120° Degrees in the Shade

That's the weekend forecast and I'm trying to figure out a strategy that will keep the house relatively cool without hearing a boom from the electric meter going supersonic: should I set the thermostat at 35° cooler than outside (like anyone can stand an 85°-house?) or be cool at the risk of an aged 5-ton roof-mounted refrigeration unit succumbing to overexposure, which could be a $10,000 day.

Maybe I should aim lawn sprinklers at shingles on the half of the roof that faces West.

I know from guys messing with a laser thermometer, once, that it was 112° in the shade and when they pointed their gadget at the concrete, out in the sunshine, the readout registered 148°.

I sure won't be frying my eggs on the sidewalk because, just like pancakes, pebbles, ants and grasshopper turds don't do much for my teeth or appetite, and anyone worth his gourmet sea salt knows the wrong texture...well... it can just ruin a dish.

Poor folks, old folks and smart folks usually turn off their A/C and flee to the mall, but I fear food courts more than legal ones, and my car upholstery would explode in their lot while my wealthier neighbors back home in North Vista would be sapping all the neighborhood's power with their homes at a comfy 72°.

Brown-outs (electric company, not my skivvies) occur on days like this, so I think I'll set the sprinklers and hunker down at home throwing darts at the face of Al "I Invented the Internet and Global Warming" Gore, prepared to empty the refrigerator, scoop up the pooch, and--only as a last 'resort'--head for the closest Motel 3 if God's bake sails though here like a Blue Diamond match skipping along a brass zipper in a room full of propane.

The Battery

The evolution of boyhood friendship, baseball, and inner growth

are intertwined in this tale of fate’s impact on what

might have been predictable lives of dreams coming true.

Appearing Here July 9th
(Unedited) 

High Strung and Low Notes

He shuffled through the music store, a bearded octogenarian in a blazer and pants, both threadbare, long out of fashion.

Squinting through the same glasses that perched on the bridge of his nose for thirty years, he wandered among the violins and violas, guitars and banjos, even the harps, pausing to extend a hand to plink seemingly random notes from instruments throughout the stringed instruments section.

The store clerk's two passes at him were politely waved-off and declined with, "I'm alright, thanks," and "I just don't know what I'm looking for," forming the clerk's silent assessment that this was probably a former music teacher or symphonic player.

His indecision was born from wanting her dead without the mess and gore of the garrote decapitating her.

He was about to commit double murder.

He would take her life, and also kill the bone-dissolving cancer before witnessing its quietus on her frail and listless form, the woman he'd known as a young and vibrant girl, and married on a Spring day he often revisited with vividity.

The Visual Serenade of St. Charles

Festivities for the long, Labor Day weekend found New Orleans aswarm with tourists afoot on the walks and stuffed into cabs and buses in the ‘CBD,‘ Central Business District.

I wagered the weather maker’s winds would repel thunderheads in the distance, giving me fluffy whites above as I spotted the outbound St. Charles line street car--for which I had waited 20 minutes--grinding against its steel rails, so many people aboard that they spilled from its ends like sausage escaping an uncrimped casing perforated with imperfections.

I looked at the sky, the gone-by street car, the sidewalk ahead, and chose to walk toward the Carrollton levee, miles away, despite icepicks of pain that snarled, ‘Tings just ain’ so in yo’ ankle ‘n knee joint, Mistah Joe.’

Leafed twigs and pods scooted along and across the sidewalk, a path with miniature hills created by fissures from roots of old cypress and maples dead-lifting the jagged concrete, a concern to only us infirm, the aged, and toddlers atop tricycles.

Decorative ironworked fencing segregated the public from the period-perfect homes, spear-tipped vertical rods providing an occasional hand-hold to steady my determined gait, completing the four-and-a-half mile trek to The Superior restaurant in a time I hadn’t kept or cared to know, a walk interrupted by readings of bronze plaques boasting respective histories of the impressive architectural wonders they fronted.

Arriving dehydrated, hurting, and spent, the eatery seemed too crowded for mid-afternoon, and I was lucky to commandeer a barstool to immediately down two tumblers of lemon garnished water, gulping with as much savor as a child in a two-handed, cold milk clench, chasing a warm brownie, and I reflected upon how--like the water replenishing me--I had drunk-in and absorbed the majestic charms of St. Charles on that humid, warm and blustery September afternoon, feeling my soul, too, had been quenched.

Trapping/s

It's a rosy-faced baby moon framed with caramel brown hair that’s bobbed into a Beatle’s haircut whose vintage might tattle-tale an advanced age safely distant from close guesses.


She’s from one of those cold, Great Lakes states, a girl adults may have described as ‘big-boned’ with that frame wrapped-on and molded with the semi-firm rubbery stuff they use to make the ball you’d squeeze a thousand times a day in physical therapy for an injured hand, a physical construct the cruelest kids in high school would call ‘fat.’

One could cast her as a clarinet player in ‘Music Man's’ marching band, wearing the feathered band uniform's hat settled not-quite-right on her head, a role she could play so convincingly well that you'd swear she's the genuine article.

She effects a corn-fed Midwestern sweetness that opposes her projection of the business-worldly confidence, coming out of the woman in iron-seeking, tumble-dried corduroys, with tapered shirttails drumming padded thighs as she walks, hanging loosely, incongruously adorned with a flowered scarf around her neck tightly inside the collar, mindful of a '70s flight attendant.

Her business persona aches for every nuance to hold her farm girlish image in a woman too old to sell 'easy going' convincingly to the wiser, whilst yearning be one of the girls by socializing with women 20 years her junior, struggling to capitalize on a that countenace to bullshit others that she’s delivering on everything you see and hear.

Convinced you've figured it out and aren't buying any, the potent concentrate of passive aggression and obsessive compulsion mix and come at you in wave after wave of attack on your character and credibilty, designed with cowardice hiding from confrontation in a wrapper of respectability, confident she’ll see you fall, hoping it’s with the surprise of the actor who disappears down through a hole in the floor of the stage, cut by the hand bearing a silent and purposeful saw rotating at the speed of advanced erosion.

Perfect Martini Perfectly Named

The menu bragged of a martini consisting of a top-shelf vodka and gin sharing the reservoir of an expensive stem, anathema to my respect for the mixocological arts of spirited beverage.

I'd have to catch a perfect cab home.

I'd need to steer my way perfectly, straight-through the front- and bathroom doorways.

I'd have to keep my eyes squinched perfectly and lightlessly closed to keep from seeing swirls of half-digested olives and pimiento.

A perfect martini would probably lead to another and another and another, taking me to all these places before delivering a perfectly aimed and miserable hangover of dispirited regret.

God bless the distiller's and God's own respective perfections in three fat fingers of Booker's bourbon over ice, with a splash of Kentucky branch water.

Numbday Morning

The absence of tasting salted blood is about the only clue I have, an hour after getting home from the dentist, that I haven't chewn into my lip or inside of my cheek from novacaine injections that evoke eye-twitching just north of the affecteed side's needled agony.

I hadn't been to the dentist, but a restless night found me awakening to reach for the last book in Stieg Larsson's trilogy, three books that took me less than six days to absorb, my task completed between dreamless rounds of sleep that seemed to land my thinking on the same plane as a novacained face.

After my final bout with the pillow, I awoke emotionless, void of any sense of any urgency 0r willpower to do much of anything, lacking the conscience's voice of a Saturday 'To Do" list, knowing all sleep was behind me.

It was the first day in probably four calendars at home that my lungs hadn't started the day with alternate inhalations of Peet's "Major Dickason" blend brewing in my Technivorm Moccamaster and exhalations of bluish grey smoke from two Marlboro 72s providing consumable timers until the aromatic liquid could deliver the first cup to my salvific spot in the daily lineup of Team Caffeine's overachievers.

All day, my thoughts seemed to steep from mush of wet clay, spun from clouds of shoulds and coulds of what may have been a promising Saturday but, after a too-long shower procrastinated until 1:30PM, my days-long yearning for pancakes coupled with food abstinence for more than 24 hours propelled me into clothes and behind the wheel of the car, heading toward Denny's.

Marie Callender's was the emptier of parking lots at the near-adjacent restaurants and the Almighty served-up a waitress named Tina who read my gummy-brained mood as if silent Morse code had been sent and answered while she engaged me in playful exchanges that elicited my promise of a return visit next Saturday (to which she said she'd look forward), after her declaration of the impossibly captivating notion, "I really want to write a book, too!"

An Excerpt

Most of the faces on the 2:17AM BART train in Wednesday's damp darkness were the same, the variance of riders on this run--as others-- consisting largely of two-legged hard cases, street people committing some of what little change they had to get tickets from the vending machines along the route.

Mel wondered whether they were headed to… or from, and where, but dismissed the thought, hoisting her briefcase from the train’s floor to her lap.

The simultaneous, unison snaps of the locks’ release were shrouded in the hum of the train’s electric power and taps of the car’s wheels negotiating the rail connectors.

Wedged between the top of a Tupperware sandwich holder and paperback novel, she removed the polished, black alligator-bound day planner and the top of the briefcase closed, pressed into service as a desktop.

Mel found the familiar tab to the lined paper section of the planner and, from the cuff of the Burberry overcoat, a milk-white wrist rotated to effect the slight twist her manicured fingertips needed for the barrel of a $400 pen to ease from it’s leather loop.

She leafed through pages of love letters drafted on other days’ commutes into San Francisco, letters that would never find the closure of an envelope, that would never find a stamp or bear the ink of an address to a lover she couldn’t identify.