January 1, 2023 10:30 AM

This following is based on the findings of Frank Martela, University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland. This is just my little riff on his core ideas.

1. Look not to yourself for comfort, but rather help others in some way. An example is taking care of your kids, which takes you out of yourself. By losing yourself, you gain a return – you get something back:

Love of love, and love of life, and giving without measure.

Gives in return a wondrous yearn of a promise yet unseen. (Justin Hayward)

2. Develop a creative outlet to express yourself. Like writing, or painting, or maybe, again, by helping others and becoming part of a group, or dancing or walking in the woods.

It’s a great year coming, or maybe not. Still, there’s hope. And all we need is an edge.

I wrote this after listening to Marty Robbins sing “The Big Iron” from an album of cowboy tunes: Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. Here’s the link:

https://youtu.be/zzICMIu5zFY

The Big Iron is, of course, a reference to the gun on Marty’s hip but also to the guy’s manhood, so to speak. And they were all rough tough men. When I was a kid, I worshipped these cowboys – Chuck Conners, Paladin, Johnny Yuma, Steve McQueen, the cook on Wagon Train, etc.

One time I went with my older brother Pat on an American Legion–sponsored trip: a big load of kids and several American Legionnaires sitting up front and jabbering with the driver. We were going to a rodeo up by Rockford or some such. Of course they told us to pee before we left because it was a long drive and we didn’t have a bathroom or even a pissoir. Well, us kids were O.K. with that, but one Legionnaire had to pee real bad at some point, and we were on a tight schedule – the driver didn’t want to stop. So, this is what they did: The bus driver opened the door with the bus going down the road at about 60 miles an hour. Then two guys held onto the urinator’s belt while he leaned out the door and took a whiz. Now that was impressive!

Then we got to the rodeo and saw the show, and afterwards we got to meet the featured TV cowboy, whose name I can’t remember. I think he did some roping tricks between events (bulldogging, steer-pitching, and so forth). All the kids gathered around him and looked at him with awe. I was close enough to touch his gun, but I didn’t. It looked pretty powerful. After that, some kids were saying, “I touched him! I touched him!” So I went and got back in the bus and sat next to my brother, who was waiting to leave. I said, “Hey, I touched him!” He turned and said, “So what?” He was a cool cat.

I was out at Ponca State Park in Nebraska some years ago, camping on a really cold night. It was early spring and early for camping too, but I was living life on the edge and whatnot, wanted to get out of town, so there I was. I positioned my small tent in a slight draw to keep under the wind and got settled in and actually got some sleep. In the morning I had the usual – eggs and bread and coffee – and then I straightened things out and set off to look around the park.

From one corner of the park the doors of perception creaked open, and I could see into a couple of other states, including one wherein dwelt the Gateway computer factory, silently churning out devices to ensnare the unaware and lay the foundations of today’s present awful state of affairs. In another state I saw the peaks and spires of the castles of Mordor. I wasn’t quite awake.

I turned away and walked another path that led me to an old abandoned house, and, as per usual I decided to check it out. In one room was a double bed with a single mattress on top, speaking of a dreaded and desperate loneliness, and in another, bigger room was a piano. Time slowed and an inivisble clock tick-tocked.

It was a big old piano, an upright that must have weighed a ton. I guess over the years I started to view pianos by their tonnage after moving a lot of uprights from here to there, and as I got older it got rougher. I had a small console piano back home – a Starck made in Chicago that had a great sound – but these old pianos, corrupted by time . . . they all play great in my dreams, but here I am right now in the waking state . . .

I walked over and hit a key, and it sounded just like this:

Bloomington IL 61701
February 23, 2020

Ambient ambiance: In the 50s and real sunny right in the virtual middle of the winter

I was walking up the nearest moraine right through the nearby alley when I spotted a feller in a long coat doing something or other – smokin’, I reckon – and also talkin’ to someone hidden from my view behind a utility pole of some sort.

The feller spotted me about the same time I spotted him, and we both narrowed our eyes in the manner of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” or so I imagined. But only for a moment – a quick moment, or a mini-moment.

Well, it was real quick, as we both realized there was no reason to get excited. Behind the utility pole sat a woman all bundled up in a long coat and scarf and whatnot and smoking a cigarette hard, but I heard her coughing before I actually saw her. She was coughin’ to beat the band, like she had bronchitis, so when I saw her, I said, “Huh, are you feeling a little peeked today?”

She said, “I don’t know that word – pee-ked? What does that mean?” “Well, ” says I, “it means yer feelin’ a little poorly. Maybe you have a cold?”

“No,” she says, taking another heavy draw off her cigarette. “Nothing like that” (Hack Hack). “I don’t know what it could be.”

“Say,” I says, turning to the fellow in the long coat, which was a really nice trench coat, “That’s a nice coat. Sharp.”

As I am admiring the coat, I see he has on *another* coat that’s wrapped around his waist and tied in front. It was a brown bomber jacket that looked like it needed a fresh coat of shoe polish. He had the front of the trench coat open and I could see a long scarf and under that a sweater and then what looked to be a shirt and under that a heavy T-shirt. He smiled a big smile and said, “All layered up.”

I turned away and prepared to continue my hike up the alley-moraine. The gal coughed Hack Hack! “Don’t know what it could be,” she said, and I said, “Take ‘er easy” and walked off.

Says I to myself a few steps later, “I know what it could be – that damn CIGARETTE YER SMOKIN’.”

smoke smoke smoke that cigarette

Friday, April 22, 2022

Hey, Scott – I went out to Sugar Grove this afternoon and while I didn’t spend too much time out there, I got into the simple qualitative experience of it: I take great delight in appreciating the holy temple out there (Stubblefield Woods), and I could smell the smell of spring – I really could. I don’t think I’ve smelled it before, but that’s what it was. Then after I identified several plants, I saw a bee land on the Spring Beauties and start doing his bee thing.

Then I just sat on a stump for a bit.

The question: Why is it awkward when another man walks into a public bathroom while you’re pooping? (Posed by someone on Quora online)

That isn’t so awkward: everybody shits – you’re just another guy shitting. What’s awkward is having women come in while you’re shitting. Just such a scene happened to me when I was attending a large faith-healing show at the International Amphitheater in Chicago about some years ago. The star of the show was the famous Canadian faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman. I witnessed some very unChristian-like behavior – for example, ushers diving for spilled money baskets and ladies invading the men’s rooms because their shorter urethras couldn’t stand waiting in lines at the women’s rooms.

I was sitting on a terlet in a stall in one of the men’s rooms when a mess of angry women came in and told all the men to get out. Since I was only about halfway through with my business, I wasn’t going to make a hasty move – it would have been too dangerous. So I put my feet up on the door to prevent anyone from opening it on me. Yes, I put my feet up and braced myself against the female tide.

The gals went from stall to stall throwing the men out, but when they got to my place, no one could budge the door. Somebody even looked under the door to see if anyone was in there. Of course, my feet were against the door, so they didn’t see any feet. The woman called out, “This one’s stuck!” And I simply relaxed and took my time with the job at hand.

When I finished I got up, opened the door, and walked out through the crowd of women. Then I walked out of the men’s room into another crowd of astonished men. I never got saved that day, but I saved my own ass from those women.

Break Time

Mr. and Mrs. Friendly & Niece & the Purtiest Cat You’ll Ever See

Mrs. Friendly accosted me from the front seat of the roadster pictured here as I walked up a hill toward the town of Conception’s water tower. I had excused myself from the other retreatants at nearby Conception Abbey after they broke their fast by drinking mimosas outside the seminary church. She had seen me taking a picture from lower on the hill, and she called out, “Hey, are you the person fixing up that new place over there?” “No,” I said, “I’m just passing through. “Well, where are ya from?” she asked. “From Lincoln, Nebraska,” I said.

“You walked from there!?” she asked in astonishment. “No,” I said. “I drove down in my car.” “Come ta see the church?” she asked further. “Yep,” I said. “Stayin’ a couple of nights.”

“Here comes my niece,” she said as a seven- or eight-year-old girl came walking up and plopped herself in the back seat of the car next to a stack of elementary school books. I spied a grade 6 science book, so maybe the kid was older than she looked. A pair of fuzzy white dice hung from the rear-view mirror. “She’s getting over a broken ankle,” the woman said. “Ya see, I had a thirty-pound tumor removed from my stomach and I was at the doctor’s office and I passed out and fell on her.” She said all of this quite matter-of-factly.

Meanwhile, from lower down on the hill comes a guy who looks like he is the grandfather of the group, and he says to the woman, “You want to take that cat with ya?” The woman says, “Sure do,” and as the guy turns around to go back down the hill, she says, “Oh, that’s the purtiest cat you’ll ever see.” “It’s got tiger stripes!” says the niece. “Yeah,” says the lady, “tiger stripes and two big spots of orange on its hindquarters!”

I looked up to the house that the car was parked outside of and saw kind of a dimwitted guy come out on the front door. I waved and said “Hello.” The guy said hello and looked a little puzzled and shy and went back into the house. There were several cats wandering around on the porch and in the yard in front of the house, and there were two dogs lying under the rear end of a pickup truck, much like hogs in a wallow, though there wasn’t any water in the wallow and it wasn’t even hot out. The bigger dog looked at me over his shoulder kind of mournfully and thumped his tail some. I thought, “That is one mournful and timid dog.” Then as he got up and shifted around, I saw that the mournful and timid dog was also quite overweight (just like Brother Tom and the tall fat lady I had been jabbering with back at the retreat center).

“That’s some dog you got there,” I said. The dog looked like Old Yeller in his later, debauched-Elvis stage. “Oh, that’s Old Duke,” she said. “He got shot in the eye, but he gets by O.K.” Old Duke lumbered over to me while the little girl sort of jumped around him and said, “Hiya, Duke!” The other dog, a frisky Scotch Terrier, jumped up and tried to get my attention. “That’s Blondie,” the lady said.

“Say,” she says, “Are you taking pictures of everything around here?” I says, no, I just took a distance shot of the Conception water tower, one of those 100-foot-tall straight up-and-down things (a standpipe), and I was on my way to take a close-up shot. “That tower,” she said, “If it falls, it’ll smash our house to pieces.” “Yeah,” I said, “and keep on sliding down the hill to that house where that fella has gone to get the cat.”

By this time, the scene was so darn cute – the little girl, the dogs, the dice in the window, the somewhat mentally askew woman stretched out half-in, half-out of the big cruiser – that I said, “Say, can I take your picture?”

She said, “Shore. I better get out of the car” (though I really wanted the car in the shot). She swung herself out, looking like the doctor had forgotten to take the other thirty-pound tumor out of her stomach, and said, “Now wait for my husband.” So that was her husband, not her father, coming up the hill in a fluorescent seed cap and carrying a scrawny little kitten in one hand.

I thought that maybe he wouldn’t want his picture taken, but he said sure. The girl had handed me the kitten to look at its orange tiger stripes, and I said, “That’s some cat,” then handed it to the guy, who threw it in the back seat of the car.

I then had them stand in front of the trunk of the car and asked them to get the dogs in there with them too. (Actually, I would have liked to have gotten all the four or five cats in there too, but there was only so much time to fart around.) They all said Cheese and were real happy to have gotten their picture taken. I said I would send them a copy, which I fully intended to do. (I later did send them a copy, and they wrote back a nice letter.)

More than anything – well, maybe along with a nice shot of the interior of the basilica of Conception Abbey – meeting those folks was the best part of my spiritual adventure of the weekend. So there!

Way Back When, in the 90s
Halfway to Somewhere, Iowa

The guy was wearing blue jeans, an army jacket, and a baseball cap. He took off his cap to reveal close-cropped graying hair. His face was lean and muscular, and his eyes were bright.

“Do you want me to strap in?” he asked as I hooked up my seatbelt. I said yes, and as he hunted for the belt, he said, “Never use ‘em myself. I was in the paratroopers in the war, and I don’t like to use ‘em. If I’m on a plane, I want to sit in the back and not wear a seatbelt. If something happens, I want to get out of there fast. Ya know, they can’t force you to use one. Most plane accidents take place on landing or taking off, so what I do, I just go up to the first-class section.”

“You mean on a commercial airliner?” I asked, noting that he had put the shoulder strap over the wrong shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said, and then adjusted the strap after I pointed out the correct position.

The guy then started rapping about how he was going to Fargo, North Dakota, to join a pro-life church group called the Lambs of God. He said some of the head guys were in jail in San Antonio for trying to rescue babies: i.e., to prevent women from entering abortion clinics, most likely. He said, “They don’t like it in Texas when you go in and try to disrupt their industry. And that’s what abortion is – a baby-killing industry!”

He said he was a construction worker and had also worked in the steel trades in Pennsylvania, where he was from originally. I told him I was an editor, originally from Illinois.

“When I was in prison,” he said, “I met a guy who was a good writer. He’s originally from Germany, and he saw all his family killed by the Nazis. He wrote a book called Acquiescence to Slaughter. Yes, that’s the name, Acquiescence to uh . . . Slaughter. It’s about the state of things in America today. You can see a connection between a Nazi state and the way things are today.”

I thought of things Walker Percy had written or said about the connection between the Nazis’ ideas and practices of “purifying the state” and euthanasia, and present-day practices of abortion, but I didn’t say anything. This guy scared me some, and I wanted to get off the subject he was riding hard. Then, out of nowhere, he mentioned talking to Colleen Dewhurst, and that was my opportunity.

“Colleen Dewhurst! She was married to George C. Scott! You met her?” I asked.

“Hell, yes,” he said, “Right on a park bench in New York City. You’re liable to run into anybody down in the Village!”

“Ah,” I think to myself, “A former steelworker who has hung out in the Village and talked with Colleen Dewhurst. Pretty interesting.”

“Hey, ya know,” I said, “I saw this great movie that Colleen Dewhurst was in—.”

“Queen of the Rebels?” he interjected.

 “Nah, it was a movie where George C. Scott played a guy who used to drive a getaway car for the Mob in America, but he retires to Spain. The film opens with him driving a sports car . . . “

“The Last Run!” he says, “Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s a good movie.”

“Yeah, well in that film Colleen Dewhurst plays a prostitute that George C. Scott visits when he gets restless, and also there’s another woman that he gets mixed up with. He actually had an affair with this woman and he dumped Colleen Dewhurst and married the other woman, whose name I can’t remember.”

“Trish Van Devere,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s it, Trish Van Devere!” I say. (Obviously I’m pretty excited at this point. I don’t often have such scintillating conversations on the road.)

“I remember her because she’s better looking than Colleen Dewhurst!” he says.

“Well,” I say, “I like Colleen Dewhurst.”

“Ah, she’s O.K., I guess,” he says. “I was standing in line to see Queen of the Rebels in New York, and I saw her sneaking in the, you know . . .”

“The back door?” I asked.

“Yeah, the back door!” he says, “I thought of accosting her, but I didn’t. Later on, when I actually met her, she struck me as being one of these types, ya know, they look down on you . . .” He makes a gesture of looking down his nose.

“A snob,” I say.

“Yeah, that’s it! A snob!” he says excitedly. “She was a snob!” he laughs.

Here’s The Last Run:

https://youtu.be/iW9lCnna1Qg

. . .

From this we go into more movie talk. His favorites: Triumph of the Will, by Leni . . . what’s her name? Eisenmueller? I say. “Riefenstahl,” he says. “Yeah, what about the 1936 Olympics?” “Hmmm,” I say. “I thought maybe you meant that D.W. Griffith film about racism in America [Birth of a Nation].” “No, don’t know that one,” he says. “How about The Little Emperor, Chaplin’s last film? It’s great – he plays five different parts.”

(NOTE: He means The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin played the dual roles of a Jewish barber and the Hitler-like Adenoid Hynkel.)

“I’ve seen the part where he plays Hitler and dances around,” I say.

“You’ve seen the movie then?” he asks.

“Nah, just the part where he plays Hitler and dances around and stamps his feet.”

(NOTE from future self: Sounds like Trump.)

. . .

Somehow we got into famous last words, and I told him a lot of stuff about Tolstoy and about The Last Station, about how Tolstoy fell into a suicidal state in mid-life and came out of it only after seeing that the Russian peasants were happy and content with their religion.

I tell more about Tolstoy’s own development of a radical Christianity and about the fight for his copyrights and how he and his wife read each other’s diaries and how he finally couldn’t take it anymore and just left one night with a flashlight and a fur coat, . . .

“With nothing else on?!” the guy asks, “Just a fur coat?” he laughs.

“Nah,” I say. “He had on his union suit.”

 . . .

He tells me about his times in Hollywood, where he trained to do or be something – perhaps a broadcaster – at the West Coast extension of Columbia College in Chicago, which had been founded by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater.

More film talk. Then he says, “I got a buddy who says films can’t portray two things correctly: combat and sex. Now, I tell ya, if you saw two people going at it out in that field, would you stop and look?”

I looked out on the big stretches of dirt and corn stubble. “Yeah,” I said, “I’d stop,” thinking about the pagan practice of copulating in the fields to ensure good fertility in the soil.

“C’mon,” he says, “You’d stop to see somebody screwing?”

“Yeah,” I said, my face reddening, “I’d stop.”

He laughs. “Well, at least you’re honest!” I got a buddy who tells me all about peeping at people having sex when he was a kid. And he names names!”

“You mean, like, the people he was peeping at?” I ask.

“Yeah!” he cackles. “The old man stickin’ the salami to the old lady! And how he sniffed panties hanging on the clothesline!” I notice that the spittle at the corners of his mouth is collected there, building up froth.

“Hey, ya know?” he says. “You’re a good conversationalist, ya know that? Some people just talk about themselves, ya know? They get into, what do ya call it?—a diatribe—ya know? They just talk about themselves!” He laughs.

. . .

Here’s the turnoff to Onawa, thank God. This has all been quite interesting, and I tell the guy that, but sniffing panties and watching the old man stick the salami to the old lady are about my limit.

I pull the car off the road and put on the hazard lights, and we go back to get the guy’s gear out.

“Ya know,” he says, “It’s been said that ‘Big people talk about big things, and average-size people talk about things, and little people just talk big!”

And I’m not sure whether he’s got the quote right, or how it flows from the conversation we’ve had about cripples being ultra-sensitive and carrying chips on their shoulders, or about Karl, “a sawed-off German actor” he knew in Hollywood, or the snobbery of Colleen Dewhurst or the neo-Fascism in America today, but I shake his hand and he’s off down the road to Fargo.

I reckon it all might make sense, one of these days.

https://youtu.be/s261QD8iEro

I was at the gym and I said hello to the somewhat older feller who was checking in next to me.

“How are ya?” I said. He says, “Good, and you?” I says, “Pretty good” with a positive tilt, as many take “pretty good” for less than good.

Then he says, “I can only say that I’m good, because I’m not pretty.” He says that with a smile.

“Well, ” I smile back, “I know I’m pretty.” And we both laugh.

Once again the world was spinning in greased grooves.

https://youtu.be/JRKr4AVdAgo