Author Archives: oinsketta

Phantom Run, ironic

As my fingers involuntarily clicked on the stats tab, I saw I had another email.  The stats said zero, the email said Chelsea had liked my post, Avoiding the Shutout, which went up a few hours ago.

I refreshed my stats.  Still zero.  Yet Chelsea had sent me a “liked it” email from wordpress.   Ironic that she found the one about barely avoiding being shut out awesome, while somehow not showing up in today’s stats to break up today’s shutout.

So am I on the scoreboard, as it would appear, or still being shut out, as the stats insist?

Avoiding the Shutout

In baseball a shutout occurs when the losing team scores exactly zero runs.   Excitement mounts in the stands, in TV Radio and Internet land, during the waning moments of a 1-0 game.  If the team being shut out scores even one run the game will be tied, the shutout lost.  No team wants to be shut out, it adds insult to injury, as the saying goes.  Better to lose 5-1 than being shut out 5-0.

I was thinking about this late yesterday as I glanced at my stats page.  On the stats page I see a running tally of the individuals who look at this blahg.   I don’t know why I glance at my stats page, it has become a tic.  That kind of tic is the reason I don’t keep a phone with the internet in my pocket.     I started writing on this blahg on August 2.  I don’t know why I do that either, except that I love to write, and good writing takes practice, and that I daydream, sometimes, about being on a public radio talk show discussing my breakthrough book with a perceptive host.   Maybe I’d also jump up and down on Oprah’s couch talking about this remarkable book that, like my fascinating organization for largely doomed poor children, resides entirely in my head.   

Anyway, every time I checked how many people had read my recent posts the answer was the same, none.   “I’m being shut out,” I thought, as other perplexing thoughts wheeled through my head, illuminating the truly puny magnitude of my concern for the stats of gratituousblahg.   An hour later the tally was still zero, as it was six hours later.  At around 11 I checked the stats, and I was still being shut out.

“I got shut out,” I said to myself, glumly, going about some other business shortly before midnight.  It would break a streak of at least one person reading these words since August 2.

Apparently, though, just as the day was about to end, some time right before the stroke of midnight, the shutout was broken up.  I had one reader yesterday.

“Yes!” I said out loud, for no reason I could grasp, except that the sports metaphor had really taken root.

Today, so far, I’m being shut out again, and so soon after setting high water marks for readers in a day and in a week.  Well, like Robbie Cano’s torrid and cool season shows, these things go in cycles.  Maybe I’ll be 5 for 5 tomorrow, eh, Coach?

Lack of Focus

The best way to do five things badly is to multitask.  With the TV on, other tabs on the computer screen updating as you write, another device displaying messages with a tone each time a new one arrives, music in the next room loud enough to hear, and a radio playing for good measure, you might find yourself mystified that you forgot what you came into the next room to do.

“I’m losing it,” you might think, not realizing that the “it” is focus, simply remembering to shut off four of the five devices.   Shut off five of them.  There is enough noise without any of them on.

Humans in complex societies are masses of twitching nerves set off by chafing or wistful memories, the many demands of the fleeting moment and often agitated thoughts of the many possible near and distant futures ahead.  Focus is elusive, it has to be practiced every day to have a fighting chance of taking root.  

But you don’t need my blinking, trite words to remind you of that.  Besides, four other things are demanding  our twitchy attention, yea, five other things.

What was I saying?  More importantly, what did I fail to hear this time.

The Puckish Nature of the World

I wrote here a while back about a friend I’d lost touch with who has the annoying habit of writing a witty email every few years, engagingly asking for feedback or a favor.  The feedback is given, the favor done, and then years pass without a peep from him.  It has earned him the enmity of more than one person I know and I’ve been fairly disgusted by it.

He was recently in town and I mulled over responding to his insistent, twice sent email seeking to get together when he was in town.  I replied, mentioned surgery around the time he’d be in NY, he replied, uncharacteristically, and said he’d write more soon.  A few weeks passed, then his itinerary arrived, which I treated with a healthy dose of silence.    

A few days later I had a voicemail from him, arrived in NY hours earlier,  posing as my surgeon, inquiring about my recovery, trusting it was smooth and pain-free, then pleasantly telling me that he and his wife were at my service and would come to me at any time and place convenient for me.   I took another oxycodone and drifted off without calling back.   Seven hours later his next message arrived.  I mulled over listening to it, decided against it, watched TV, wrote a few emails, took more drugs, drifted off again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t listen to the message yet,” a friend said the next day.  I really wasn’t that curious.  I knew over time the messages would be tinged deeper and deeper with the hurt tones of someone forced to keep drinking their own medicine.  I thought about it, when I did think about it, as the 8 year-olds in Harlem used to, when a bully met someone who hurt him and was crying.   “Good for you,” they’d call out to the crying kid, while hiding their identities.  

I eventually sobered up, decided that my sadistic inaction, pleasant though it was, and justified as it might have been, was not of a piece with the gentle stance I have been trying to maintain.  I called him back, informed him that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get together with him and we proceeded to have a pleasant chat.  It turned out the infinite flexibility would all occur on a certain day, the day before they left, and that was a complicated day for me.  If there was any question of exerting myself to get together with them, the limited time frame made it impossible.  

But all this tedious background is for this.  He told me at one point, as we discussed my animation program that has just crept its first fins on to land and is about to close up the gills and breathe air for the first time, that he’d been in a one-day animation workshop in a summer program in a San Francisco art museum as a boy and had never forgotten it. 

“I remember almost nothing from before I was about 14,” he said, “but I have vivid memories of how cool it was, at ten, to draw these crude things on cels and then see them played back as animation.  I remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the program and watching the animation I’d done on a big screen, and how amazing and exciting it was.  I remember it 45 years later, and almost nothing else from that time in my life.  So it made a huge impression and I’m sure the kids lucky enough to be in your workshop will have a similar experience.”

Wow, I thought.  What a great little sound byte to record and use to promote the program.  

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s been great talking to you.  We’ve missed you and are sad we won’t get to see you, but we understand, it’s a short trip and your operation and all.  But,” and his voice got very tender and sincere “let’s stay in touch.  You know, we should email and talk on the phone once in a while.”  He sounded, for all the world,  like a person who actually did these kinds of things and I managed to say “sure, that would be nice,” instead of laughing in his face and telling him how hilarious he was.

“Oh, listen, send me your latest animations, I love them.  And I’ll send you feedback and stay in touch,” he said, and again I managed not to spoil the mood by guffawing like a donkey.

The next day I sent him the latest animations with a short note about his great story of being a ten year-old animator for a day.  I told him the story would make a great promo and suggested we get a recording of him telling it.   I let him know how nice it was to hear from him.  

That was only two weeks ago.  It’s not that I expect to hear back from him, I just think it’s another great example of the puckish nature of the world, if you look at it the right way.

We go to war with the army we have

And so we embarked, on a boat, into an atmospherically perfect morning.  That I had slept less than two hours was not even on my mind as I let a comrade drink what would have been my second cup of coffee.

We go to war with the army we have, and the armaments too.  We went into battle armed with a guitar, two ukuleles, a small portable keyboard and a tiny external speaker.  And we put up a hell of a fight there on the beachhead.  Hell of a fight, boys.

Skunkie

Walking back from the all night grocery store with a small bag (which says “be the change” on it)  I turned up Cumming, a quiet one block street that leads to the famous corner where it joins Seaman.  It was 2 a.m. and garbage was set out in black plastic bags for early morning pick up.  Looking ahead and to my left I saw an odd looking cat moving among the garbage bags.

Strange looking cat, I thought as I got closer, with that wide beige back, and the dark fur everywhere else, the pointy face is not a cat’s face, nor that stripe on his head, nor cat ears, and what an odd splayed tail.

“Skunkie,” I said casually as the wild animal eyed me momentarily.  I noticed the skunk’s back was toward me, in position, and thought for a second “please, don’t spray me, man.”   I was like that kid getting tasered because he’d worn a t-shirt insulting to a powerful politician.  Don’t tase me, bro.

The skunk, satisfied that I was not going to try to pet him or otherwise molest him, that I was staying to my side of the narrow sidewalk, walking away at a steady but not alarming clip, looked after me to make sure I was serious about avoiding a show-down, and then went back to looking for dinner in the loose collection of plastic garbage bags, very businesslike.

I thought of another gentleman skunk I’d seen in the neighborhood a few years ago.  This one stepped out between two parked cars to cross Seaman Avenue, not far in front of my bike, also long after midnight.  I slowed, and the skunk, very self-assured, paused to look at me.   His look seemed to say “you know who I am, you know what I can do.  I say you move nice and slow and I walk across the avenue to my buffet.”   I agreed at once, waited straddling my bike as he unhurriedly crossed the wide avenue and disappeared among the black plastic bags.

To this day I’m convinced that skunk was the spirit of Sekhnet’s father, Sammy.  It was just after the good-looking, dapper 92 year-old died and my first thought, seeing the good-looking intelligent face of that skunk, calculating and shrewd, was that Sammy’s  spirit was visiting me in the person of this handsome little forest creature out for some human food on a Wednesday night.  When I told the story to Sekhnet she had no doubt her father had contacted me in the person of the skunk.

I’d almost forgotten this annoying slice of NYC life

Luckily I had my notes from 9/7:

I took the C local uptown because there were plenty of seats, the A was crowded, and I could take the C, a slightly slower boat, to 168th where I could switch to the A for the short last leg of the ride to Dyckman Street.

As these things often happen, the C train inexplicably stopped in the tunnel a few hundred feet from the last stop, 168th Street, the stop where I’d catch the A for the five minute ride home.   The train sat in darkness for three or four minutes, the engines silent.  Suddenly the engines rumbled to life, the train lurched forward two or three feet, then stopped again, and went silent.  Another few minutes passed.  Though I had nowhere to be, this was annoying, since it would likely mean missing the connecting A train and waiting another ten or fifteen minutes for the next one.  For nothing.

The speaker started crackling, the conductor about to begin a belated apology for the delay.  Before he could even thank us for our patience the train rolled slowly into 168th Street.  Very slowly, but not slowly enough that I didn’t see the A train across the platform, its doors closed, poised, either just having pulled in or just about to pull out.  

It happened in slow motion.  We sat on our side of the platform, with our doors closed, looking at the immobile A train, with its doors closed.  If we were pirates we could have swung easily from one train to the other, daggers in our teeth.  

In the way of such things the doors of the C took a minute to open at that last stop and the A train, after waiting with doors closed for just long enough to give hope, pulled slowly out, towards my stop five minutes up the line.

The conductor of the C, its run now at an end, was looking out his window and I took the opportunity to vent to him a bit.  “Did you see that A train leave right as we pulled in?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said pleasantly, “I didn’t notice it.  It was odd that they had us waiting in the tunnel, you know, because we were already late.”  Clearly he worked for a messed up transit authority and didn’t get too bent out of shape when stupid things happened. 

I smiled at the conductor, who seemed like a pleasant enough fellow.  “It’s frustrating that the A didn’t wait another fifteen seconds and now I’ll wait 15 minutes for the next one,” I opined.  He nodded, thoughtfully.  Then I had another annoying thought, “and we can’t even assault you guys any more.”

I was referring to the new law of the last few years making it a felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison, to slap or punch a conductor or bus driver who closes a door in your face or otherwise dares you to be indignant or unruly.

The conductor gave me a big smile and in the same NY second retracted his head and slid his window shut.  I smirked and settled in for my wait on the broiling, airless platform.

On the A train

heading uptown

with new brushes

black ink

the entire universe

anything that cannot be said

by pausing

string bent

to lay a bit of

succulent silence

against the beat

 

on cue

tres payasos

in cowboy hats

clubbing a Mexican beat

to death

with upright bass

buzzing twelve string

and a squeeze box

 

Mama

don’t let your baby

grow up to be a payaso

with a squeeze box.