The Blog

I slipped out of the office to run some errands this past Tuesday.

I take my crummy job all too seriously, and as a result I can get kind of surly with my coworkers. I don’t want to be that way, the guy everybody tries to avoid in the hall. I just resent having to work for a living, all the more because I think my company is stupid, so I’m a little crotchety sometimes.

But I thought I’d try to soften my image a little, so I went to a store and bought a 25 dollar tray of assorted holiday-themed cookies, red and green decorated sweets, laden with butter and sugar. I got it at one of those big box stores that also sell refrigerators, designer jeans, power tools and huge pallets of toilet paper, so I got to rub elbows with a lot of Christmas shoppers while I was at it. I noticed one of the popular toys this year seems to be an actual house. Kid-sized, but big enough to go inside, little three-room pads, complete with furniture, and built-ins in the kitchen. I saw a few of these rolling past the checkstands, unassembled in their huge cartons, illustrations on the outside of the finished product. I wondered if they came with kid-sized adjustable rate mortgages. That would be an educational toy.

I took my cookie tray out to the car and put it in the trunk. Midday traffic was heavy. Los Angeles was built for cars, but no one could have foreseen how many of us would be trying to use these streets and highways. Most of the roadways maxed out about ten years ago, so normal driving can be a challenge, but during those special times — Christmas shopping season, tsunami evacuations — you find out what “gridlock” means. I wanted to stop at the bank on my way back to work, and by the time I got there I was frazzled and getting surly again.

I was the only person at the counter at first, but while I was doing my banking and bantering with the teller another customer walked briskly up to the window next to mine. She was a skinny woman in her forties, wearing a pea coat and jeans that were designed to be tight, but which hung limply on her thin frame. Her jeans looked as if they’d been worn out the old fashioned way, not bought that way in a store. She had glossy auburn hair done in an improbable 1940’s style, ringlets down both sides of her face, which was pleasant, plain and bony. She wore a small holiday corsage made of fake green holly and festive red berries. She carried no purse or shopping bag.

“OK,” she said brightly, “the first thing I need to do is check my balance.”

Normally they won’t answer that question out loud. I don’t know why, but they just won’t. They always write it down and show it to you. But this guy punched a few keys on his terminal, squinted at his screen and said, in a voice that I could not help hearing, “You have twenty five dollars and eighty-three cents.”

She gave this only a second’s thought, then said “In that case I’ll take twenty-five dollars.” While the teller was getting that together, punching keys, sticking slips of paper into little printers, opening and closing drawers, the woman struck up a conversation with a bank officer seated well back from the teller windows. They apparently knew each other, in the way customers are led to think they “know” bank officers.

They exchanged the usual December pleasantries, about the weather, about the traffic, about not being ready for Christmas. They were talking loudly across a great distance — the distance from where the customers stand to the place where bank managers sit. Then the bank officer asked her how she’d been doing.

“Doing great! Well, except I’ve only had three job interviews this month. You know me — I really need like a hundred and fifty. But I’m fine. I feel good. I see so many people with such problems — no food, no friends, no place to sleep. I just feel so blessed. I’m sure I’ll find something someday. You know, there are worse things than just not having a job.”

The bank officer’s smile had started to coagulate on her face. The woman’s money had been counted and placed before her, five 5-dollar bills. My own transaction was finished. I picked up my stuff, went back to my office and made sure everybody got some Christmas cookies.

Larry Jones is not a crackpot.

He is a responsible citizen who holds a job. He is a voter who never fails to perform that particular civic duty. He once even worked in a presidential campaign, where he learned that honesty and personal integrity won’t help you at all in such contests.

Larry Jones maintains his yard, both front and back. He is on friendly terms with many of his neighbors, even the retired lady who feeds the pigeons in the alley between their houses, making it a no-man’s land of bird droppings every afternoon at four o’clock. Larry Jones is fond of animals, and feeds strays that wander into his yard, sometimes becoming so involved with them that they move in and stay indefinitely.

He is concerned about the environment and is replacing his incandescent lights with compact fluorescent bulbs, even though the CFL’s give off a weird, inadequate light. He drives a little Honda that would fit in the back of some SUV’s, but he doesn’t think these small actions will reverse global warming.

Larry Jones is pretty smart — he went to college and earned a degree in Semantics (of all things) — but he nevertheless is not climbing the corporate ladder at his job, because he doesn’t know how to suck up. Larry Jones feels that being reliable and doing superior work ought to be enough, so he knows he will never be promoted, and he’s OK with that, even if he kind of wishes he had the money that goes with a fancy title.

In his spare time, Larry Jones plays in a rock’n’roll band, a group that he started because he loves music, but also to keep from feeling like a great big zero (see “job,” above). He is proud of his band, almost as proud as he is of the fact that he has managed to stay married to the same (beautiful, intelligent) woman for 27 years.

Larry Jones is a regular guy. He is not holed up in a primitive cabin with an assault rifle, two years’ supply of canned goods and a portable Smith-Corona, feverishly pounding out 800-page manifestos (manifestoes? manifestum? manifestae?) and paranoiac conspiracy theories.

You might want to take Larry Jones with a grain of salt. After all, he’s been politically liberal since the first time he gave that sort of thing any serious thought. He understands that not everyone shares his world view, and he can live with that. But Larry Jones has been around a long time, he’s lived through various wars, natural disasters, economic ups and downs and multiple swings of the political pendulum, and he’s not kidding when he tells you that things are getting vewy vewy scwewy.

He’s trying not to panic, but chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island are breaking off from the ice caps, hundreds of kilos of plutonium are missing, the United States government is torturing people, the world’s banks are trying to keep the lid on a collapse that will make the Great Depression look like fun, and when he looks around everybody is buying 42-inch flat panel high-definition TV’s and acting as if nothing’s the matter.

So Larry Jones tries to maintain, and asks your forgiveness if he sometimes seems a little jumpy.

I’m a big fan of digging holes.

You need a hole for some reason — maybe to plant a tree, or put in a post, bury some incriminating evidence, or any old reason — grab a shovel and get diggin’. Burn off some calories, build a little upper body strength, relieve some of those unsavory antisocial aggressive tendencies, and when you’re done, look! There’s a hole. You don’t have to allow three weeks for delivery, you don’t have to wait for the check to clear. It’s more or less instant gratification. You wanted a hole, you got a hole. Toss in that recently fired .45 and cover it up. Satisfying.

Same with doing the dishes, or mopping the kitchen floor. These are tasks with clearly defined goals that you can achieve in a known amount of time, and when they’re done, they’re done. I’m not saying it’s fun doing these things. I’m saying it’s satisfying, actually being able to complete something in this world that’s grown so complex. Now that I’ve made these counterintuitive statements, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to find out that I also consider ironing a satisfying enterprise.

Which brings us, inexorably, to women’s clothes.

Most of the time I wear low-maintenance clothes. Zero-maintenance, even. T-shirts and Levi’s, mostly, but my work shirts must be ironed. I’m probably the only guy at HugeCorp who irons his own shirts, and as soon as they start paying me The Big Bucks I’ll start sending my shirts out for cleaning and pressing, light starch in the collars, please. In the meantime I have the pleasure of a weekly task that has a clearly defined and totally attainable goal: flat shirts. Instant gratification. Until Mrs. Jones brings me a few of her things to iron.

What is the deal with these blouses? Ruffles, pleats, darts, plackets, stays, lining, appliqués, facings, lacy decorations… The care instructions always tell you to “…use warm iron, if necessary…” (emphasis mine — I’m sure they mean that ironically). And the fabrics: rayon, satin, acrylic, polyester, microfiber — what is microfiber, anyway? Of course, everything has a little dollop of spandex in it, too.

First of all, I need broad expanses of wrinkled cotton in front of my iron. Wrinkled, perhaps, but, you know, simple. Ironable. These little ladies’ tops rarely have enough acreage anywhere on them even to accommodate the footprint of the iron, much less room to move it around. As soon as I move it I run into a flap of something on a different plane of existence, something that gets wrinkled even as the original surface is getting unwrinkled. And how do you iron a ruffle? Answer: One square millimeter at a time.

So I mince around on these dainty little patches of fabric with my big East German steam iron. Have you ever ironed anything with a “warm” iron? I use steam on my work shirts, show ’em who’s boss. They start to flatten out as soon as they so much as hear the big Rowenta snarling and hissing. But on the “warm” setting there can be no steam, and I am defeated by the delicate little things. No matter how many times I go over the same space, and no matter how hard I press down, I can’t get that crisp, like-new look and feel. I believe this is proof that designers don’t iron.

When I’m done with Mrs. Jones’ blouses, I hang them up in the doorway and look at them, and they just don’t look very good. I don’t mind doing the work, but I don’t get much satisfaction. Well, that’s not entirely true, because eventually I’ll get to see one of them on the beautiful Mrs. Jones, and then I remember that not all gratification is instant.

In the meantime I think I’ll go plant a tree.

Twenty minutes to midnight on a Thursday.

Lately I’ve been conking out at midnight. It’ll probably happen again tonight. I’ll type until it does.

They say the Devil Winds will return this weekend. It’ll be weirdly hot in the daytime, desert-cold at night. Everything that happens now must be looked at as if Global Warming is to blame. Who knows? I can honestly say that I won’t be around to suffer the worst of it. I’m too old. You kids, though — you should be screwing in more CFL‘s, and getting out of those big SUV’s. Ride your bikes to work. I’ve thought about riding a bicycle to work. But it’s fifteen miles. I might be able to handle that much of a ride, but I’d get to work all sweaty and wearing those tight little bicycle shorts. I don’t have locker room facilities there, so I’d look silly all day, and smell, too. It would be a good smell, though. The honest sweat of a hard-peddlin’ man. What the hell — nothing I could do now could make them think I’m any kookier.

The band is taking up most of my non-sleeping, non-eating, non day-gigging hours. I’m having fun, but I miss my bloggin’ buddies. In some ways I’ve missed them since the beginning. By them, I mean “you”. Maybe I’m lonelier than I think I am. Would that be possible? To think you’re not lonely, but actually be lonely? I know I never seem to get enough of people, even though they are maddening, unmanageable creatures. I’m certainly getting my fill of real live people these days, because I am an Entertainer. I sing for them. The ones who don’t like it never tell me. I only hear from the ones who enjoy it, so my head’s getting real big. Sometimes it expands so much that I have to lie down and think of Joe Dimaggio for a while, so it will subside enough to let me get through the door. Ha ha, just kidding. I have to think of Sandy Koufax.

I’ve been a blogger for three years now. I heard about blogs and I started reading them in the summer of 2004, and I developed an unnatural fascination with this one blogger chick named Melissa, and the Presidential election was coming up, which I thought I had important things to say about, so in October of that year I signed up with Blogger and started posting. I was unable to influence the outcome of the election, and I never got anywhere useful with Melissa, who turned out to be sort of an illusion anyway. The following year I wrote a political protest song expressing my feelings about the election (and associated crap), and I’m still going to write a song about Melissa, try to get a little closure there. President Bush will have his presidential library, and Melissa will be immortalized in song.

I think they’d both like that, going forward.

The city never burns.

It’s made of steel and glass, asphalt and concrete. Even the rivers are paved. When there’s a fire here, it’s started with gasoline, fueled by toxic chemicals and old tires. Nature doesn’t have the tools to burn us here in our fortress.

But if you venture outside the walls, as many of us have, if you build your house of sticks out in the canyons or on the surrounding ridges, if you are so brazen and presumptuous as to think that the world owes you a view, of the sea, of the mountains, of the stars at night, then you’d better be ready to run. Spiders will bite you, coyotes will eat your cats, mountain lions will stalk you and poison ivy, Lord’ll make you itch.

We’ll build a road out there for you, and we’ll string wires, and you may feel as if you’re still part of the city, but there are different rules out there. One day all the moisture will be gone from the air, and the trees and brush will get brittle. The animals will be jumpy with foreboding and a hot wind will start to blow in from the desert and the brown, cracked leaves on the ground will start to swirl, trees will bend in half from the roaring wind and after a while one of your wires will fall, spraying sparks, and God help you if you don’t catch it in time.

We’ve put out too many little fires, we’ve tampered with the natural order of things, and we will atone.

Back here on the pavement, I can’t see any fire, except on television, like the rest of the country. I might see more of it because here everything is preempted for fire coverage, hours and hours of pictures of things burning, soot-covered men in yellow suits, water-dropping airplanes and helicopters, reporters on the scene, wearing goggles and face masks, endless reports of road closures and — hooray! — road openings, the Governor giving grim interviews in front of a fire engine while evacuees pour out of the hills, 500,000 of them so far.

It’s like the bad old days of the 1960’s here now. You can see the air. It coats the inside of your mouth and shrouds the sun, casting the city in an orange-grey shadow. Soot and ash are everywhere, but the business of the city, getting and spending, goes on. Yesterday on the freeway on the way to work I saw a mile-long convoy of fire trucks and ambulances going in the opposite direction, in the carpool lane, heading for Orange County, the vehicles painted the many colors of several different fire departments. They were on the other side of the divider, but my side of the freeway bogged down for ten minutes because of it. People have to look. They can’t help themselves.

But I’m fine. The temperature will be below the nineties today, not that I’ve noticed in my air-conditioned office. I’ll be singing for the people tonight. I have a little extra stuff in my throat and lungs, but I think I can do it, and I think the people will ignore the disaster and come out to party.

It’s not the apocalypse. Just a preview.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept:

Reconcile the following two oft-heard statements.

A. “Lift only with your knees.”

B. “The knees are the first to go.”