‘Complicated, but it’s alright’

Frank Orrall (photo by Rob Myers)

     There is no First Amendment when it comes to poetry. You can print almost any sentiment that originates in the smithy of your own soul. But if you want to adorn your work with, say, a few lines of Mary Oliver’s about wild geese, you have to track her down — or her estate, now — get permission, and pay.
     I knew this intellectually, the way you know that falling down a rocky embankment would hurt. But I didn’t really grasp the reality until I found myself tumbling along, working on my last book, which uses literature to explain addiction and recovery. Securing the rights from nearly 80 poets and novelists took over two years — longer than writing the book itself.
     Song lyrics were the worst. I found myself conducting negotiations in French, tracking down three different people who got together and wrote a song 30 years ago.
     Some cut a hard bargain — I haggled with the John Lennon estate over 13 lines of “Cold Turkey.” Poi Dog Pondering, a sprawling multi-ethnic party band, is rooted in Chicago, and so at first seemed getting rights from them might be easy. I called Frank Orrall, who wrote “Complicated,” and asked for permission to quote from it, beginning “Sorrow is an angel, that comes to you in blue light, and shows you what is wrong, just to see if you’ll set it right...”
     “Sure,” he said, or words to that effect.
     But oral permission from Orrall (sorry, couldn’t resist) wasn’t enough. “He said I could, your honor, over the phone...” wouldn’t cut it in court.
     “Frank,” I said, “I need written permission.”
     “Sure,” he said, or words to that effect.
     Musicians are not famous for their attention to legal detail. Though I stalked him via letter and email, written confirmation was not forthcoming. The book’s due date neared.
     Then I noticed that a few members of Poi Dog were providing musical backing to Tony Fitzpatrick reading at the Poetry Foundation. I typed up a letter, and hurried over. At intermission, I made a beeline to Orrall.

To continue reading, click here.

Just Faucets

     As a general rule, I leave uncovering deception to the watchdogs, to investigative reporters and those who dig and probe.
     But, well, sometimes y0u just stumble across it.
     Our to-the-studs bathroom remodeling project, nearing its first anniversary, had hung up on a particular piece of plumbing: a pop-up drain that had to fit into the old bathtub, which we did not remove because a) it is made of iron and you can't buy that kind of thing anymore; b) it would cost thousands of dollars more to take it out and rebuild the floor underneath and c) my wife wants a tub in the house anyway, to bathe the dog and any grandchildren who may come along in the next decade, hint hint.
     But when it came time to put the spanking new white PVC drain pipe in she had bought, our contractor kept the original drain pipe because it is brass and brass is better, which made sense. 

     In theory. In reality, that meant the new pop-up drain we bought wouldn't fit in because, while the proper diameter, the threads were spaced differently. That is a thing, apparently, in plumbing, as I learned this week.
     The solution I came up with was to go to Banner Plumbing Supply, because I had passed it on Lake Cook Road, driving out to Buffalo Grove, where my parents now live. The place is enormous, and I imagined it would have the piece we were looking for because it was big enough to hold all pipes and valves and drains and faucets that could have ever been conceived or manufactured since the dawn of time. It's that big.  

      My wife and I—we tend to do these journeys as a team, for company, and I suppose for self-protection too, the way gun ranges will only rent weapons to a pair of people, to cut down on spontaneous suicide— entered with confidence. The people at Banner were brisk and polite, efficient and pleasant and helpful, everything we could have hoped for, except for one little thing: they didn't have the part we needed. They did, however, point us toward something called "Just Faucets" in Arlington Heights. They had a photocopied map and everything. Which struck me as selfless.
     I thought of saying, "Can we really expect to find a drain at a place called 'Just Faucets?" Is this not deceptive, to claim they're only in the faucet trade, publically, in their very name, and yet seem to be engaged in sub rosa non-faucet commerce as well? 

     But honestly frustration had drained the wisenheimerhood out of me, and as we drove the half hour from Banner to Just Faucets. Plenty of time to brood, darkly and aloud, on all sorts of grim, defeatist tangents. Such as: why are we were doing this at all? Why isn't our contractor doing this? He's the guy who spurned my wife's perfectly good PVC pipe in favor of the supposedly better half century plus brass pipe, which might even be better in theory but not in the suddenly crucial area of allowing the new drain to be screwed in. Maybe we could just re-plate the old drain, battered and corroded though it was.

      "We could use a white rubber plug on a chain," I suggested. My wife didn't respond. "Or we could just stuff a rag in the drain, fill the tub, and drown ourselves," I didn't say, or even think that second part. But it succinctly captures my mood on the drive.
      "Just Faucets" seemed a refugee from a David Letterman sketch—what was it? "Just Lightbulbs" or something? We found a cluttered, small—the polar opposite of Banner Plumbing Supply—yet somehow reassuring store of the sort that it would seem international chains had eliminated. Except this one exists, or at least I think it exists, assuming it didn't just rise from the mist of our despair, like Brigadoon. Lou took our old battered drain and walked over to an array of threaded rings and started fiddling with them, hope, which pretty much had been drown by a sloshing tubful of cold pessimism, threw off a single spark.
     Lou made a satisfied sound and presented us with a new drain, gauged to fit thanks to an adaptor, and for only $38, which you can bet your ass is coming off what we owe the contractor. I'm at the stage of life where problems loom larger than they should, so much that their solutions become thrilling, glorious releases from failure and anxiety. I felt so delighted I considered hugging Lou, but this was not a place where men hug for any reason, even for moving their endless bathroom project through its final yet eternal, Zeno's Paradox, halfway to the goal every day phase. I did immediately think of this blog, and asked Lou his name, which I didn't know up to that point, and how old "Just Faucets" is. He said 40 years, 20 in this location, and introduced me to the owner, sitting nearby who looked up at me with a minimum of curiosity. 
    "Thank you for your important work," I said, and meant it.

Lou

Who was the first president to visit Chicago?

No, it wasn't Abraham Lincoln

     When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, in the first wave of nauseating shock, my immediate, unfiltered thought was perhaps a strange one: Now he’s always going to be on presidential placemats. You know, those laminated arrays of placid white male faces peering out from oval frames: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump.
     You can never unring that bell. Schoolchildren 100 years from now, assuming we still have a country, an increasingly shaky bet, will look at his leering orange visage and be presented the chirpy, sanitized tale that kids always get: Donald Trump, American Hero.
     Today being Presidents’ Day, it seemed appropriate to wonder if the White House has been so besmirched by a man utterly unfit for the office that the usual American affection and interest for presidents is gone. Did Donald Trump break the presidency? Who cares anymore about Washington’s false teeth or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stamp collection?
     (Though the story of FDR’s postal scandal is dear to my heart. Just like Trump larding the government with lackeys, FDR picked a croney, James Farley, as postmaster general. In the knee jerk currying of favor that defined politics, then and now, Farley pulled a few sheets of the 1933 Mother’s Day stamp off the presses before they had been gummed or perforated and gave one to his philatelist boss, never pausing to consider he was creating hugely valuable philatelic rarity. Word spread, outrage ensued, and the post office figured out an ingenious fix: issuing sheets of ungummed, imperforate stamps, making the president’s private boon available to all).
     See, that’s the thing about presidential history. It draws you in. The simplest question isn’t so simple.
     For instance: Who was the first president to visit Chicago?
     Go ahead, plug that query into Google. Nothing, right? Random stuff.

To continue reading, click here.

O Canada.

     I never suspected there were stupid people in Canada. Smug, yes. Passive-aggressive? Certainly.
    But the kind of towel-biting, conspiracy spewing, chest-thumping, fact-deprived, fantasy-dwelling dumbasses that jam every diner in America? Well, that's a new discovery. Their knowledge might be skewed toward the various flaws and misdeeds of the great vibrant democracy on their southern border. But they were generally up on the way the world worked.
     My fault. Of course ignorance is a universal. The quality that makes us human, really. You don't see many truly stupid animals. No squirrel could last long with the skewed, bullets-cannot-harm-me worldview that people approach COVID with. "That fox can't hurt me, it's just fake ne...."
     I don't know why it took me until now to realize this, to grasp that there are idiotic Canadians too. The anti-COVID restriction truck drivers and their anti-masker allies, have been parading around Ottawa (sigh, the capital of our frosty neighbor to the North) for weeks already. And just now are being driven off the streets of Ottawa (east or west of Chicago? Close to Seattle? Or Maine? You have no idea, right?) and are finally being driven back into their holes.
     I ignored them, both because everything that happens in Canada is so easily ignored, particularly in Ottawa (near far more familiar Montreal, or about 775 miles northeast of Chicago, or 440 miles due north of New York City) and the world political scene is so crazed and random that focusing on any particular lunacy seems overkill. We're fucked, the irresistible gears of history are turning, grinding our country into a miserable powder of screwedness, what's for lunch?
     But Saturday afternoon I was coming from Buffalo Grove, where my parents now live, and couldn't help notice a knot of protesters on the corner of Milwaukee and Dundee, waving heretofore unimaginable mash-ups of the American and Canadian flags. An echo of an echo, the nutsoid anti-COVID movement in the United States, bouncing into Canada, and now bouncing back.

    It reminded me of the mini-rallies that Trump supporters used to hold on the corner of Shermer and Walters, to harangue passing cars and manifest themselves. Trump denied the significance of COVID, initially, to try to get himself re-elected, because of his worldview where acknowledging anything bad is weakness, and even though now he has tried to walk that back, it's too late. Denialism as a political belief has escaped the lab and infected half the country.

     Wearing masks is a bother. Boo-fucking hoo. The dynamic active elder lifestyle community where my parents now reside requires masks. And temperature checks. Which I happily consent to because a) I'm not an asshole; b) I don't want to kill somebody's grandmother and c) it requires almost no thought or effort.
     There is something almost funny that people who are otherwise busy trying to kneecap elections, throttle the media, pull down American democracy and install a strongman in the former of Loser L. McLoser get all frantic over the prospect of being asked to save their lives with a vaccine, or somebody else's with a cotton mask, the wearing of which interferes with your personal freedom to a lesser extent than wearing pants does. It's gotten so bad that now Canadians, in all their decency, have begun acting like Americans—a charge I level in the full knowledge of just how profound an insult they will consider that to be.
     No matter. Insults are now the air we breathe, drawing condemnation of ourselves into our lungs, expelling denunciations of others. It's both immensely worrying and strangely freeing to us in the words-on-paper business. None of it really matters, does it? It's like we're providing play-by-play commentary to a forest fire.

Timeless Notes: Fathers

     I've been thinking about Shel Silverstein lately. The United States Postal Service is issuing a stamp in his honor later this year.     

     He's one of those Chicago writers who seldom make the casting call of Chicago literary talent, even though he was born here, grew up in Logan Square and went to the University of Illinois. He started writing and drawing for Playboy, living here until success hit and the moved, quite prudently, to a houseboat in Sausalito.

     Silverstein should be on the list, "The Giving Tree," featured on the stamp, certainly having as much impact on our culture as "Humboldt's Gift." He was an amazingly broad talent: he also wrote "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash, and deserves some hoopla in his hometown to go along with this stamp.
     But our Saturday correspondent, Caren Jeskey, beat me to the punch, at least with the opening quote to today's report, which I've delayed your reading too long already. Here it is:

I cannot go to school today!"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue
It might be instamatic flu
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke
I'm sure that my left leg is broke
My hip hurts when I move my chin
My belly button's caving in
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained
My 'pendix pains each time it rains
My nose is cold, my toes are numb
I have a sliver in my thumb
My neck is stiff, my spine is weak
I hardly whisper when I speak
My tongue is filling up my mouth
I think my hair is falling out
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight
My temperature is 108
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear
There's a hole inside my ear
I have a hangnail, and my heart is... what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is Saturday? Ha-ha
G'bye, I'm goin' out to play”
— from "Sick" by Shel Silverstein

     Long gone are the days when I played sick to get out of an exam at school. I’ve barely been able to get off of the couch for weeks after an exhausting move, then the flu. I can’t wait to be well again. I am hoping I’ll be able to get out and play this weekend, maybe even today.
     These days, typical stressors can feel like a lot more to contend with than they used to. We don’t have room to process normal life phases right now. Even though a pandemic was inevitable, we are dealing with collective shock and grief. The texture of our lives has been altered. Life stages and aging cannot be sufficiently processed with the angst and pain of a bigger demon on our tails.

     Enter the gifts of the humanities, and of our own imaginations and memories to get us out of this mess.
     The original Whip In opened in 1986 and was a cozy, wood paneled convenience store with a small bar and restaurant with red vinyl booths that served generous portions of aromatic, authentic Indian food. It’s on a major interstate, I35 (the most terrifying Indy 500 wannabe thoroughfare I’ve ever travelled save Chicago’s current incarnation of the Dan Ryan), in Austin Texas.
     I stumbled upon it several years ago before it was sold (and sadly rearranged but that’s another story). The long side of the L-shaped bar boasted tap after tap of crafty beers, some brewed in house. The short side had just a handful of stools, wine on tap, and several shelves of cheap to fancy wines.
      I ordered some food and a glass of red wine. It was impossible not to notice the dapper chap sitting at the other end of the small bar. He was dark haired and grizzled in a handsome cowboy way. He wore a white fedora and it didn’t take me long to realize that it was James McMurtry, Larry’s son.
     His body language said Keep Out, and so I did. I chatted a bit with the barkeep, and very quietly told him that I was dying inside a little, one of my favorite songsters a few feet away. I’d been known to sell James’ music to my friends with “he’s one of the greatest living American poets!” And who can not dance to Choctaw Bingo?
     I once listened to James’ "Complicated Game" driving east down rural highways to a work training in College Station. In his music, I felt the southern blues in my bones as deep as Chicago and Gary steel mill rusty melancholy. Amidst the stark pain of dreams deferred and the longing sensitivity of an artist’s soul, James is witty and funny. When he strums his guitars they are an extension of the rest of his sentient being. He’s a joy to behold through the airwaves and even more so in person.
     The barkeep took the matters into his mains compétentes. “James! My friend Caren here is drinking the same wine you are!” An eye cautiously looked up at me from under the white felted hat. “Hmm, you don’t say?” Within a short time James had moved a few stools closer until there was just one in between us.
     I sat very still, having wooed a forest creature into trusting me. A woman came up and let him know “the boar sausage is in the freezer and ready for you to pick up!” James was pleased by this news. He generously regaled me with a tale about his recent wild boar hunting expedition with his crossbow.
     Here I was, the mythical McMurtry family the reality of my life.
     I’m not sure what prompted it, but suddenly James was telling me a long story. I dared not look straight at him, for fear of ruining the moment. I soaked up his gravelly voice in my left ear. As I recall, the story involved a saloon owner who, during the Gold Rush, travelled from town to town opening establishments in booming towns. When the area dried up, he’d pack up and move the gig to the next hot spot, sticking his sign into the dusty ground, tiny town after town, as he travelled.
     James said something about the moral of the story, and it was not something simple about industriousness. Maybe one day that memory will come back to me. I hope so.
     The story was told to him by his father,  Larry McMurtry who we sadly lost last year. (I think it’s a book too, but haven’t been able to find it yet. If you know, please let me know). It registered that James McMurtry just shared, in detail, one of his father’s magical fantasies with me. Time stood still. No amount of money can buy the most valuable things in life. James commented “oh. I reckon I just spoiled the story for you.” I assured him that he had not.

P.J. O’Rourke, scribe of a franker time

     When I wrote this, it never occurred to me that the Sun-Times would refuse to print the offensive way that O'Rourke described a Korean political rally back in 1988. But we wouldn't. Respecting that decision, I won't share it here either. I realize that my bosses are just trying to protect me from being run out of town on a rail, a quivering ball of tar and feathers. Neither of us want that, and better safe than sorry. 

     Though you can be too safe, which is also a sorry situation. Nobody writes in to complain about that, so perhaps I should. This is an example of something we can think of as "N-Word Creep," where banning one word as being too disturbing to be mentioned in any context ever leads to other words receiving the same banishment, because it's the path of least resistance. I guess that's also why you can't guess "wench" or "slave" on Wordle. The danger is that you do it enough and it becomes, not a sign of enlightenment and consideration, but condescension and timidity. Maybe that day has already arrived. The bottom line is, I don't set newspaper policy, I follow it, sometimes grudgingly.

     Every time another 1960s musician dies, Facebook keens with grief. Tears spatter Twitter, as people clutch at their hearts, decrying this latest loss.
     And if the departed are in any way famous — say, Michael Nesmith of The Monkees — a process I call “The Full Diana” starts up, wheezing like a circus calliope, with the stacked teddy bears and cellophane-wrapped flowers.
     “Save it for somebody you love,” I mutter.
     Sitting at Denver Airport Tuesday, waiting for my flight home, I saw that P.J. O’Rourke had died. I felt ... well “sad” is overstating the case. “Sorry” is more accurate. I was thinking of him just last week, wondering what became of the arch, edgy humorist, so big in his day, and whether it might be worth tracking him down for a chat. Too late now.
     Even “sorry” is too strong. “Grateful” might be more to the point. Not grateful he is dead, of course. But that he lived, and wrote, amusing millions while inspiring an army of lesser talents such as myself. He was frank and fearless.
     When I got home, I went to the bookshelf and pulled down my O’Rourke books. “Parliament of Whores,” his keelhauling of the U.S. government, begins, “What is this oozing behemoth, this fibrous tumor, this monster of power and expense hatched from the simple human desire for civic order?”
     Did I mention he was a Republican? He was.
     My favorite of his 20 or so books is “Republican Party Animal,” containing the delightfully titled, “Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West,” one of those delicious assignments freelancers once dreamt about:

     “Ferrari North America, which is based in Montvale, New Jersey, had a 308GTS that needed to be delivered to Los Angeles by January 2, to be featured in a movie. Ferrari called Car and Driver and asked if they’d like to assign someone to drive it across the country. Car and Driver was good enough to ask me, and of course I said yes.”

     Though a member of the media — he was “international correspondent” for Rolling Stone; the title initially something of a joke — O’Rourke could be critical of the press. With good reason. I just waded through two long obituaries, in The New York Times and the Washington Post. Neither mentioned his most relevant story, “Seoul Brothers,” a report on the South Korean presidential election in 1988.

To continue reading, click here.

Sharing Wordle scores: "This is all madness."

"Random Word Machine," by Daniel Faust
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     People despise Facebook. And rightly so, as an addictive time sink, a gigantic 24-hour carnival of triviality and pathos and malice that they can neither abandon nor embrace. A cheap simulacrum of life and the world that keeps them from experiencing the real thing. 
     I get that.
     Myself, I kinda like it, as a curated 5,000 member shock troop of readers, as a source of ideas—I often learn the news, not from publications such as mine, but from snippets people post. Now that we don't gather in public anymore, Facebook delivers the zeitgeist, the tone of culture, at least those clustered around me. 

     Then there is my own life, served back at me from a decade ago.
     "Don't do anything reckless," I told Ross a dozen years ago, when he was in his mid-teens and heading downstate for an overnight chess tournament, the precious memory preserved in amber like a paleolithic wasp.
     "What do you mean?" he asked, guileless.
     "Don't open with anything other than your king or queen's pawn," I sputtered, improvising.
     "What about the Sicilian?" he answered, sailing beyond my chess knowledge.
     I shared that with the public. Some readers fill their page with Bible quotes, or real estate listings, or trite memes. Which is their right. I would never dream of objecting. "What's all this about your wife being in heaven? Heaven is an artificial human construct. Ludicrous, really, in its..."
     So it surprises me to see the pushback directed at Wordle, the popular little game where you have six guesses to nail a five-letter word. There is a button that lets you post your score—not the mystery word itself, which is the same for all players every day, but the colored boxes reflecting how accurate your series of guessed words was. 

    I post my score, because dozens of people then comment. They have a Wordle party on my Facebook page. I posted Wednesday's score with the remark, "Nailed it in three." All sorts of people chimed in: from my college roommate's mother to director Bob Falls.
     Most comments were along the lines of this:
     "Took me 5. I just couldn't pull it together!" wrote Joe O'Connor.

     It doesn't seem the sort of stuff to annoy people. But it does, big time. Forty-six people commented on my Feb. 12 score, including this, from Joe Lenord:

     "This is all madness to me and I refuse to be a follower."

     The classic refrain of all the objectors, which is curious, given the actual madness going on, and what people are clearly willing to follow. Their objections reminded me of the Chicagoans-don't-put-ketchup-on-hot-dogs trope, which of course is not a culinary debate at all, but a parody of the sneering you-don't-belong-here exclusion that our tribal city used to feel comfortable projecting at anybody arriving on the block uninvited, now preserved as this very odd, ritualized condiment scruple.

     In that spirit, given what an enormous wildfire Facebook represents, it is very human that public ire would be directed at the five-minute commitment required by Wordle. Yet "madness" is the word people frequently use. 

     "Feel free to play, but for G-d sakes please STOP sharing this madness!" Bruce L. wrote on Wednesday's post, setting off an interesting exchange.
     "How about people stop getting so upset about it?" I replied. "You don't hear me complaining about golf."
     "Because we’re not posting about our golf game!" Bruce riposted. "Yet 20% of our feeds these days are people posting this silliness... That’s why you hear complaints..."
     "I'm confused," I wrote. "Are Worlde scores any more trivial than baby photos or what somebody ate for lunch today?
     That drew a lengthy, thoughtful exegesis from Bruce:

     "Yes Neil Steinberg, Wordle scores are infinitely more trivial than baby pics and modestly more trivial than food pics..."And again, we’re not posting our golf scores, our Scrabble results, our bowling scores, or our completed NYT Sunday crossword puzzles...
     Why do so many people feel the need to share their Wordle scores? I guess that’s the part the rest of us are confused about... Why do Wordle players think that other people care, yet nobody else seems to share any of their scores from those other trivial activities...
     Go ahead and play and enjoy! But why the need to share? Unless the ulterior motive is to clear out your friends list because you know so many people hate it and will stop following you... in that case, you may just be a genius! ."  

     While I do need to periodically thin the herd, that isn't my intention.  I replied:

     That's easy. Because they can. Wordle gives you a button to paste the score to your clipboard, for easy posting to social media. I guarantee if there were a button next to the handle on your toilet, posting your efforts online, Facebook would be crammed with those photos. So perhaps gratitude is in order; worse is no doubt coming.

    Even as I typed that, it occurred to me that my reasoning was doing more to bolster his argument than mine. I try to be able to be persuaded; it's my superpower. I'm sure the blush will go off both the playing and the posting of Wordle. New baubles will appear to distract us with their shine. Until then, if anybody should be bitching about Wordle, it should be me. The column I wrote about Wordle drew two comments when I posted it on Facebook Feb. 9. My Wordle score for that day drew 38.