next stop, Kalamazoo

The world certainly looks different from the window of a 737 than it does from down here at “see level.” Before you groan and start gathering your stones and torches, “travel at see level” was a tagline I coined years ago back in college for a Greyhound advertising campaign. This was the same client for whom I designed an ad with the graphic of a yellow BUMP sign in front of a picturesque mountain vista that read, “At 30,000 feet it's called turbulence.” Blame it on the late nights and Schaefer Light.
Just days ago I found myself flying over this very same terrain -- a patchwork of ruddy brown and green peppered with red thatched roofs, above ground pools, and bisecting lines of asphalt leading to somewhere else.
Now I find myself on the Amtrak Wolverine heading west towards Chicago, ironically traversing the very ground I happened to survey from the air a couple of days back. I recalled the beautiful sights from above, with boundaries clearly drawn and definitive borders giving a sense of order where none really exists except in city halls and dusty land plats. It was an earthen quilt peeking through clouds splayed like lobster tails, full of possibility and wonderment, beauty and grandeur.
Down here below though it's a different story.
Mattresses under overpasses, boarded up windows, discarded refrigerators along the tracks, and a hollow look in the eyes... the invisible people clad in gingham and pilled flannel who walk these city streets that quickly flash by the double paned glass of this single level coach. There is a duality that is readily apparent to someone like me who grew up in this area and had the fortune to move away before everything went to shit. The people still smile through the haze; through sour economic times and a shared poor sense of proper daytime attire.
A mile down the tracks, the Kelloggs plant with its smokestacks spewing Corn Flakes ash while a fiberglass Tony the Tiger happily waves unaware from the front lawn. Also whistling by like an apparition, the Jiffy company... “cornbread since 1932.” and MacMillan and Wife Hand Car Wash, around the corner from the Elite Barber Shop -- manufacturing and small business monuments to the people who wake up every morning at 5am, wipe the sleep from their eyes, brush their teeth, and drive to the factories and shops in order to keep food on the table, pay their mortgage and keep America moving forward. What other option is there really?
(So these are the people that make up that elusive and intangible “Main Street” Obama keeps talking about.)
The Joan Didion book on my lap is a welcome counterpoint to the novel I just finished, H.G. Adler's “The Journey,” with it's harrowing account of transporting Jews via rail to concentration camps during World War II. Perhaps, I was meant to take this rail expedition now, my own personal journey through the heartland to a destination that cannot be printed on any ticket. It is a trip, an exploration that doesn't allow itself to be purchased or fully articulated in a blog. Interestingly enough, this blog was meant to be an amusing travelogue detailing my date with a cocktail in Chicago and a review of the fabulously inspiring music flooding my ears from my iPod. But, you know what they say about the best laid plans.
(I wonder what Dorothy Parker would have to say about plans being laid end-to-end?)
Regardless, this is a journey we should all take at some point that doesn't require physical passage necessarily. The destination is already there if you take a moment to look closely enough. I am now reminded that much like the unnamed towns passing by at 70 miles per hour I have been here before and I will return to this spot a million times in my ahead with the gained insight that comes from being an accidental tourist, and the knowledge of a better stop just around the bend.

back porch haiku

bamboo muhly sways
in time with spring's metronome
as summer tunes-up.

the wind in the leaves
passing secrets from Brazil
and Greece and Kansas.

water tithes the rock
flint shoals gleaming in sunlight
offerings to the Gulf.

waiting to inhale

A close friend was recently kind enough to let me smell one of his books.
Now before you cart me off in a tumbrel, or start dialing 9-1-1, or 3-1-1, or whatever you do in a situation like this, allow me explain.

Ask any card-carrying bookworm: There is no finer fragrance than the interior of a yellowed tome with its notes of far-away lands, and an hermetically sealed universe that can only exist within the confines of a front and back cover. Some would rightfully argue that a book is a passport; a best friend; a portal into other people's fate, to be consumed as leisurely or voraciously as the reader would digest it. A good book is better than a good meal any day with nary a chance of acid reflux.

When I was a boy, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time in self-imposed solitude, living through the pages of as many books as I could get my hands on. I found myself consistently laden down with pounds of age-appropriate literature from the school library, somehow managing to later steal more adult titles from the shelves of the neighborhood bookmobile to feed my precocious quest for carnal knowledge.

Of course, there really isn't a point to any of this. Taken at face value, it is just a few paragraphs thrown together in a virtual shrine of the written word. Perhaps it is a call to arms for my fellow compatriots to continue fighting the good fight, reading the good paperback, forging forward against the wind, Oprah Book Club selection raised firmly in hand for everyone to see.
Besides, you can always sniff it later when nobody is watching.

what is a depression, and who is it to me?

Who wastes time fretting over whether the glass is half full, or half empty? What we really want to know is whether it is water or whether it is gin? Changes the equation entirely.

Brings to mind all of this incessant hand wringing over what to call the current economic downturn. A recession? A depression? A retrenchment? A Barnum-and-Bailey World?

Oh, come on... it's only a paper moon after all (and hopefully not one made of common stock, or cheese for that matter, although they are now worth about the same.)

Regardless of what term we settle on, all this daily sturmundrang has me wondering if the mere attempt to classify said blemish on the nation's fiscal complexion is what is leading to the stock markets steady decline.
It seems to me -- and I'm not one to give away my age for a cheap cocktail and a bag of peanuts -- but during the original Depression of the 30's, people just made due. They rolled up their collective sleeves and went to work righting the economic ship that was helmed by an improbable captain, FDR. They did not wallow in despair or self-pity, or go on Oprah to blab how much worse off their plight was than their neighbors.
If I see one more waif publically plead her case about lack of good roles for women before the national media, I'll just turn the channnel. That's what I'll do.

In the end, if we are forced to wear oatmeal boxes for shoes, make our own clothes, or drink from Mason jars again, so be it. I shall be the very last person to complain. Just make sure you that you fill that jar half full.... no water please.

plagiaristic dyspepsia

Is it just me, or does the new Pepsi logo bear more than a passing resemblance to the Obama campaign's emblamatic trademark?

The cola manufacturer unveiled the new design to coincide with the inauguration of the country's 44th President.

Hmmm. Probably just me.

(Now that's Cyanocobalamin you can believe in.)

a pirate looks at forty

When I was 12, I ate a plain cheeseburger -- no condiments, no lettuce, tomatoes or pickles on the 73rd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta and got a copy of the menu as a souvenir. When I was 32, I ate a plain cheeseburger -- no condiments, no lettuce, tomatoes or pickles on the lanai of Jimmy Buffet's Cheeseburger In Paradise in Lahaina, Maui and got a copy of the credit card receipt as a souvenir.
I swam in the cerulean blue waters of the Caribbean at the foot of the Mayan ruins in Tulum. And I have white water rafted on some river in Belize... I forget the name. I have stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon four times, at Yavapai Point and yelled my name and heard it echo ten times. I have straddled the continental divide, and then peed at a nearby rest area all the while wondering if my piss would ultimately reach the Pacific or the Atlantic.
I'll never know for sure.
Then there was the time that I kayaked in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and got so sunburned that I shed skin for 3 weeks.I have driven the road to Hana, but got bored after two hours so drove back to the hotel to drink another drink with a biodegradeable umbrella.
I have sipped cocktails at the top of the Hancock Tower in Chicago, but ordered a Sidecar on a dare and thought it tasted like cherry flavored Sucrets. I have built two houses and found out that it wasn't as bad as everyone claims. I have walked the sidewalk outside Graumann's Chinese Theater but never saw Marilyn's handprints. I have owned five cars, and will never buy a Chevy again. I bought a Chevy in 1984, and will never buy a Chevy again. Did I mention my first car?
I rode the streetcar in Portland and shopped at the world's largest bookstore that required a map of the store and ended up buying a book that I could have just as easily purchased at Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com.
I have shopped online, repeatedly.
I learned how to ice skate, but cannot drive a stick shift or roller skate backwards. I have canoed down the Cuyahoga river and seen Indian Burial mounds from the banks of the Erie Canal.
I have walked 30 blocks alone in New York City at midnight after seeing one of Idina Menzel's final performances in Wicked, and managed not to get mugged.
I have been mugged in downtown Dallas.
I have lived. I have loved. I have lost. I have won. I have written.

new year's haiku

Sniffles, Sneezing, Cough.

Crumpled tissues by the bed.

Is it midnight yet?