Experimental embedding of an audio file. Check it out, the opening scene of Shagsbee’s Julius Caesar, with a bit of crude improvisation by one of the rude mechanicals, and then some page flipping for a random soliloquy and some other chance dialogue. Apparently recorded on July 3, 1998.
Welcome to our virtual world
Some kind of spambots, which are now ubiquitous, diverse and ingeniously specialized, land on my website from time to time and leave me comments, designed to get me to click on links they send me. Posing as appreciative comments about my writing, the kind of comment most people are tickled to receive, they’re sent to generate hits on the sites they are promoting. Many of the rare “likes” I get for these posts lead me back to enterprising web entrepreneurs who describe how wonderful it is to write from Bali, Copenhagen, Goa, Prague, Florence as they make excellent money working when and where they want, writing for the internet.
All you need to do is create a blahg, a squeeze page, I think they call it, with affiliate links, backlinks, sidewinder links, they write using a jargon alien to me, but apparently very simple to master. They will teach you everything you need to know. Master this surprisingly simple craft and you can sit on a beach, or hotel room or in a cafe, anywhere in the world, and spend a few hours a day writing and watching substantial amounts of money flow into your electronic bank account. A few changes of underwear, your laptop and international chargers and power cords and you’re on your way. You will also find yourself losing weight, flab turning to muscle, meeting cool people, having tons more sex, laughing more, eating better, sleeping better, waking refreshed to have breathtaking adventures every day.
Funny or not, I get almost no direct comments on this blahg but several every week on the blahg for the upstart nonprofit I am trying to start up. The spambots for some reason home in on that mission driven nonprofit site rather than this gratuitous one. Many of their comments are in laughably machine-translated non-English advertising some very weird and specific products involving commercial concrete removal, aluminum, real-estate, diet pills. But I’ve had variations on this one a few times now, usually in response to posts of pictures or videos that have virtually no written content on them:
Comment:
I read a lot of interesting content here.
(Actual interesting content on this one was:
If he doesn’t start long jumping right away, click on him.
This neat leap was animated on 3-10-14 by a ten year-old at the Ella Baker School in NYC, using the amazing reference photos of Eadweard Muybridge taken in the 1880s.)
Probably you spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google – k2seotips unlimited content
Think of the hours I could save! I could use those hours to learn about and master affiliate marketing and try my program, untroubled by any funding concerns, two or three weeks at a time, in Africa, Asia, Iceland, spend the hours every day learning languages, mastering new musical instruments, collaborating with local musicians on every continent, working on my six pack abs. While high quality google friendly content is generated for me to maximize my audience and lead to my almost instant success in anything I try. What an increasingly wonderful world it is!
Perhaps my favorite recent comment is one I saw on the site of a business woman who occasionally has a spambot send me a message letting me know that she thought my thoughtful post was awesome and that I should check out what she’s up to. Clue number one on her site is her description of how the free site had been taken down once because she had violated the terms of use by promoting her businesses on the site, and that she had figured out a beautiful workaround she was generously sharing for others who wish to use the free platform for free, and powerful, advertising.
A commenter on that post referred to her, perhaps not entirely unfairly, as a “cunt”. The next commenter took that first one to task for saying something so harsh about someone who was trying to do something good. The first commenter wrote back, not without a certain hard humor. Other commenters joined, but after a while it was only the first guy, the one who’d called the scheming businesswoman a “cunt”, who was answering everybody.
Since high quality google friendly content (the post you’re reading now, actually) was being generated for me by robots of my own, I had the leisure to read the entire string of comments, and eventually came to a wonderful exchange that made the entire exercise worth more than I can say. I share it here:
A man who identified himself as a pastor wrote to the woman who’d thought his post was awesome and had invited him to visit her site. The pastor thanked her humbly and profusely for her appreciation of his writing. It was a wonderful thing, he said, to have one’s poetry and philosophy appreciated and she was clearly a bright and discerning woman and also, in his humble opinion, the creator and keeper of a very interesting and rewarding site that he would be visiting again soon. And a fine writer herself, if he might say so.
The next comment was from the clever trollish commenter who was the only one answering anything directed to the site. It is perhaps the best comment on this whole blogging business I’ve seen:
Look, “Pastor”. I’m the only one reading these comments and responding. There is no blogger here anymore. She set up an automated system that goes around and clicks LIKE on people’s wordpress posts. And, let me guess – that is how you found this blog. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no actual people read or like your posts.
Uncanny Echoes of Babel
The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.
My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets. I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.
This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”
(Vasye did not have mercy)
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor:
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.
A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.
He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”
And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”
I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:
“You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”
And so it goes
When I was in High School my father clipped out a very short piece by Kurt Vonnegut published in the New York Times. It was about how to write, and it was excellent. He began with the advice to always give the thing you are working on a title. This is the first step in framing what you want to say, and I have found it helpful. I don’t recall much else from his excellent advice, but that was help enough.
(Spent the last half hour searching the web in vain for that piece. If I ever turn it up, I’ll post it here.)
I have been reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. called “And So It Goes”. Engaging tome. I am reading about how diligently Vonnegut worked at his craft, how tirelessly he pursued a paid writing career. In passing I learn that he apparently played the piano well enough to execute Chopin’s Funeral March as the new owners walked up to the decrepit house he was selling. This is the second mention of him at the piano as an adult, with no explanation of how he knew how to play. During a time he should have been finishing a novel he’d long ago gotten an advance for, and when he was still completely unknown, he took a few days to build an 18 foot sculpture at a Boston International Airport restaurant. Huh? He took time to add many creative touches to his home in West Barnstable. We have no inkling where these skills came from but we learn that he was handy, he could build things, he had many creative interests. But mostly, he wrote.
I am reading about his struggles, including his bouts of depression, and trying not to think too hard about my own struggles. I tell myself there are lessons to be learned from Vonnegut’s life, things I can use.
“One thing you could use is his discipline and drive,” a voice announces, “the ability to soldier through terrible moods, fear, rejection, and keep producing something you can SELL,” a voice announces. “He wrote every day from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., no matter what. When he worked full time, he woke up early to write and wrote at night. Another thing you should keep in mind: you are no Kurt Vonnegut.”
True enough. Vonnegut was, from the beginning, a writer with his eye on making a living. He wrote what he could sell, changed his ideas, often grudgingly, to sell short stories to glossy magazines at a time when selling three or four stories could provide a decent year’s income. It was decades before he was able to write what he really wanted to write. Decades before he got any respect as a writer, something that troubled him immensely during those long years. He was, from the beginning, a working writer, struggling to put food on his family, as a former president once observed was a challenge many Americans step up to.
Write with an eye for what the market will pay you for.
Write to one person — the one who loves what you have to say. Come to the point, don’t waste a second of her time being clever. Write what will touch her heart, make her laugh, and then, cause the tears to flow.
And so it goes.
Fair Play
My sister, raised in the same war zone I came up in, vowed that her children would not grow up to be fearful people. Her conscious goal was to instill confidence and agency in them. They both seem to be doing fine in that regard.
She expressed the great terror she felt recently blinking at the prestigious job offered to her daughter through the lens of learned maternal fear. She reported that her “fear-based” worldview left her paralyzed, nauseated, blinded to the many auspicious facts about this prestigious job offer. I reminded her of her goal with her kids and how it seems to have worked out well. I predicted her daughter would do fine in that 100 year-old Florida magnet school with the award winning jazz band and debating team, that they wouldn’t have offered her the job if they didn’t intend for her to succeed.
“I want to thank you so much for what you said the the other day. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me.” I told her that anyone looking at the facts, and knowing her, could have said the same. Apparently nobody did. I was glad my comment made her feel good.
We commiserated about how aggravating, and gallingly common, it is not to have even a cursory response to something we’d put time and effort into.
“I don’t know how you can continue to do what you are doing, with no pay and, especially, with no appreciation for the hard work you do,” she told me sympathetically, before promising to look over the last few things I sent her, particularly the curriculum, and give me some feedback.
“I have a day off tomorrow and I’ll check gmail and look at what you sent me, and I’ll send you my two cents,” she said.
That’s what she said, a couple of days ago.
2 minute summer animation groove (remix)
Holiday
“So, are you saying his father literally machine gunned people into a mass grave?” she asked, brow bent.
“Well, that was the weight of the old man’s painful confession the night before he died,” he said, already up on his toes, dancing in that half mad way of his.
“So you’ve taken poetic license to his confession and transformed it to guilt over machine-gunning families into a mass grave?” she said.
“Philosophical license,” he said, one finger in the air, head cocked like an old school pedant.
“You’ve taken license with the facts again,” she said. “I thought you’d taken a vow not to write fiction.”
“It’s not fiction. What the man did to his own children, at the moment when they most needed a human response, was inhuman. Instead of empathy he fought them, denied them, dismissed their feelings as stupid. He beat them down when they tried to express grief when they learned of the slaughter of their entire family when the family tree had all but one limb hacked off, was uprooted, the ground burned and sown with salt. On this blackened dirt the bones of his aunts and uncles skittered on windy days.”
“According to him these things may have happened, but they were the kind of trifles a mature person doesn’t waste time crying about. His children came to him grieving over a trauma to make a child vomit and he snarled adamantly that they were insane to grieve.”
“So in your mind browbeating his children was the same as machine gunning the entire family into a ditch and feeling justified as he did it,” she said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t just the browbeating. The browbeating fit the pattern– take a trauma, deny it, tell anyone who may be traumatized they have no right to feel that way but that they are insane, and cowardly, in fact, to have any feelings at all about it.”
“A very damaged individual,” she said, “but not necessarily a machine gunner of families into mass graves. You want to be careful before you go there.”
“Nancy,” he said, “a person who is damaged this way, if he still has a soul, dies with terrible regrets. He deeply regretted that he had lived his life in a black and white world. The black and white world is a zero sum game where many atrocities are permitted. After all, it cannot be black when it is white, nor white if it is black, right is right and wrong is wrong. In fact, he told his son with sorrow, hours before he died, ‘I think of how much richer my life would have been if I’d seen life in all its gradations and colors…’ In a black and white world it sometimes becomes necessary to murder another person, even thousands of people at once. In a nuanced and just world it is never OK to murder thousands of people at once.”
Nancy looked at him.
“Ask God, if you believe in God, and you’ll get the same answer: there may come a time when a killer must be stopped from killing and deadly force becomes necessary to prevent an atrocity. No God worth praying to would ever assure you– unless you see the world as black and white– that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to destroy an entire city in the name of some greater good. There is no godly answer to the murdered souls of the dead children, old people, invalids, babies, workers in that city. You want to say you are justified in war to slaughter an entire population? God does not smile upon you, if you do.”
“I thought you stopped drinking,” she said.
“Nancy,” he said, “be serious. I’m trying to get you to understand why I chose the metaphorical machine gun as the instrument of his towering, seething, white-hot rage, rather than a much harder to fully describe verbal whip he actually used. Brutally using words to cause pain is one way of being furious and self-righteous, but how much better is actually physically machine gunning a perceived enemy, on the lip of a mass grave he would later insist meant nothing.”
“He insisted the mass grave meant nothing?”
“He waved his hand, Nancy,” and he waved his hand, “and he said ‘those people were mere abstractions, nobody ever knew them. You have no right to claim to be effected by the loss of those people you never even met,’ and he smirked as he said it. And it was true that I’d never met them, they were all killed more than a decade before I was born, almost exactly 13 years, actually. The year of my birth would have been bar and bat mitzvah year for the infants who went into that ditch along with the dozen great aunts and great uncles wiped out by Ukrainains as Nazis gave instructions. My grandmother Yetta knew them very well. They were her six brothers and sisters, and their families, and her parents, if they were still around in 1943, and all the children and extended family, and also the same for my grandfather Sam’s six brothers and sisters.”
“Wait a second,” she said, “so this guy you were referring to in the third person was actually you?”
“No need to be so literal about it,” he said. “Fact is, on his deathbed an old man expressed regrets, and whipped himself over having been such a cruel bastard during his life, stubborn, judgmental, enraged, unfair. This is the profile of the guy, who, finding himself behind the gun, turns and fires it, wiping out anyone who might stand against him.”
“Which is only logical, after all,” she said.
“It’s logical,” he said, “but not everybody sees the world as an implacable enemy worthy of death. Not everybody is capable of actually swinging that big gun around, training it on the terrified faces, and, rejecting all of the many reasons not to, heeds only the imperative to pull the trigger. And if they are capable of it, it will bother them on their deathbed when they have only their vanishing, irremediable lives to consider, and they’ll be filled, sometimes, with terrible, almost unbearable regret.”
“I see what you mean,” Nancy said.
The possibility that most of them are sadists
On his deathbed he expressed tormented regrets, spoke for the first time of things he’d found impossible to talk about, tried to make his peace. “I must have been insane to believe I was doing something good when I machine gunned those people into that ditch. I pray that God will forgive me, for that one, at least,” he said.
“You did the best you could,” his son said, “God will understand.” He gave the old man some water. “Besides, since when do you believe in God?”
“It’s not God so much I believe in now, but justice. It seems impossible that there is no reckoning for the bad things we do here.”
“It is our pain that makes us do the bad things we do here,” said the son.
“Pain also brings forth the best of some people,” the dying man observed sadly.
The son nodded, heard the rest of the old man’s unspeakable confession. He listened with special attention to the detailed apology for the years of truly regrettable cruelty to his own family. Knowing that death was about the dying man’s needs and not his own, he mildly told him he would have done better if he could, closed the old man’s eyes after the dying man breathed his last.
At the time he thought of this belated conversation as a blessing to both of them. Years later he realized the blessing had probably been much greater for the old man, being forgiven and let off the hook as he opened up, for the first and last time, to express his regrets for the pain he’d caused. He’d given the man an easier death. “Why was I so mild, letting the old killer off the hook?” he sometimes wondered.
Eventually the son looked at patterns in his own life, questioning his largely unnoticed attempts to be mild above all else. Mildness is easily mistaken for passivity, which is widely hated in a competitive society where people are judged largely on their ambition and accomplishments in the marketplace. He wondered if he’d been unconsciously attracted to people like his father, collected as his friends a group of unrepentant sadists who would possibly be filled with regret on their deathbeds, but not a moment sooner. Had he surrounded himself with smiling but angry friends who were the least equipped of anyone to understand his desire to be mild, the first to point out what a pussy he was when he got in a tight spot and resisted lashing out, as any self-respecting person would?
“It’s an oversimplification to call us sadists,” said the dead man from his grave. “Do you think we derive pleasure from defending ourselves and our righteousness at all costs? It’s a reflex to protect ourselves, first and foremost. It’s not about sadistically taking it out on our victims, for our pleasure. We feel they would have done it to us if we didn’t strike first, so we hit them hard to keep them off balance. It’s paranoia, maybe, but not necessarily sadism. The entire pleasure, if any, is in not being victimized again. Plus, we are completely overwhelmed by our own demons, it’s not about others, it’s about us.”
The son was sick of hearing the dead man’s opinions, but they had to be considered nonetheless. “On the Asperger’s spectrum is probably a better way to think of some of them. A chap who calls to report on and get solace about his problems but seldom inquires about his friend’s troubles. ‘Ah, but your troubles are well known!’ he’ll exclaim, full of bonhomie, then back to his recitation, the reason he called.”
“I have to talk to you, at least you listen,” one tells him, “nobody else lets me talk. Do you have any idea how painful it is not be be listened to?”
“I never worry about you,” says another, truthfully, but oddly nonetheless.
There was one with a great sense of humor, an unappreciated person of great talent with an even greater need to be right, who decided the best course, when he was trying to be funny, was to look at him with a slightly disgusted expression and slowly shake her head. Why laugh at his attempts to make her feel better when it was so much easier, and so much more satisfying, to make him feel like an asshole? Nobody ever gave her anything.
He was able, without rancor, to shed the most destructive of these old friends when the time came to cut the ties. No need to curse or express disappointment, it was a rational act of delayed self-preservation. If a friend acts consistently hurtfully, is unrepentant and ignores requests not to behave that way, it is time to take your leave. Wish them well and head for the door. Few will wrap their arms around your legs as you go, experience teaches that their pride always prevents this.
As a result of being more selective in his friendships, there were days when the only voices he heard were his own, often asking himself out loud who the hell he was talking to, and the dead father’s voice. It was a heck of way to take a vacation, but better than fighting, he reasoned.
He could see the old man as a strong young man, setting up his machine gun, hear him cursing the people he was about to shoot, and going about his business feeling quite justified. “These people were scum, they’d have done the same to me in a second, if they could have,” he said, acrid smoke hanging in the air, his accomplices shoveling soil into the ditch.
Vacation
I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest. Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal. And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces. We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad. “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.
I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes. I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts. Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback. I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now. Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.
I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission. It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part. The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur. The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated. During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often. I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily. One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out. Woken from a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.
The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal. We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged. Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often. It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.
The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all. She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free. I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood. It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess. I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.
The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children. Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup. She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too. My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going. She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity. I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities. Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything.
I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting. I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal. This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake. I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one. The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.
Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman. I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.
Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo. And not a moment too soon.
Seven Miles from home, New York City Style
We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here. The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.
Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night? This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.
We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us. As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent. “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him. At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll. The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.
By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile. Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile. A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour. We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively. But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure). We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30. It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.
Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.
