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Weak VIII

20 February 2021

No. 7,298 (cartoon)

I hope things will be fine.

Wishful thinking doesn’t work.

If it did, you’d be dead.

21 February 2021

The Perfect Conceptual Artist Revisited

I scribble words daily but only publish these notebook entries in a weakly group. When I recently went to upload another batch, I noticed that all the text for 13 February had vanished from the database, leaving only the title, “The Perfect Conceptual Artist.” I never saw a problem like that before, something I still say almost daily after going on forty years of working with computers.

It wasn’t hard to rewrite, since I remembered most if not all of the tall tale I’d written a few days earlier. I have no way of comparing the final version with the missing original, but I’m fairly certain that the second iteration was better.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, I have failed to grasp it let alone appreciate it. I suppose that I could spend the next twenty-five years redoing most of what I’ve done over the last twenty-five years and have a better body of work to show for it. If I’m still around to show anything. But where’s the fun in that?

That ain’t a-gonna happen. I can’t imagine spending that much time correcting old mistakes where there are so many new ones to make. I’m not sure how many, but clearly enough to keep me busy fur the rest of my life.

And who cares about a body of work, anyway?

Bruce Calderwood, Stephen Depace, Lawrence Falconi, and Russell Wilkinson dba Flipper revealed The Ultimate Answer decades ago when they recorded Life.

I've figured out what living is all about,
It's life! Life!
Life is the only thing worth living for ...

22 February 2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 1919-2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died a month shy of his hundred and second birthday. I can’t imagine that. Or, more accurately, I don’t want to visualize such an ending.

I’m glad that my father, who was a year younger than Ferlinghetti, didn’t live that long. A couple of lines in his obituaries were telling ...

“ ...mostly bed-bound and nearly blind in his later years ...”

“He was signing books up until a few years ago, when he couldn’t physically do it any more.”

When he died, he was a visual artist who couldn’t see and a writer who couldn’t sign his name. I hope anyone who finds me in that state will kindly put me out of my misery, even if I’m a week shy of my hundredth birthday. While almost everyone else is celebrating that Ferlinghetti “lived” over a century, I’m lamenting that he really didn’t.

23 February 2021

North on Top?

How can people in Australia survive when they’re upside down? I went there in 2000 to investigate. And even though the bogans down under were decidedly more than a tad off-kilter, they were about as vertical as I was after so many cans of Victoria Bitter.

It took me a couple of decades before I wondered why the northern hemisphere is always shown at the top of maps and globes. I poked around a bit, and found that wasn’t always the case. For a while during medieval times, most European maps showed the east on top. (Of course, they didn’t know about the crazy round earth idea with the earth spinning on an axis running through the poles.) Old Arab and Chinese maps showed the south on top. And blah blah blah blah blah ...

In conclusion, mapping the north on top is just one of those things that just are for no good reasons, like combining raisins and bran instead of wine and coarse bread. Crazy stuff.

24 February 2021

One of Thirty-Seven Drummer Jokes

Joey is moaning about his myriad aches and pains from a lifetime of drumming. Of course he is. The human body only evolved enough to be healthy until forty. And there’s nothing on the evolutionary trail that leads to maniacal drummers who spend decades of drumming vainly trying to smash their instruments back to their original molecules and atoms.

Most of the old drummers still around have degenerated into insipid jazz, lightly tippety-tapping the skins and gently scritchy-scratching cymbals, sending listeners into a deep, somnambulistic stupor.

But not Joey. He still bashes and smashes away feverishly at everything he can pummel and wallop, as if he was trying to make a herd of mammoths stampede. (He probably would have succeeded by now has the massive beasties not gone extinct thousands of years ago.)

“I wish I would have been a musician instead of a drummer,” he lamented.

“What’s with the self-defecating humor?” I asked.

“It’s survival,” he explained. “I make the drummer jokes as a preemptive strike before anyone else can.”

Tarnation if he wasn’t right! There are only thirty-seven good drummer jokes, and since we both knew all of them it was pointless to ridicule his chosen medium.

25 February 2021

Fairly Good With Words

I was pleasantly surprised when Katia told me that I was starting to get fairly good with words. I went into “aw shucks” mode, and protested that I wasn’t a very good writer, it’s just that if you do something every day for decades you reach a degree of adequacy.

She didn’t hesitate to correct my misunderstanding; I like that in a friend.

She began suggesting that I was suffering from delusions of sufficiency. When she said that I was becoming fairly good with words, she meant that I’d barely moved on from arranging syllables in the right sequences. She added that my sentences were pathetic and that my paragraphs were abominations. In case I missed any subtleties, she concluded that not only was I not a good writer, but that I was a sadistic language butcher.

I thanked her for the extraordinary compliment. I can’t throw a cup of espresso across a coffee shop without hitting at least three pretty good writers, but, according to the Internet, I do be the only sadistic language butcherer they is!

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart