“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”—Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

The great Mark Twain once said "I am prepared to meet anyone, whether anyone is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."



One of the earliest memories I have is of sitting in my red metal booster chair in the breakfast room in the old house, and my mother is feeding me. My mother is left handed, and although I am too young to explain what I perceive, what I perceive is that my mother's angle of approach with that spoon is not right. I take the spoon from her hand, dump out the applesauce, announce "self", and proceed to do just that: feed myself.



My next defining memory is of refusing to eat off a plate or drink out of a glass of the wrong color. I am unable to explain just what the wrong color is in advance. Only when there is food or drink in place can I tell my mother if the color palette is to my satisfaction. If it is aesthetically unappealing, nothing can persuade me to partake. I am maybe six.



Let us fast forward through my early childhood, which was idyllic, to my school years. On the first day of first grade, I come home and announce that as Mrs. Smith has told us we will learn to read the next day, I will agree to go back. My school years grew more unpleasant annually. I was very small for my age and bullied. Small and very bad at sports, which made me the object of ridicule on the field or in the gym. A favorite pastime for the bigger girls was to force me to play tether ball with them, where they would bash the ball around the pole in a tight spiral, two feet above my head. Fun times.



In high school, I swanned into my guidance counsellor's office and convinced her that I wanted to join the French foreign legion. I lectured a substitute on the cast of characters in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and for punishment was sent to the principal's office to be assigned sentences. I had to write 500 times "I will not talk in class and I will do as I am told." I wrote that at the top of every page, but the rest of the time I was writing "I will say what I want and I will think what I want." I planned to become a marine zoologist until my marine science teacher told me that girls could never do research and the best I could expect would be a career as a teacher. I walked out of his class and never went back.



At a time when people cared about these sort of things, my IQ test came back with a score that brushed 200 and I was labeled an underachiever. That beleaguered guidance counsellor would cry that they knew my IQ, why wouldn't I just apply myself? Weren't they paying attention? That lecture about Shakespeare? I was right, the old man and the soothsayer are different characters. If that substitute would just have read the passage I'd pointed out, she would have seen that the two were having a dialog. Hadn't I been sent to the principal on another occasion for reading Time magazine in class because I'd already read the assignment (the entire text book, not just the lesson in question) twice? If you think being small makes you a target, you have obviously never been a geek.



In my thirties, I went to see an industrial psychologist to take an aptitude test to see what I should be when I grew up. Everyone falls into one or more of the following seven categories said the results letter. Your strengths are...and then MY letter listed three things that were't any of the seven. The psychologist explained that my particular combination was so rare as to be statistically insignificant and hence left out of the standard form letter. Communication. Authority. Something else that meant I had no problem figuring out what needed to be done and then directing other people to do it. I'd make a good lawyer, wedding planner, or art director. So, basically, said the psychologist, I should just keep doing that art thing I'd been doing.



This week I have been told I face disciplinary action for something I did in a sales meeting where I had been sent ("from corporate" seems to have been an important aspect, the solemnity of which I failed to fully apprehend) to observe the training process. Even though my mind was fully engaged and I was participating in every segment of the program, and even though i took notes and came back with a list of projects I wanted to develop based on what I'd heard and seen, the take away that some anonymous others had gotten from me was that I was knitting in the meeting and that therefore and somehow this action made me so heinously disrespectful to them and everybody else in the room that they felt compelled to call my boss and complain. This became my boss's truth, even though he let slip in passing that an equal number of not-to-be-named others had called him to say they enjoyed my participation. The remaining three quarters of the attendees have not voted on my popularity.



I learn better when my hands are busy. Other people doodle, I knit. Had anyone asked me to stop because it was distracting, I would have been happy to, but nobody said anything other than to ask to see the yarn, as it was some I'd spun myself (agrarian, crunchy-granola, hippie freak that I am.)



My mind is always going. Always. If there is one thing that my friends all agree on, it is that while I have never changed, I have mellowed out. People who haven't known me since college, however, find me too intense, too passionate in my opinions and feelings. You think it's scary on your side of that? Try living inside my head. My mother used to tell the story that people often said to her that they couldn't imagine what it was like for her to be "that child's" mother. She was my mother, she was proud of me. She taught me to be strong and true to myself. She loved me.



Once more, even though I am forty years out of high school, people with more power than I have decided that because I am different, I am to be punished. Just as gender, skin color, chemical or physical make-up are genetic and not a matter of whim, so is the way I think. You can punish me and lecture me, torment me on the playground, put it in my permanent record, dislike me, demote me, find me intimidating or find me peculiar, give me lousy performance reviews, judge me or discriminate against me, but I can never be anything other than what, or who, I am. Believe me, after 57 years, if there was some way I could pass myself off as a normal person (or at least what the majority of you people have agreed a normal person is) I would.



Another great man once wrote "I believe that i am a molecular swerve, not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap minded." maybe that should be my next tattoo.

I am sad to announce the ignominious end of Mild Burning Symptoms. Instead, I bring to you an updated Tante Leah’s Handmades. Just click on the shop link and see what happens.

There is a Vietnam Nam vet sitting in a wheelchair next to me on the train. He is loudly declaimng his politics. This begins with telling the world, or at least the occupants of this car, that he was shot down over Nam, spent two weeks in a hospital and then came back to America where he was denied a job because he wasn’t a minority. Ain’t that right, Freddie, he bellows at the guy on the other side of me. From there, he goes on to explain that this sort of bullshit is why he has never voted for a Democrat in his life and never will. Next up on his litany of grievances is Hippies, and how they took over California and how we still have that crap, but now it’s called diversity.

It is at that point that I cram my earbuds into my decidedly hippie head, mutter asshole under my brreath and turn to Freddie to opine that perhaps if his friend voted for Democrats, there would be fewer wars resulting in fewer disabled vets like his friend, who, I want to add, is on his way for medical care at a VA that his friends, the Republicans, are busy unfunding and dismantling. It’s better that I sit here typing furiously and keeping the sound in my head loud enough to block the Tea Bagger shit pouring out of this douchebag.

Took a header through the doorway to our bedroom this morning. Went down hard on the terrazzo, the dog guard, and my forearms. Contusions, scrapes, bruises and ouchies everywhere.

In other news, the commenting function is working again and having cleared 5,000 spam followers out of my database, you will be asked to register and use the capcha function in order to use it.

In one form or another, I have been keeping a journal since my 18th birthday, when my first college roommate gave me a spiral notebook and a roach clip. I still have that notebook, somewhere in storage, along with all the other books I filled with my jejune, yet deeply felt, ponderings on life, the universe and everything. It’s been years since I attempted to reread any of them, as I can humiliate myself just fine without going back almost 40 years to pick at forgotten follies.

When I started this blog, I was political and passionate. I blogged about my job. I blogged about the news. I blogged about everything and nothing, but I tried to keep the most personal introspections offline, and in my notebooks. Eventually the lines blurred, the postings veered wildly between pop culture snark, bitter dispatches from the workplace, and disquisitions on the cruelty of life.

This week starts the Jewish new year, a time of conscious rebooting of our lives. Last year I changed my body, losing almost forty pounds. This year I vow to change my head. I pledge to renew my writing, and to become the perfect corporate drone that my bosses want me to be. It will be a much greater challenge, but I’m committed to do this.

I gave up on Twitter early on, as MizShoes is unable to contain herself to a mere 140 characters and spaces and moved on to Facebook. Deceptively fun to be around, dangerously easy to talk to, Facebook was like cocaine. I have always prided myself on my non-addictive personality; my ability to say enough. So today, I turned off my Facebook account and said, no more. If I have something to mutter aloud, I can mutter in my virtual living room, and not on the train, if you know what I mean. I wanted to embed a video here, a clip of Peter Weller as Buckaroo Banzai, the scene where he utters the immortal line: “The deuce, you say.”, but alas, such is beyond my Google-fu to find.

See you around.

Constant readers of this blog, both of you whom are left after this long hiatus, will remember that after that Terrible, Horrible Thing happened at the end of last season, Miz Shoes vowed that she had quit Tyra and could quit the unholy troika of Heidi, Michael and NinaGarcia, too. 

Well, MizShoes tried to quit them, but in the event, she has been watching and not recapping all along. And here is what MizShoes thinks about this season. It has sucked. Who or what is Clinque Counter Josh, but the Straight From Central Casting prettier, flamboyantly queenier, bitchier and stunningly less talented (and that was a mighty low bar, bucko) version of the Insufferable Jeffrey the Pin-Headed Schmoo?

These contestants are merely contestants or actors and not one of them has done anything worth remembering, at least in terms of design and craftsmanship. Wasn’t Bryce the same person as the Autistic Yet Talented One on the rip off show about the search for America’s next top visual artist? For that matter, wasn’t Falene the same person as the Woman Who Had Taxidermied Unborn Fawns? The judging, which has always been erratic at best, has become…Well damned if the loquatous Miz Shoes can come up with an adequate word for that pitiful panel.

No, all in all, MizShoes doesn’t think this show is worth the free airwaves it’s broadcast over.

 

So, I’m sitting at my spinning wheel in the South Miami Farmers Market last Saturday (World Wide Spin In Public Day, which, while not to be found in the Hallmark section, does occur) bonding with a stranger over the concept of centering and how one cannot force it.

She told me about her college days in the ceramics studio, spending endless hours at the wheel and never being able to center, walking away for a few weeks or months, coming back and having the clay fall in place in her hands, effortlessly. Yep, I said, twist is like that, it either flows or it doesn’t.

I just finished rereading Robert Silverberg’s “Lord Valentine’s Castle” and there is a passage, early in the book, where Valentine is about to juggle for the first time. It captures the very essence of what we seek, we who spin on a wheel, be it clay or fiber or ourselves on the edge of this spiral arm.

“We will teach you basics, one small thing at a time. Juggling is a series of small discrete motions done in quick sequence, that give the appearance of constant flow and simultaneity. Simultaneity is an illusion, friend, when you are juggling and even when you are not. All events happen one at a time.” Sleet smiled coldly. He seemed to be speaking from ten thousand miles away. “Close your eyes, Valentine.

Orientation in space and time is essential. Think of where you are and where you stand in relation to the world.”

Valentine pictured Majipoor, mighty ball hanging in space, half of it or more than half engulfed by the Great Sea. He saw himself standing rooted at Zimroel’s edge with the sea behind him and a continent unrolling before him, and the Inner Sea punctuated by the Isle of Sleep, and Alhanroel beyond, rising on its nether side to the great swollen bulge of Castle Mount, and the sun overhead, yellow with a bronze-green tint, sending blistering rays down on dusty Suvrael and into the tropics, and warming everything else, and the moons somewhere on the far side of things, and the stars farther out, and the other worlds, the worlds from which the Skandars came and the Hjorts and the Liimen and all the rest, even the world from which his own folk had emigrated, Old Earth, fourteen thousand years ago, a small blue world absurdly tiny when compared to Majipoor, far away, half forgotten in some other corner of the universe, and he journeyed back down across the stars to this world, this continent, this city, this inn, this courtyard, this small plot of moist yielding soil in which his boots were rooted, and told Sleet he was ready.

I am depressed. Clinically, one supposes. I am spinning in place, with so many projects and ideas in my head, but too few hours in each day, and too little energy to create in the ones available to me to do so. I want to blog, but about what? Does anyone really want to hear me whine about such first world problems?

I am depressed about the political climate in my country. Are these shit-flinging chimps really viable presidential candidates? Have we, as a nation, completely lost the power of critical thinking, the ability to understand nuanced thought and complex concepts? (Don’t answer that. It was a dispirited, and jaundiced, rhetorical question.)

I am depressed about what used to be my career and is now reduced to a mere job, something I do eight hours a day to pay the bills. Although I am dangled carrots, I know them to be nothing more than carrots on a string, to be snatched away when I believe them to be within my grasp.

I am depressed about, well, everything.

This summer is speeding by in a haze of good times had with good friends: all back-lit and golden and soft-focus, like a cheesy beer ad aimed at the demographic of late-season baby boomers, or you know, me and my peers. In any event, we have been having a blast, fueling it with a soundtrack of girl groups, rockabilly, bar bands and tiki/exotica. We started with the Hukilau, and Miz Shoes is here to testify that she is now deeply, truly in love with Grinder Nova. UNO MAS TEQUILLA! We were joined by the Fabulous Flamingos, and in the event, the Hukilau proved to be more fun than any of us had imagined, and we all have great imaginations. One of the highlights of the weekend was meeting MeduSirena, who has reawakened my childhood obsession with

dream of becoming a mermaid. There is going to be a lot more sequined tail in Miz Shoes future.

The following weekend, we left for the annual left coast week. This is a ritual gathering of our pod (to steal MeduSirena’s term). Most of us are women of a certain age who have been friends for either half or all of our lives, depending. We gather on the beach to soak up the sun, reconnecting with our selves and each other, and admitting to our group our alpha male, the Renowned Local Artist. He demures, but he is.

This year found us gathered for the Summer Solstice, and we were crones, practicing great healing magic on the one who needed it most. We swam in the Gulf; we were mermaids and we sang our siren song to the RLA. We ate communal meals and rendezvoused with friends, Total Wine and the world’s best GoodWill store.

And now it’s time to pile up the towels and blast the sound track: it’s time for the annual tank wars and bbq/pool party.

Well, this sucks. The Big Man has gone to the great gig in the sky. He himself believed that we pass from this form into the pure white light, and if anyone ever did or does, then Clarence Clemons would be that one. Clarence was the heart and soul of the E-Street band, and I cannot imagine how the show will go on without him. To all my friends in the E-Street nation, I send you love and light. To anyone who ever saw him live, I tell you that you were blessed. To those who knew the Big Man personally, I cannot imagine the depths of your loss, and do not presume that my words could be of any comfort at all, but I offer them anyway.

The size of the hole he leaves in this world is immense, as immense as his talent, as immense as his soul.

Miz Shoes dedicates this post to The Rude Pundit, for obvious reasons.

So here’s the thing about Anthony Weiner that nobody is willing to talk about. It’s the elephant in the room, connected, if you will, to the trunk in Tony’s crotch shots. Miz Shoes is not going to offer an opinion about Tony being a pervert or a creeper, although, you know, if it sexts like a creeper and lies like a creeper and acts like a creeper, the odds are pretty good that it is, in fact, a creeper. No Miz Shoes doesn’t care about that. Miz Shoes says this as a woman with a history of fondness for men who are not, shall we say, classically handsome (see obsession with Bob Dylan). But LOOK at that man, people. LOOK long and hard. THAT is a man who has never gotten laid for free in his life. Really. Not even a mercy fuck for that monkey. How he scored his wife is a mystery, but the word “beard” comes to mind. He is just a pathetic little man who finally found a medium where he could “charm” with his “wit” and then get his rocks off via e-mail.

And now let him be gone from our national dialog.

 

As regular readers of this irregular journal are most likely aware, Bob Dylan sits at the top of my personal rock gods pantheon. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is the enlightened fool of the tarot deck. Either way, not a day goes by that there isn’t something from Dylan on my i-pod and thence into my head. I carry on my shoulder a (tattoo of a) Siamese cat. I dream about him more than I dream about the people who populate my waking life. Today is Mr. Dylan’s 70th birthday, and so pundits from the Rude to the New York Times are lauding him and retrospecting him and carrying on as though he’s just been discovered. This year I chose not to bake him a cake, as he never shows up at my house for a slice anyway, and my diet precludes random cake baking. Instead, it is my pleasure to reprint for you all, in its entirety, a little something from the Sept/Oct 1995 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).

The Value of Love, Using the Dylan Model

 

by Joseph Cliburn, Dept. of Institutional Research/Planning, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Perkinston, Mississippi

Andrew Russ, Department of Physics, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania

Tiny Montgomery, State Penn Center of Mathematics and Truck Driving, University Park, Pennsylvania

Zeke de Cork, Shady Acres Old Folks Home and State University, Perkinston, Mississippi

Starting from a statement brought home by Bob Dylan [1965a] we estimate the value of Love using basic algebra of need [Mottram, 1965], perhaps some calculus, maybe a bit of the geometry of innocence [Dylan, 1965f], and a lot of wishful thinking.

The Limits of Love

 

We begin with the following assertion by Dylan [1965a]:

    (Love - 0) / No Limit (1)

using the expression on the record label in preference to the statement on the back cover [1965b], and taking a cue from the author’s statement that it is a fraction [1965c].

Setting aside the question of whether the use of an expression here marks Dylan as an Expressionist, we set the expression equal to X, which is unspecified for the moment, and solve for Love:

    x = (Love - 0) / No Limit (2)

Thus:

    (No Limit) X = Love - 0 = Love (3)

where we’ve made use of the fact that for any A, A - 0 = A.

Thus Love = something times “No Limit.” The traditional quantity that has no limit is infinite, thus we get Love is infinite, assuming that X is finite. If X is 0, we have 0 times infinity, which is indefinite.

Signs of Love

However, if X is negative, or “Less than Zero” [Costello, 1977], we get the result that Love is infinitely negative. This is perhaps enough negativity to succeed when gravity fails you [Dylan, 1965d] and will probably get the

reader down. We may allow (no limit) to be negative, in which case we’ll want either both X and (no limit) to be positive at the same time or both negative.

Other than the sign of X [Dylan, 1967a] however, there is nothing specified about it. If X is complex, then it has a real part that acts as above and an imaginary part, in which case (No Limit) times X is also complex, which makes Love both complex and partly imaginary [Whitfield-Strong, 196?]. Dylan himself has explored this idea extensively in later investigations [1975a, 1975b] with extensive revisions [1984, 1974/1993, various public

presentations since 1975].

At any rate, we can conclude definitely [Anderson, 1982] that:

    X=X

We thus sum up by offering the following observations:

1. Love is infinite if X is finite.

2. Love is indefinite if X is zero.

3. Love is infinitely negative if X is negative.

4. Love is imaginary if X is imaginary.

Fractal Love is Problematic

There remain some questions regarding the appropriateness of using fractal mathematics to resolve these problems, e.g., “i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me” [Dylan, 1965e]. But we should also clarify that we are not putting infinity up on trial [Dylan, 1966] here. Love is, after all, just a four-letter word [Dylan, 1967b].

References

Anderson, L., 1982, “Let X = X,” Big Science, (Warner Brothers, Burbank CA).

Costello, E., 1977, “Less Than Zero,” My Aim Is True, 2nd ed., (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan,B., 1965a, “(Love - 0) /No Limit,” Subterranean Homesick Blues, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1965b, “Love - O/No Limit,” Subterranean Homesick Blues, back cover, (Columbia’, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1965c, broadcast communication.

Dylan, B., 1965d, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Highway 61 Revisited, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1965e, liner not~s, Highway 61 Revisited, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1965f, “Tombstone Blues,” Highway 61 Revisited, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1966, “Visions of Johanna,” Blonde on Blonde, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1967a, “Sign on the Cross,” Writings and Drawings, (Random House, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1967b, “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word,” Writings and Drawings, (Random House, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1974/1993, “Tangled Up In Blue,” The Bootleg Series, vol. 2, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1975a, “Simple Twist of Fate,” Blood On the Tracks, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1975b, “Tangled Up In Blue,” Blood On the Tracks, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1978,” ,” Street Legal, (Columbia, New York NY).

Dylan, B., 1984, “Tangled Up In Blue,” Real Live, (Columbia, New York NY).

Mottram, E., 1965, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need.

Whitfield-Strong, 196?, “Just My Imagination,” as reviewed in R. Stones, 1978, Some Girls, (Atlantic, New York NY).

Somewhere or another I read that the human body completely replaces itself on a cellular level every seven years. That means that today I am a completely different person than I was the day my father died, which was seven years ago this morning.

I suppose that’s true in a metaphysical way as well. I know that for the longest time I felt diminished, as though I was no longer the person I was when Daddy was alive. Getting my bookkeeping in order and my weight down were two steps towards getting back to who I was BMD (before Max died). Still, I’m not the same. I’m more melancholy (hard to believe, I know, especially considering I espouse putting Prozac in the city’s drinking water to improve the community at large).

I miss talking football with him. I miss talking baseball and basketball with him. I miss telling him stories about my dogs. I miss him every Sunday when he doesn’t call. I miss him sending me marshmallow Peeps at Easter time, and a weekly envelope full of newspaper clippings.

I miss his acerbic take on politics, and know that the Tea Party would have caused him to burst a blood vessel in his head. I find myself less tolerant of stupidity than ever, and remember the old man’s favorite saying: “I don’t mind ignorance, but I can’t stand stupidity.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t think “What Would Max Do?” and the answer guides my actions. And saying that, what Max would do about this sorrow and emptiness would be to suck it up and do the things that still need to get done. There is no going back, so there is no use in dwelling in the sorrow. Pick yourself up and live in the now, he would tell me, although not in those words.

Nope, Max would say this: you do the things that need to be done first, and then there will always be time to do what you want to do. So I’ll put one foot in front of the other, and wait until tonight, when I can light a candle for my father.