Saturday, March 27, 2004
Werewolf Raspberries
by Richard Brautigan
Werewolf Raspberries...from The Tokyo-Montana Express
(with a Glenn Miller record playing in the background, perhaps "Tuxedo Junction")
. . . and all you wanted to do was take your best girl out into the garden on a full moon night and give her a great big kiss . . . too bad the raspberries were covered with fur and you couldn't see their little teeth shining in the moonlight. Things might have been different.
If you had played your cards right, you could have been killed at Pearl Harbor instead.
Late spring
1940
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence edition
First Printing, 1980
(Now out of print.)
3/27/2004 02:58:00 PM
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
The Man and the Moon.
It is a new moon as of tonight, not even a sliver of waxing crescent yet. This is to say the moon is simply a black shadow, vacant, unseen, hiding in the early night, while the sun crouches behind the trees. Hide-and-seek. But briefly, just as the sun ducks away completely beneath the horizon, the sun illumines the bottom of the moon like a light bulb far below a dangling sphere. On the lower edge of the moon is drawn a bright thin yellow line.
This glowing 'u' cups the moon gently, making the moon an apparition, a vague ghost barely visible above.
At that moment, in the middle of an old bare field, the glowing lunar specter appears, and a man stops walking and stares up at it.
The world has changed instantly. Where before was only the man, there are now two poles in the universe: the man and the moon. But, he realizes, perhaps there is also a third: the space in-between.
The man, the space, the moon. Object, space, object. Presence, absence, presence. Nothing else seems even to exist.
Why does the space seem to come alive between the man and the moon? The man knows it is much more than the slight mist he is now aware of, the moist air that lightly brushes his cheek. What was absence now feels like presence, what was nothing has somehow become something.
How much does the object define the space? the man finds himself thinking. And how much does the space define the object? For a moment it all seems a puzzle, with only three pieces that he cannot put together, cannot fully comprehend. He can feel just the faint intimation of the mystery while, like the moon, the weight of it hovers just beyond its illumined edge, out of focus, out of reach.
Then the sun sets, the moon flees, and the man shrugs, walking on in the empty darkness alone.
~
3/23/2004 01:07:00 PM
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
John L. Sullivan: Bareknuckle Ironman
In 1911 a young reporter named Jerome Power was assigned to interview former heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan, then age 53:
"Who gave you the toughest fight of your career?" I asked.
"Well, that's a question! Most of them were plenty tough. Jake Kilrain was one of the hardest to lick. Charley Mitchell, the Englishman, gave me a lot of trouble, too, but in a different way. By talking to me all the time in the ring, from the first bell, he got my goat. He threw more insults in my direction than blows. When I took out after him, he ran. He did not dare to stand up and slug with me and that is why I had trouble in licking him."
"Yes, Charley Mitchell had the reputation of being a bad actor, all right," I agreed, "but should we expect too much of Englishmen?"
"Well, no, not as a rule. But I have known a few who were strictly on the up and up. One in particular."
"Who was that?"
"Why, King Edward VII," said John L. "He was a real fellow. Common as an old shoe. We got well acquainted when I was across the pond. He made me forget that I was talking to royalty."
. . .
"In fact," he continued, looking at a gold watch almost as large as an alarm clock, "most of the real harm I ever did in this world was done to just one man - yours truly, John L. Sullivan. I make no secret of that. Even the fellows I pounded in the ring were all right again after a few days - [crowing?] fresh challenges at me as if nothing had ever happened to them. Today, many second-rate fighters make more money than I made when I was champion of the world. Fighters now seem to think of nothing but money. I thought first of the fact that I was champion of the world and I was always ready to prove that I was, any time, any place, against any contender. I fought in barns, on barges and in the back rooms of [saloons?]. The gate, as they say, was a secondary consideration. I would bet heavily on myself and, of course, always won until Jim Corbett beat me for the championship. That time I lost my shirt. Thousands of my friends all over the country, who thought I was unbeatable, I guess, lost their shirts, too. That is the thing which made me so sore about this fight."
"Yes," I hastened to agree, "the old-timers cannot understand, even today, how you came to lose. But I have never heard any man question your honesty."
"Well, I have traveled a long, hard road," he went on - and the eyes were blue and mild again - "but I have been honest all the way. I toured this country from one end to the other, offering $50 to any man who could stay on his feet for three rounds in the ring with me. Nobody ever collected, but don't think they didn't try! Can you imagine the champion of the world doing that today?"
I couldn't and said so frankly. Then, judging the interview to be at an end, I started to leave. He walked with me to the door.
"I realize," he concluded, "that it is hard for me to say anything new about fighting. I never had a great deal to say, even when I was champion of the world, because, as you have said, I was a fighting champion, not a talking champion. I give you permission to write anything about me you please, within reasonable limits. My fighting days are all over and what's printed now makes little difference to me. If you can get some of the things I have said about whiskey past that city editor of yours, so much the better. If he wants a story about fighting, he'll have to pay some attention to whiskey, because I say to you again, that in spite of the record, whiskey is the only fighter who ever licked John L. Sullivan, champion of the world!"
~
Click here for the full interview.
3/17/2004 12:34:00 PM
Monday, March 15, 2004
Halogen Sunset, Hydrocarbon Spring
He walks at night, because sometimes you just have to get outside and smell the fresh carbon monoxide, the springtime scent of hydrocarbons. Watch the minivans and SUVs and pickup trucks whiz past. See the pretty squirrels and raccoons and skunks, pizza-squished in the road, illuminated by passing high-beams. You know: commune with what’s left of nature.
But the trees are beautiful black cutouts against the nighttime city glow, graveyard statues silhouetted against perpetual halogen neon sunset.
~
(Whoa. Writing that depressed me.)
3/15/2004 11:27:00 AM
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Epiphany
Last night I was driving home with the radio on, and it hit me, just hit me, what jazz is: It's love and sex and drugs, with none of the risk, none of the fear, none of the bad side-effects.
That's what it is.
~
3/09/2004 09:12:00 AM
Monday, March 08, 2004
You-Know-What Moon last night! Ehh, the little guy was romping all over the yard, chasing possums and his own shadow. He's too smart to chase skunks, after that last incident. He's getting tougher and tougher to catch on film, too.
~
3/08/2004 10:23:00 PM
Thursday, March 04, 2004
Tony Robbins:
Canary in the Coalmine of the Economy
He's smiling right about now.
Lately the channels are clogged with a plethora of Tony Robbins self-help book advertisements, directed generally at depressed and unemployed people watching late-night or daytime TV because they're depressed and unemployed. My friend John recently pointed out that this is as sure a sign as any that the economy sucks (and a more reliable indicator than some, since Wall Street will tell you everything is rosy right up until they start jumping out of New York highrise windows.)
That's right: Tony's a businessman. He knows his niche market, his target audience. And right now he knows they're bummed out.
Like a canary in a coalmine, sensitive to poisonous smells, Tony's back in full strength, his large hound's nose having caught the scent of despair and dismay. The smell, really, of body odor and nervous sweat, as well as the sickly sweet fragrance of the person who just feels like a failure. Unwashed clothes and microwaved meals, soap operas and infomercials: the domestic human couch-potato, sans job.
Don't get me wrong, Tony Robbins is a heckuva motivational speaker. If you're into that sort of thing. I'm sure plenty of people have followed the Robbins formula for success.
But what exactly are Tony Robbins's credentials?
The selling point of Robbins's books and programs and of Tony Robbins himself is basically the idea that he, himself, is the prime example of success. He makes millions of dollars flying (and even helicopter-ing) all over the world to give expensive motivational speeches and seminars.
So, Robbins has written these books about how successful he is, but basically he's successful because he has written all these books about how successful he is.
Is it just me, or is there some kind of unending moebius loop to this logic?
And is the average Tony Robbins subscriber going to change his/her life the way Tony did, by becoming a millionaire self-help guru? I don't think so.
Personally, I smell snake oil.
Okay, I'm oversimplifying things. Evidently Tony was once depressed and unemployed and overweight. He pulled himself up, got a job, lost some weight, and felt better about himself. Tony changed his thought-patterns, and he tries to tell other people how to change their own. I never finished his first book, but maybe you did and it changed your life. Maybe you're on a private Lear jet right now down to the Caymens to teach a group of Ford executives how to feel better about themselves, project confidence, and be like Tony. Hey, whaddooIknow?
I'm just sayin', he does a heckuva PR job selling himself. And right now, he's got one helluva market to work in...
~
3/04/2004 10:42:00 AM
