the parents were and how all those who are exposed to the meanness of today’s young world manage to stay hopeful and inspired.

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Unexpectedly, my three sons managed to make it home, and my wife, not having been able to find a turkey small enough for the two of us, had prepared enough food for all, in case anyone should drop by. We took photographs, which I always urge for various and obvious reasons. We had a nice, traditional meal, turkey and all, and prayed for those less fortunate, which, for all I know, may soon include us. We talked about when we would get our Christmas tree.

My student’s brother with the hot dogs? He never showed.

Let me know what you think of this post, and thanks for reading.

This tricky story and hard to write. Hard because of language. English has a word for everything. English has one million words, most of which we don’t know, even though they pretty much all written down in big books in Oxford.

My language has fewer words but each word mean many different things. For example, use same words for phrase “Welcome, honored guest” and “Pig go eat in cellar”. But if host give modest cough, or roll eyes, the meaning is the second one.

Anyway, this week I go to old philosopher’s apartment again. But this time easier. This time I take a chance. “Trick or Treat,” I say with knocking, knocking. “It’s not Halloween,” say old philosopher. “For you it is,” I say. “What you mean,” he say. “I mean that I could trick you or I could treat you to lunch. When is last time you been in restaurant?” No answer for a minute. Then he say, “It’s been a while. But now I know you’re here, no way you trick me after last two times.”

“Of course I could,” I tell him. “Oh yeah? How?” he ask. “I use Bunchy-Foot trick. It very good trick, even if person was tricked in past by Bunchy-Foot. Most don’t even know they’ve been Bunchy-Foot.”

He pause. Then he say OK, he getting tired of being tied up, even with the pizza. I ask what type food he like best. This Manhattan, so other than exotic French restaurant, where reservations must be enforced in equity court, you pretty much get what you want. He ask if any good Shanghai restaurants left. Yes! More than ever. But stay away if look like decorated by pimp or serve alcohol. Look for small storefront with all Chinese people inside in families. This sound good to him. So we take train to Chinatown and soon find restaurant that look good to us. Go in and sit down.

Philosopher hungry but don’t know what to eat. Everyone likes soup dumplings, I say. He look at me funny. But I order them. Soon show up. “How eat?”, he ask. “This be messy,” I say. “Be careful no burn yourself. Take small nibble where dough crimped at top. Let dumpling cool down a little. Then stuff whole big dumpling in mouth and bite and chew. Juicy flavor go everywhere.” He do this and then get up and jump and jump with joy. We eat many dumplings.

Philosopher ask me who’s going to win, Little-Eagle-Feathers or Pineapple-Boy? I tell him I don’t know. I just happy they lock up somebody new in big house. Too many problems, I say. Insurance a problem. Housing a problem. Jobs a problem. Global warming a problem. List could go on and on. I tell him I can’t fix problems. I was reporter. Could get facts very good but not write good. My editor say that’s OK, he fix commas and things. Then editor get fired. New editor doesn’t want to bother with commas and things. Doesn’t even like reporters. Would rather pull story off A.P. newswire print ready. So every story must be print ready. I not last long, even though I know lots of people. So before I go I warn people about Stupid Tuesday. I tell them it pretty much hands election over to other party. It is like each voter gets dart and throw at barn all at once. Darts all over barn. But patterns. Left hand dart thrower has dart on left. Right hand dart thrower has dart on right. Old dart thrower has darts at bottom. Young dart thrower hits middle or higher. But when I warn people they laugh. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, they say. So hold Stupid Tuesday and guess what happen. Lots of old people, darts all say Little-Eagle-Feathers. Lots of young people, darts all say Pineapple-Boy. Now what? Now a few rich people who say to poor people “Screw you and your pizza, too.”

I say I can do small tricks like pizza trick and bunchy-foot, but I can’t do big tricks like insurance companies can. Insurance company, Car company, all big companies try to give money to every big candidate. This make them bigger and hard to beat. No matter who wins, companies own them.

Then they trick us. Instead of brake, they put funny pedal in wrong place and make you drive like crazy into ocean or other car. They always making up new tricks, but result the same. They reach in our pockets and take all our money. If you have no money, then no insurance. Let’s say you sick and can’t work. Then you in big trouble. Same with banks. Same with doctors. Long line of people all to get your money. College first in line. Country supposed to protect, but turn around and hurt us. Still, country was pretty good for many years. But not if you Native American. Not if you Black. Not if you Mexican.

What if you have good system but don’t let anyone turn on system? No money for anti-trust enforcement. No money for safe toys for kids. No money for electric cars. No money for education. All schools become trade schools. Go look at computer screen and no more schools, no more teacher.

You become programmer, there’s a school for you and get job. You become doctor, same thing. Dentist. Accountant. Actuary. Engineer. But what if you want to learn about history and languages and music and art and other cultures? Then nothing. Nothing with big price tag. Education only for the wealthy now. Everything else trade school. So we have lots of uneducated people who scare easy. Afraid to fly. Afraid of tall buildings. Afraid of terrorists hiding under bed.

So we give away our privacy so government can round up terrorists. Government set up straw man argument. Terrorists want to come here and get us. Nonsense. They just want us to leave their countries alone. How many terrorists hurt people in this country last year? None. Government says this proof government working. I say I chase away dangerous elephants for a living. You see any elephants? No? That means I good at job. What if I want to become philosopher? Come on. You philosopher. Maybe you can help.

Philosopher sense my frustration. But he say a little about being philosopher. He say how he was other things before philosopher. Technical things. But not happy. So he read and read. He take courses and write papers. But always same thing: look for answers and wind up not really knowing what questions even mean. So that what he knows is really just what he feels should be. People should be free. What that mean? Don’t ask because I don’t know, he say. People should care for each other. What best way to do that? Don’t know. But beware of people who say they do know. More likely, they want something; money, power, fame…something. And when you support these people you diminish yourself in some way that he can’t put into words. Maybe someone get into big house and do some good. But he not holding his breath. That all he say.

Little-Eagle-Feathers and Pineapple-Boy race to see who can get locked up in big house. They race all over country. Pineapple-Boy a bit faster because Little-Eagle-Feathers covered in tar. But she still pretty quick and race is close. Some people say stop race. Some people say racing is good for whole country. But race not last forever. Race ends at latest when Monster-Rally ends. When race over, still one more race to finally decide. That race against Snapping-Turtle-Prisoner. He not fast but he very dangerous, very old and tricky. And very, very tough.

Hah! Got old philosopher again. He tied up in next room again! First I knock on door. “Go Away!”, he shout. “We save whole world!”, I tell him. He philosopher, after all, and that good philosophy trick, save world. But no work this time. “I got a gun”, he say. “Now get the hell outta here!” “OK”, I say, “You never see me again. Ever. I mean Never. I just go.” Then I go buy big pizza. Then I see little boy on street. “How you like earn five dollar?”, I say. “Screw you and your pizza too”, he say. This good start. He can hear! And he not blind! “OK, ten dollar”, I say. Then I tell him plan.

Soon I knock on old philosopher’s door. He smell pizza. “Who is it?”, he ask. Kid say, “I Little-Jimmy from down street with apology pizza for wise philosopher. Crazy person say he sorry he trick you.” “Well, forgive and forget”, philosopher say. He open door and I jump out and tie him up. He still get pizza. Now to story!

Little-Eagle-Feathers and Pineapple-Boy look at same house behind gate. Then Little-Eagle-Feathers and Pineapple-Boy look at each other. They look and look. Little-Eagle-Feathers remembers King Kong lesson, be friendly and smile a lot. She say “Gate locked, and crazy person locked up inside. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!”.

Pineapple-Boy say nothing. He know to wait!

“Soon crazy person move out. Soon I live in that house. I smash! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!”, say Little-Eagle-Feathers. “How you gonna do that?”, say Pineapple-Boy. “I smile a lot. Then they don’t catch on. Ha Ha Ha!”, say Little-Eagle-Feathers. “That’s not smilin’, that’s laughing.”, say Pineapple-Boy. Then Pineapple-Boy think and think. Then Pineapple-Boy say “But that’s great. Laughing’s even better. Specially if you laugh when they don’t expect it. Then they know you’re really, really friendly”, say Pineapple-Boy. “By the way”, say Pineapple-Boy, “how you know when it’s time to move in?” “That first lesson”, say Little-Eagle-Feathers. “I tell you. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.” Then stand on box.

“A long time ago, in another universe, I live in that house. Ha Ha Ha Ha. I remember I was lady. Big lady. Biggest lady of all. But then I get thrown into La Brea Tar Pits. You know when? This happen when Mr. Big give “Let My People Go” speech. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. This speech he give when nobody looking. Best way to smash things. First he make up list. You do favor, you get on list. You do business, you get on list. You friend, you get on list. But if you give money, you can only get some other person on list. That a rule. Ha. Idiot could get around that rule!”

By now, Pineapple-Boy could see that Little-Eagle-Feathers was getting agitated. Her voice become shrill. Her complexion turned pale and she flapped her arms a few times. “Stupid Mr. Big call up Department of Justice. This late at night. I don’t know why Department of Justice open late at night. Usually, it’s closed. Maybe this special night, because I could smell much pizza all the way over here. Anyway, he call. “Who’s this?”, they say. “This Mr. Big. Let My People Go!” Then he read list. Then he make them read it back so he know it good. Then he hang up. Next thing I remember, I am in La Brea Tar Pits.” Little-Eagle-Feathers began to sway back and forth. “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. Now another list being made. King Kong tell me. This be biggest list of all! So soon I move in house and smash everything! Ho Ho Ho. Merry Christmas.” And Little-Eagle-Feathers fall off box and faint on street.

Philosopher getting quicker at eating pizza. This getting expensive. Next time no pepperoni! Got to go. Back soon.

When my sons were very young, I would sometimes ask them what they’d like to be in life. For a MacGuffin, I’d mention that when I was young, I thought for a long time about this very question, and then wrote down my conclusion on a sheet of paper, which I had put in a special blue envelope someplace in the attic. But I had forgotten where. Would they help me find it? I needed it now because I had some free time coming up and I wanted to do some of what was written on the paper. Then we would talk as we searched. On one of these occasions, one of my sons talked about a story he had heard on the news, of someone famous whose garbage was searched in an attempt to find out more about him. What, my son asked, do you call the person doing the searching?

I wondered if he was getting suspicious.

As we leisurely looked at old boxes of books and papers, I told him that such a person was a garbologist, and went to school to study garbology, to learn how to do this, before actually setting out to explore people’s trash. He said then, that he no longer wanted to be an Elvis impersonator when he grew up. He wanted to be a garbologist.

I have only recently learned from a wikipedia article that the terms garbology and garbologist exist, and have been around for some time, and that garbology is an academic major dealing with modern refuse. This amused me. And with too much time on my hands now this led me to wonder again at the nature of man. About how ideas occur independently in separate places but around the same time, and are pursued in somewhat different ways. Commonly cited examples include the development of calculus, the development of writing, the invention of the telephone, and who knows what else. I wondered to what extent these events are independent, and whether your concept of independence is the same as mine or the next person’s. Perhaps there’s some shared sense that the time is right for a logical next step in a process whose end we cannot see, because it is defined by the process, by us, always changing and receding faster than we can pursue it, entropy itself generating entropy, and order circling in upon itself until it vanishes into the next dimension which, when it gets enough order, will have its own big bang. The logic is our invention too, you know. The way we knew a process was logical was that we made up the logic as we went along, then went where the logic pointed. The tangent was always a straight line, but our direction never was. The horrors of the twentieth century prevent me from calling this process progress.

Most of the items on my “to do” list will never be done, of course. When my life ends, not soon I hope, I will not have learned Aramaic or Coptic. I will not have read more than a small fraction of nineteenth century philosophy. I will have known but a vanishingly small fraction of those of my time. And yet it is nearly enough for my scope. When our activities are focused around what we love, we use our time wisely.

I still haven’t adopted a fixed perspective on cultural relativism and its problems, or logical positivism and falsification, because I don’t know enough about language and its influence on our concepts to feel any confidence in an evaluative process. I feel fixed in time, and that time is passing. I think I can appreciate it for what it was. Yes, there was a feeling of intellectual excitement: we can finally get it right, clarify our terms, end the madness. And to have felt some of it during Friday night pizza and espresso and Chinatown and pastrami on rye fueled discussions, optimism a buzz lasting the weekend until Sunday midnight when the libraries closed without an answer, and still digesting until Wednesday, when you knew that this Friday you had to raise the case of …. It was fun.

Then graduate studies come to an uneven bumpy end. Fred decided on law school in Alabama. Susan was law school in New York. Connie, already wealthy, began to travel. Me on Wall Street. Family. Move to someplace nice where the boys can hike and swim. Thank you Fred and Susan and Connie and the rest of you, wherever you may be. It was fun. Maybe now I can get some sleep.

I had a friend who died a while back.

He wasn’t an old friend.

My wife knew his lover,

And that’s how we met.

We only went out to lunch a few times before he died.

He said he was inclined to call me Robert,

Although, he said, he observed that most people called me Bob.

I said I wasn’t particular.

He went to a famous school

But was not, himself, famous.

He told me he had prostate cancer.

I said that I had passed biology

Only because my hand shook as I drew an earthworm transfixed in death,

Giving it a compelling, lifelike quality.

But I had heard that prostate cancer was a slow grower.

Only in his case it wasn’t.

In the hospital, when he lay bleeding out into a clear, plastic bag,

(goddamn you, people, can’t you help him?)

I brought him his last French pastry.

His smile was wide.

I turned to the sink to wet a paper towel for him,

Hiding tears.

He died the next day, and his body was burned.

Cremated.

To cremate. That’s an infinitive. I learned that in Latin 101.

It used to be common.

Funny how it still is.

RJB

There are those among us who lift us up, and give us the courage and will to persist against adversity even when the odds seem long. They make us glad to be here on this crusty old rock, and constantly point out and enhance its beauty and possibilities. They inspire us to do more, to be more. I am proud to say that my sons are such people. They reach, not for the next dollar, but for the next dream. And they have made many dreams come true.

One of my children has his birthday today. I will not mention his name, because many of you know him. He makes me feel as if tomorrow may indeed be a better day.

On this 29^th day of January, grey and cold, I, with a warm and happy heart, wish you the best in this coming year, and many happy returns. If your dreams come true, we shall all know a better world.

Happy Birthday!

-Dad

Author’s Note: When I first took a few minutes to jot down the story below, I thought that more comments would result relative to the traffic I received. But upon review, I feel I may have obscured some of the issues I was trying to make visible in a feeble attempt at humor. But I believe, what a word but I can’t find better, in particular that discussions concerning animal rights have a legitimate, even necessary role to play in forming one’s concept of the social self and the moral self. It is disturbing to me that animals are to be cloned for food and that animals are used as food. In this, I am faced with my own hypocrisy wherein I am disgusted with the eating of meat and seafood, but I push those feelings aside and do it anyway and enjoy it.

A friend of mine who lived on his uncle’s farm as a child was never allowed to play with the pigs, which had numbers on them, lest he develop an emotional attachment. He was never informed in advance when one of the pigs was shot for the family’s consumption, and was forbidden to discuss the matter. When I was young I was invited to dinner at the home of a girl I briefly dated, whose father had survived Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He was wearing a short sleeve shirt, and on one forearm a tattooed number was starkly visible. I was suddenly and permanently saddened by the realization that the construction and operation of Auschwitz was a purposive activity of an entire society. I believe there is a connection here that I am unable to adequately articulate, but it goes something like this. If we are unable to appreciate the wonder and beauty of life to such an extent that the taking of it can become a routine, every day affair, are we in some sense less “human” than we believe ourselves to be? And is this approach to life unethical? Why is it so easy for us to read a war’s casualties as a number. And is there some way that we can educate our selves out of this condition? I hope you get a kick out of the story, of course, and that some of you will look beyond the plebeian humor, to issues that are more important than my writing is able to convey. Thanks for reading. -R

Jerry, a world champion porker, has a grin on his face that’s hard to describe without using profanity. But you may read here the amazing story of Jerry’s salvation from near certain execution, and of his happy latter days.

As one of the world’s few talking pigs, it seemed that his future was assured and a life of luxury leading to a blissful retirement was in Jerry’s stars. Alas, the publics’ taste for talking pigs had declined over the years. Some maintained that the “talking” was fraudulent. Others were offended by a claim of U.S. Government’s scientific community that, although talking pigs are rare, all pigs who do talk suffer from Tourette’s syndrome, rather like our public officials. Whatever the case may be, and in spite of the fact that Jerry could delight crowds everywhere by urinating upside-down, the day arrived when Farmer Al had to tell Jerry that the end was coming; he was to be sold at auction.

“This is Bullshit with a capital fucking B,” said Jerry. “Ain’t there no way out?”

“Well,” said Farmer Al, “there is a hog judging contest at the county fair on Saturday. Win that, and we’ll clone you forever.”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about, if you’ll pardon my fuckin’ French? I just get upset about that damned Iraq fiasco, remember.”

“Well,” said Farmer Al, “FDA just now said cloned pigs is good food. You be the champ, and I’ll let the chumps chomp your clones. And I’m the judge in the hog contest.”

Saturday at last rolled around and things went well for Jerry and Farmer Al. A shill brought Jerry to the fair, Al handed out the prizes, and before sunset Jerry was home with his blue ribbon.

So for the foreseeable future, if you’re riding out past Al’s farm, you may hear a happy porker singing a little ditty he made up to celebrate his victory. It goes like this.

Well, you ain’t gonna munch on me
Hell, you ain’t gonna munch on me
No, I won’t be the goop
in nobody’s soup
It’s my clone in the pot, not me.

By way of further explanation, if you do get to see Jerry, you may read, painted on his right side, the words “Eat my clone, you f***ing drone”. Farmer Al thought it best to remove three of the letters. But be forewarned; Jerry may yell it at you anyway. It’s just the Tourette’s, you see.

It is with great sadness that I post the following post. Or post the following writing. Or perhaps write the following post. Well, let me just say I’m sad. And I’m writing.

Tragedy has again struck New York City. And, apparently, terrorists are to blame. According to my sources, the sadness is widespread, the grieving extensive. It seems that at about 3 P.M., in Grand Central Station, someone, perhaps unaccustomed to our culture, made a rude noise. Witnesses described the noise as sounding somewhere between an unexpected cardiac infarction during an unplanned bowel movement and a moose blowing his nose while drinking the pristine waters of the north. Although these things happen regularly in the station, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan had, unfortunately, recently been assassinated. Security personnel immediately called the White House. The President of the United States, after a brief meeting with his closest advisers, Dick Chaney, issued the following announcement.

“I am aware that here, in America, on New Years Eve, in New York City, the financial capital of the world, there has been an incident of Ali Kappa’s poppa striking at us again. I am sure all Americans share with me the profound sorrow that is felt by Republicans everywhere. This unfortunate event could not have been foreseen by anyone at Yale, in the C.I.A., the N.S.A., the S.D.I.; Oops! I wasn’t supposed to mention that there’s an S.D.I. But you get the point. A lot of us home town folks are upset!”

The Transportation Safety Administration was immediately ordered to lower the limit of explosive ingredients allowed in little bottles on planes from three ounces to two ounces. In response to the request, Democrats said they would require an immediate $300 million dollars from the Federal Government to train the Transportation Inspection workers in fractions. Nancy Pelosi, a great big democrat, asked, pointedly, how government workers would be be expected to divide two by three while looking at live images of attractive passengers walking through the fun screen, although she admitted that most didn’t have a problem with dividing three by two.

In return, she promised that all air traffic controllers would show up sober for the New Year’s night shifts. When asked how she could implement so drastic a revision of practice so promptly, she replied, “Da fu?” as she slumped in her chair. Political insiders think that this must be a previously undisclosed Democratic call to action.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani offered to return to New York to officially welcome in the New Year, while insuring the city’s safety.

“I’ll bring my own Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1870 Pauillac”, the Mayor said. “It’s the best of the pre-phylloxera vintages,” he added, implying with winks and elbow jabs that the value of well kept bottles of the stuff could only go up. Unfortunately, as he made this remark, he himself had an unexpected bowel movement, and rapidly moved away from the press box.

For all of you who have indulged me this far, I wish you a Happy New Year. Yes, some of us are alone, perhaps in pain, physical or spiritual.

Hang in there! There are many who care about you. A new world is coming. I don’t quite understand it myself, but 2008 will be better than 2007. People who care for you may not know where you are or may be unable to reach you for a while. And, of course, you are always invited to post a comment here.

With love, an old philosopher.

A giant red nosed meat clown threatened downtown Tokyo early this morning, overturning noodle and dumpling pushcarts and hurling hot beef frisbees in all directions. Several people were injured by slipping on the greasy frying disks. Others were maimed as their dogs dragged them into traffic in persuit of the meat, the soba and buckwheat noodles, pork dumplings and a few moon cakes left over from a recent dragon festival.

“We help America and this is what we get!” shouted several pedestrians. “We want Rice!”

President Bush has decided on an immediate high level diplomatic response.

College for me started in 1967 at a Liberal Arts and Teacher’s college in Patterson, New Jersey. There were no sit-ins, protesting of recruitment programs(the military didn’t want us anyway). There were no controversial military research activities on campus. These aspects of campus life, had we had them, would have forced us to examine ourselves, and our school, and say something, individually or collectively, about what we wanted to be and what we thought the mission of higher education should be.

Most of us merely wanted to be teachers. Our school was a small, quiet environment in which personal growth and self examination were facilitated. Protests were held in Washington D.C. and many of us attended.

I do not now, after all these years, see sizable groups of people challenging the school administrations that support controversial policies that potentially have enormous impact on students’ subsequent lives and our conduct the world. Perhaps this is because we do not, at present, have a military draft.

But the question of how conscription came into being in a country that traditionally values individual liberty is nowhere being discussed; surprising in that our recent experiences in Iraq persuade me, at least, that the draft will be back in time for our next significant military engagement.

And the horrors that we have recently purpetrated or merely watched, unmoved, uninvolved, would have led to social outcry even in our little corner of academia.

We have become self absorbed to a frighteningly barbaric degree.

In a bizarre twist to the hairy tail of the orbiting space station that sucks money like a black hole on steroids, spacepeople are adding a school bus, or something of that size, using a robot arm. Although lacking a veranda, this airless cottage still aims to be a place where new crews will be quarantined while we get on with the real stuff. In months to come, Japanese space people will be able to determine whether the caps on Kirin will remain attached at zero gravity. Too, a new hops plant will be cloned in zero gravity.

This is what they should have named the chain. Not only could they have had the Egg McMuffin, they could have had the Egg McPizza, the Egg McBacon, the Poached McEgg, the Egg McMann, and many more. And they could have closed by noon.

Discussions welcome in comments. An erector set will be given to the most persuasive submission. Thank you.

Big Food, by an old philosopher.

Now I’ve got a son, and his health’s not good
I feed him everything I think I should
But everything we feed him seems to make him worse
Maybe we need it but it’s such a curse.
Big Food.

Well the apples we gave him kinda looked all right
They made his cheeks all rosy and bright
Then they turned red and began to bleed
Those apples had something he just didn’t need.
Big Food.

And we gave him cauliflower, broccoli too
Mixed with tomatoes in a hearty stew
It was cooked four hours, but he sure had to chew
He still had some teeth after snack-time, too
Big Food.

Well the trucks come thru about three A.M.
Loaded with soda pop and M&Ms
They dump this stuff in a shed in the back
When we wake up each mornin’ we go buy us a sack
of Big Food.

Well he’s kinda wide and he’s not too tall
He can’t reach the top shelves at the local mall
And he can’t bend down for the lower ones, too
I’m startin’ to think it has somethin’ to do
with Big Food.

Now the mice writing covers all the boxes and cans
With stuff I can’t say, much less understand
Forty ingredients stuffed in some sauce
Twenty more in the tacos, I’m at such a loss
with Big Food.

Now what we’ve been feedin’ him just might be good
And pigs might fly, but I don’t think they should
So think about this as you open the can
Is what comes out maybe not fit for man?
Big Food

So if you have kids and you love them a bunch
Feed them organic, for breakfast and lunch,
And try it for dinner, this is only a hunch,
But they may live to thank you, if you don’t let ‘em munch
Big Food.