Time to Slow Down a Little

I don’t mean slowing down when it comes to writing the blog–Lord knows I have done too much of that in the last year or so.  I mean that my days are finally not as hectic as they have been for much of the last month, which means I have time for more walking, writing, blogging, and doing nothing.

Mainly, this is because the fall semester rush at the Columbus State bookstore has ended until after the first of the year.  I worked from the third week of August until the Thursday after Labor Day, and the work varied from dull days with very few customers, to the inevitable scenario that plays out on the first day of class: A student has a 6 p.m. night class, and shows up at the bookstore at 5:55 to see what books they need.  And are pissed off when we’re out of them.

Susie collected her first real paycheck on the 30th of August.  She signed up for direct deposit, but the first paycheck is always paper, so we went to the Cashier’s Office and picked it up.  I asked if she was sure she wanted to cash it, instead of framing or mounting it.  Yes, she wanted to cash it.  I did take a picture of it to send to Steph before we went to the credit union.

I love the bookstore job, but I’m also thankful I don’t have it all year.  I realize that I’m a bit too misanthropic for a regular customer service job (one of the reasons I decided, after many years of considering it, that I would not be a good pastor).  I realized this when I jumped at the chance to stay at the bookstore two hours after closing time, so I could shelve the buybacks in peace.  There wasn’t total silence–the night supervisor took advantage of the lack of customers by cranking up Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on his computer.

Susie learned the joys of six- and seven-hour workdays, working in the retail part of the bookstore.  She and I both have the default job title “cashier,” but neither one of us got close to a cash register.  While I stocked books, Susie folded shirts, put merchandise on shelves, priced items, and helped customers.  The first day, she came home looking utterly exhausted.  I pretty much said, “Welcome to the world of work,” and thought that Upton Sinclair was writing a book about the Discovery Exchange that very minute.

Susie had to work until 10 p.m. several nights, and when she was impatient waiting for the bus, she ended up taking a taxi home.  I think it was then that she understood one of Archie Bunker’s common complaints: “Jeez!  Earnin’ a living is costing me money!”  My job at the bookstore ended on the 10th, and hers on the 11th, so she’s back to pounding the pavement Internet in search of sustained remunerative employment once again.

This has also been a recent time of going back to earlier habits and circumstances.  Currently, I am typing this at Ohio State’s William Oxley Thompson Library, partially because this is one of my sanctuaries here in Columbus, and also because my laptop is currently under the knife.  The fan either needs to be repaired or replaced.  I dropped it off Friday afternoon, and am still awaiting word on the cost.  So, when I had the sudden urge to blog today, I came here.

The absence of the laptop has had a positive effect.  I took my Royal Skylark portable manual typewriter out of mothballs, set it on the desk, and have written 11 pages (a Prologue and part of Chapter I) of the novel I began for NaNoWriMo in 2013 and have not touched since November 30 of that year.  Susie is not used to the sound of a typewriter in the house, it’s been so long since I’ve used one.  I grew up hearing it, and was typing almost before I knew how to write with a pencil.  I’m hoping that I can keep the momentum going, even after the laptop comes back.

One of my favorite episodes of Lou Grant, “Blackout,” features a reporter who refuses to start using the then-new VDTs installed in the newsroom.  He is shown industriously writing on a portable typewriter, and Lou berates him for using “that relic,” and asks him when he is going to start using a VDT (visual display terminal, considered futuristic in the late 1970s).  Later on, I came to be quite offended by the reporter’s reply, “I’m a writer, not a typesetter.”  Of course, later in the episode, when power goes out in much of Los Angeles, he is the only one who is still able to work.

Despite the very discursive way this blog has read since day one, spontaneous prose has never been something I’ve done.  One of the things I’ve “reverted” back to is setting up camp in a fast food restaurant for hours on end, subsisting on free refills of soda and tea.  This was my practice in the mid-1990s, when I lived on W. McMillan St. in Cincinnati, and I spent many of my waking hours at the Subway across the street from my apartment building, with my diary or several books on the bright yellow table in front of me.

Susie and I are doing the same thing at the McDonald’s on N. High St., by the OSU campus.  She’ll be there with her laptop and her ear buds, and at some point in the evening I’ll join her, again with my knapsack, books, and diary.

The major difference between my Subway experience and my current one with the Golden Arches is that they don’t allow us to run tabs.  (“He’s our Norm Peterson,” the people behind the counter said of me.)

This document is as historic as a Gutenberg Bible or a First Folio Shakespeare. It’s a page from a 1994 notebook of mine, showing that I had paid my Cincinnati Subway tab in full.

Since bringing the typewriter out of retirement, I’ve been thinking–for the first time in over 30 years–of a guy who habituated Harvard Square in 1982 and 1983, when I was typesetting The Harvard Crimson.  He would come by with a bridge table, an IBM Selectric typewriter, and a big stack of white typing paper.  He would plug the electric typewriter into a public outlet, roll in a sheet of paper, and begin typing whatever came to his mind.  Once he finished a double-spaced page, he would hang it with Scotch tape to the front of the table, so that people walking by could see whatever he had on his mind.  Sometimes he would let other people take turns at the keyboard.  (I seem to recall doing it only once, writing about my Crimson supervisor’s constant threats to quit unless we ditched the computerized typesetting and cold type and returned to flatbed presses and Linotype machines.)

I have contemplated doing this at McDonald’s.  I would be far from the most bizarre character that comes in there, especially in the night hours.  When Susie and I are there after midnight, which often happens on Friday and Saturday nights, the managers are grateful for at least two people who aren’t panhandling or sleeping.  Many LGBT (including several trans and genderfluid) teenagers congregate there.  They’ll usually take up a whole table playing Magic the Gathering, and this McDonald’s has been popular because of its proximity to Star House, a shelter in Weinland Park many of them call home.  (Susie and I seem to have taken a trans teenager under our wing.  They met when this person saw the bisexual pride sticker on Susie’s laptop lid and mistook it for a trans pride flag.)

Susie has threatened to pretend she doesn’t know me if I start bringing the typewriter in and cranking up to full speed, hanging the finished pages out for all to see, but I think she’ll get over it.  Harlan Ellison wrote one short story, “Hitler Painted Roses,” live on the air during the Pacifica Radio show Hour 25, and he wrote at least one other story in the display window of a bookstore.  I should probably promise her that I won’t imitate the late Stephen J. Cannell whenever I finish writing.

Just realized another reason why I love working on my typewriter.  Just now, I clicked the wrong tab by mistake and thought I had lost all my writing since I sat down and began typing this entry.

Much to my (and your)  relief, all is here, all is well.

Now, if I could only save my product to a Cloud, I would be very happy. (But wait: I don’t have to worry about power failures or disk malfunctions with this, do I?)

“I Wasted a Good Worry”

The title is a quotation from Franklin, friend of Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown in the Peanuts universe, who receives an A+ on a test after worrying incessantly about it beforehand.  In days past, I was in charge of hanging weekly quotations (known as the Wayside Pulpit) on the display board in front of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, and I tried to find quotations germane to current issues or news.  I wrote the above quotation at the top of the page in my diary for Sunday’s entry.

Susie was still asleep Sunday morning when I headed to Giant Eagle to buy some money orders.  I know that it is quicker to pay bills online, where you can do it without ever leaving home, but I have gotten in the habit of buying and mailing money orders, and I like doing it.  Also, the U.S. Postal Service needs as much mail volume and as much business as it can get, so I like to do my part.

After I go to Customer Care and buy the money orders (which are $.58 apiece–quite a good price), I go to a little table in the deli and fill them out, put them in envelopes, and then drop them in the mailbox by the store exit.  I had set aside a larger money order (over $300), because I had forgotten the payee’s name and address, so I decided to take it home, fill it out there, and then mail it later on.

When I came home and sat at my desk, I put the receipts for the money orders I had sent on one side, looked through my pockets, and could not find the most expensive one.

I ran went back to Giant Eagle (about a 15-minute walk from my place) as fast as I could.  I remember the bells of Holy Name Church, beckoning the faithful to Mass, striking as I left the house and headed back to the store.

I highly compliment the deli personnel at Giant Eagle, who donned rubber gloves and searched two wastebaskets to see if I had thrown the money order away by mistake.  There was nothing there.  At the customer care counter, the cashier remembered my purchasing all the money orders, and she and her manager were able to go through the transaction records and pull up the money order number.

The manager handed me a form I could use to apply for a refund.  The issuer was Western Union, so I went back to the same table, pen in hand, and filled out the form.  (Western Union’s main business these days is wire transfers and money orders.  They discontinued all telegrams and Mailgrams in 2006, since email had completely taken over the got-to-receive-it-now market.)  I enclosed the $15 fee, and mailed it to an address in Colorado, knowing that there would be nothing to do but wait, maybe for as long as a month.

Harpo Marx’ telegram congratulating Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on winning the Democratic nomination for President in 1960. When I hear “Western Union,” I still think of telegrams first.  (I have never seen the 1941 movie Western Union, however, nor the 1951 picture Overland Telegraph.)

By now, folks, you probably can guess where this is going.  I came home, resigned to the fact that payment to this particular person would have to wait until the refund arrived–assuming someone hadn’t found this blank money order, filled it out, and cashed it.

Sitting down at my desk, I pulled out my pocket notebook so I could flip through its pages and find a friend’s email address.  And…

Inside the front cover was the missing money order!  I alternated between relief and cursing myself for not taking the extra 15-20 seconds to go through the notebook and make sure the money order had not been hiding in there.

I will always be out the $15 processing fee, but I no longer have to worry about the fate of this money order.

Despite feeling completely silly about the whole thing, I feel relieved enough that I can share it here, and even more relieved that the whole experience had a happy ending.

Wide Awake Since 3 a.m., Maybe I Should Blog

Dawn will soon be breaking here in Columbus, and I have been awake since 3 a.m.–“the dark night of the soul,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald says in The Crack-Up.  I’ve sat in a booth at the McDonald’s on High St. and written a three-page diary entry, and did a C. Auguste Dupin-like wandering around the narrow streets east of N. High St.  So, now that I still have some energy, I will devote it to the blog.

Susie and I have become the first bi-generational employees at the Discovery Exchange (a.k.a. the DX, the Columbus State bookstore).  She has been on the job there in retail since before I began my latest rush gig.  (Classes for the fall semester began on August 31, and I started working the Tuesday before.)  When I come in at 5:30 p.m., Susie has already been there for 2½ hours, and usually stays for over two hours after the bookstore closes at 7:30.  She and I both have the default job title “cashier,” although neither of us has touched a cash register.

Jimmy Carter at his word processor (1981 or 1982) writing his memoir, Keeping Faith. His recent cancer diagnoses shamed me into getting back to the blog.

Faithful readers of the blog know that my job at the bookstore is seasonal, only at the beginning of each semester.  It had been my hope that Susie would be able to get a permanent job there, whether full- or part-time, once the rush ended.  I thought there was a good likelihood for this, since her supervisors have praised her hard work, but that is not going to come to pass.  Permanent part-time jobs at the bookstore go to work-study students, with the Federal government picking up the tabs for their wages.  So, as of the 11th, Susie will once again be out of work.

She and I have become fixtures at the McDonald’s near the Ohio State campus.  In a way, this hearkens back to my time in Cincinnati in the mid-1990s, when I spent many hours camped out in the Subway across the street from my apartment building on W. McMillan St.  There are substantial differences, though.  Neither of us have established the rapport and camaraderie I did with the Subway employees in Cincinnati, and McDonald’s does not let us run tabs.

Yet, Susie is a familiar site at the Golden Arches, with her laptop in front of her, surrounding by a scatter of books and notebooks.  When I’m with her, I have a book or my diary in front of me.  We take full advantage of the free refills, of course.  (I have been drinking sweet tea, since I am making yet another attempt to abstain from carbonated beverages.)  We also seem to be the most normal of the people who camp there–in some cases literally–for hours on end.

In addition to the panhandlers who prowl High St., there is a sizable contingent of teenagers from dark until well after midnight, seven days of each week.  A lot of them seem to be genderfluid.  (Full disclosure: I am still trying to understand that whole concept.  Susie has several friends who prefer the pronoun “they,” and I am still trying to unlearn how I learned gender differences as a toddler: “You’re a boy, you have a penis.  Jenny is a girl, she doesn’t.”)  Susie and I seem to have adopted a genderfluid person, aged 17, named Tyler, who is very conversant on 1970s and 1980s music, vintage computer games, and horror literature.  (They were very interested in the copy of Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft I had on the table.)  Tyler met Susie when she was at a table typing on her laptop, and Tyler thought the bisexual pride flag sticker on her laptop lid was a transgender pride flag.

Like many places that are open 24 hours a day, McDonald’s has many surveillance cameras.  They did not help much when someone stole Susie’s wallet.  There was footage of the actual theft, while Susie was in the women’s room, but neither the manager nor the police officer who looked at the video could identify the perpetrator.  (As is the case with a lost wallet, replacing all the ID cards is the biggest nuisance.  Susie only had about $10 in cash, but she had to go to the credit union to get a new debit card, and to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for a new state-issued ID.  I was more upset about the loss of the Subway rewards card I had lent her, which had over 600 points on it.)

It sounds like I am laying the groundwork for a tinfoil hat-type rant about the lack of privacy and how Big Brother is everywhere (and here I would insert a mention of the two-way telescreens in Orwell’s 1984), but I am not as obsessed with that as many people, on both the Left and the Right, seem to be.

To me, fear of surveillance is the moral panic of the decade, much like the loony reports of rampant child abuse in daycare centers during the 1980s (I highly recommend Richard Beck’s book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s for an examination of this), the rumors of a vast Satanic underground network in the 1970s, and the fear of alien abductions and black helicopters in the 1990s.

I have actually taken offense at the fact that I am probably not under government scrutiny.  One Facebook poster pointed out that if the NSA is not investigating and spying on you, you’re not doing enough.  Every decade or so, I send a Freedom of Information Act request for anything they may have on me, and end up highly offended when the Attorney General’s office sends back a letter saying there is nothing.

And that is surprising.  When I applied for employment with the U.S. Postal Service, and later the IRS, I was afraid that a letter I wrote when I was 18 would surface.  I had written to Selective Service after I registered for the draft–and I let them know it was under protest, and in the letter I said that if I was drafted, I would give classified information to the Soviet Union and to Iran (This was in 1981, right after the Iranian hostage crisis ended, and when Ronald Reagan–he of the double-digit IQ–was talking of the “evil empire”).

And my ongoing games with Selective Service didn’t rate a file, either.  They instructed that I was to inform them of any change of address, so I began filing change of address cards whenever I left the house–to the store, to Burger King, to church–complete with the addresses of my various destinations, and then filing another card when I came home.  When I moved to Boston in 1982, I sent in a change of address listing an address that would have been midway in the Charles River, between Cambridge and Allston.

It ended when they sent me a letter care of my home address in Marietta.  To this day, I do not know its contents.  I wrote ADDRESSEE DECEASED–RETURN TO SENDER on the envelope, dropped it in the mailbox, and never heard from them again.  Their bureaucracy was too lazy or inefficient to request a death certificate or obituary to prove this.

I am not denying that surveillance exists.  It is, however, hypocritical that the same Republicans who were all for it after 9/11, when it was called the Patriot Act, and who vigorously supported the wiretaps and mail interceptions Richard Nixon authorized in 1971 against people who committed the heinous crime of opposing the Vietnam War, are now the shrillest voices against the NSA.  I have no right to be outraged if I get in trouble for something I have posted on Twitter or here in this blog.  It is accessible to anyone with a router, and that is its purpose and intent.  If, however, I get government attention as a result of a diary entry, or a snail-mail letter to a friend, then I have the problem.

Any World That I’m Welcome To…

The Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown was in a unique position this past weekend.  It played host to two different types of alternate universes.  The generations divided these two avenues of escape, but, as I thought, there would definitely be some overlap and–though both sides would be loath to admit it–some common ground.

Susie and I spent much of the weekend at these two events.  Susie was overjoyed that she was actually able to be in Columbus when Matsuricon 2015 was taking place.  It is a three-day anime convention which is always held at the Hyatt Regency, but in previous summers, Susie has been in Florida for the time that it happened.  Now that she is once again based in Central Ohio, she was overjoyed by the fact that she could go.

I was shocked (and somewhat amused) to see that Matsuricon would be sharing space with Pulpfest, the annual convocation of fans, collectors, and scholars of pulp, which became a genre unto itself from the 1930s until television truly came into its own in the early 1950s.  Publishers began producing books and magazines en masse on low-quality wood pulp paper, which meant they could produce magazines much more cheaply than their “glossy” competitors.

The content was all over the map, but the pulps were the gateway for many readers of all ages to the world of books, and popularized genres such as Westerns, science fiction, detective, and adventure fiction.  The list of authors who published in the pulps is miles long, but this year’s Pulpfest honored the 125th anniversary of the birth of H.P. Lovecraft, so many vendors in the Regency Ballroom at the Hyatt plugged any magazines or paperbacks or first editions featuring any of Lovecraft’s writings, especially any work that was part of his Cthulhu mythos.  (Also, one of the annual events of Pulpfest is Farmerfest, a day of workshops dedicated to Philip José Farmer and his works.)

The allure of the pulps was the escape from the mundane world of work, school, and home life, where for the cost of a measly dime The Shadow could coolly assure you that “as you sow evil, so shall you reap evil.  Crime does not pay.”  You could fight criminals in the morning and woo curvaceous women in the evening with Simon Templar (The Saint), or have a front-row seat at a prizefight between two fictitious boxers.

An assortment of pulp magazines for sale at Pulpfest 2015.

The literary quality of many of these magazines and books are questionable (and I’m being charitable in using this adjective), although many writers revered to this day (William Faulkner, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, and Isaac Asimov) first published there because these were the only venues where they could appear in print and be paid, although at a lower rate than in the “glossies.”  Many parents would forgive the literary quality (or lack thereof) and the content once they saw that reading these books opened the door to a love of books for their children that would serve them well as time passed.  (Indeed, I own several paperbacks–some of them literary classics–published during the early and mid 1940s where the back cover urges the reader to “Send this book to a serviceman!”  How many World War II soldiers, too broke for the bars and brothels, utterly bored, took Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, or Charles Dickens out of a care package and began reading out of sheer desperation, and then looked into the GI Bill once they had returned home to the U.S.?)

Matsuricon served the same purpose for the teenagers and young adults whom I saw roaming the Convention Center and the Hyatt during the weekend.  Susie went on Friday afternoon, and was back on Saturday–the day I was at Pulpfest–and Sunday afternoon.  She dressed as Dipper Pines, one of the major characters in the animated Disney series Gravity Falls.  I have yet to see this program, but Susie describes it as a teenage PG-13 Twin Peaks.  She later posted pictures of herself in a room full of Dipper Pineses.

Susie (“Dipper Pines”) is near the center, left arm outstretched with journal in hand, in the company of her fellow Gravity Falls characters.

From the summit of my years, I can now see the allure of Matsuricon.  Many of the kids there are, undoubtedly, on the receiving end of bullying, harassment, and probably full-fledged physical assault among their peers, at school and in their neighborhoods.  For the three days Matsuricon takes place, the more bizarre their costumes and characters, the more welcome they were.  None of your fellow Matsuricon attenders would ridicule or question where you found yourself on the gender continuum, or what pronoun you preferred.

This explains, I think, the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, which began when I was in high school in the late 1970s.  The kid who weighed 97 pounds (or 397 pounds) could, at the mere roll of some dice, lay waste to an entire village, ransack their treasuries and come away with more gold coin than he could ever spend, and ride away with a beautiful woman or two on his arm.  This would be a much more palatable experience than the bullies who would steal his lunch money and stick his head in the urinal.

Even though I thought for sure that Matsuricon and Pulpfest peacefully co-existing would be unlikely, there was some overlap.  I was not the only parent there whose child was at Matsuricon.  I saw two costumed teenage girls wander into the Regency Ballroom hand in hand and begin looking at the paperbacks and the magazines with the risqué covers, fascinated by what they were seeing, until someone told them they could not stay unless they paid the $20 admission fee.

The kids from Matsuricon showed no signs of exhaustion.  Susie surrendered to sensory overload and left with me after the Pulpfest dealer room closed at 4:30.  (Seeing the Pulpfest people weaving through the Matsuricon people was truly where the oil hit the water.)  I, however, went back downtown a little after 11 p.m. for the second night of “Lovecraft at the Movies.”  I saw a 1971 episode of Night Gallery entitled “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture,” and this was followed by The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), which looked very much like a 1930s black and white film, so much so that I mentally began filling in the inevitable static, scratches, and pops, and looked every so often for the black fuzz that occasionally appears at the bottom of the screen when watching an old, badly restored movie on TV.

I came out of the movies a little after 1:30 a.m., and Matsuricon was still going full blast.  The comic book store Heroes and Games had remained open late, as had the little convenience store, and everywhere I could see con-goers sitting around talking, cuddling, reading, and standing around talking and laughing.

I am sure there are dark moments at gatherings like these–there always are.  My video game skills never got much past Missile Command and Space Invaders, so I cannot relate to the large-scale universe of the seriously competitive video gamers.  That world’s ugly side became public last year with Gamergate.

But last weekend, it looked like the haters were the only people who were personae not grata.

(NOTE: The title of this blog entry is the title of a song by Steely Dan on the album Katy Lied, ABC Records ABCD-846.  The refrain is “Any world that I’m welcome to/Is better than the one I come from.”)

Shades of Difference

This has been a rainy summer, but when the sun is out, it is very hot and very bright.  It’s been so bright that I have actually considered buying sunglasses.  When I had my annual eye exam in June (a must, since glaucoma is so prevalent in my family), I debated spending a little extra money on a set of prescription sunglasses, but they would be one more pair that I could lose or break.

I think that my resistance to buying and wearing sunglasses is that I have seen them more as a fashion accessory and statement than as a practicality.  Having never been a driver, they have not been a necessity when travelling.  I’ve always been able to brace myself against bright sunlight.

Briefly, I wore a pair of mirror sunglasses when I was a teenager.  These had teardrop-shaped lenses, and I had almost convinced myself that I presented an air of cool.  What brought me back to earth was when I was walking down Putnam St. in downtown Marietta.  Two teenage girls (possibly classmates of mine, since I was about 16 at the time) were passing me on the sidewalk.  One planted herself directly in front of me and gazed into my eyes.  Or so I thought.  Instead, she reached into her purse, took out a comb, and stared into the lenses as she combed and adjusted her hair.

After my annual eye exam at the OSU College of Optometry. All I need to   complete the look is a saxophone.

It took me some time to associate jazz musicians, especially the ones from the 1940s and 1950s, with sunglasses.  (Please note that I drew on that stereotype in the caption for the above picture.)  The first time I saw a picture of a jazz musician wearing sunglasses was on the cover The Shearing Piano (Capitol T-909), in my dad’s record collection.  Dad explained to me that George Shearing (or “old God Shearing,” as Jack Kerouac called him in On the Road) was blind.

A friend of mine, a jazz aficionado, believes the reason that jazz musicians took to wearing sunglasses on stage (and whenever they were out and about in the daytime) was because of amphetamine use and indulging in other controlled substances.  One of the side effects is dilated pupils, so being under bright lights is quite uncomfortable.

I took to wearing sunglasses in the summertime when I was in elementary school, mostly modeling this on Joe Cool, one of Snoopy’s many personae in Peanuts.  Unlike Corey Hart, I did not wear them at night.

During Zappos Bay to Breakers last May, I waited impatiently with many other walkers in Corral G for the green light to step off and begin the 7+ miles to the Great Highway.  There was a family in front of me, a husband, wife, and two girls.  The girls were maybe seven and nine years of age, and, as we waited for the okay to hit the bricks and start walking, the girls were starting to get impatient.  (I probably wasn’t modeling the best behavior, patience-wise, I’m the first to admit.)  As they waited, they both posed with sunglasses (one had a pair of John Lennon glasses with amber lenses, and the older of the two had a pair of black Wayfarers that reminded me of Tom Cruise in Risky Business (1983)) while their parents took pictures of them.  The sunglasses were unnecessary at that time of the morning, as the sky was somewhat leaden and fog hung over the Bay.

While I was at CVS picking up a prescription the other day, I passed some time looking over the sunglasses on a spinner near the front door, while the pharmacist filled my order.  I was looking for a pair of rectangular clip-ons to go over my bifocals.  Once again, practicality reigned.  Unlike when I was younger, shades would not be a trademark.  (Some people manage to make this work quite effectively: the Blues Brothers, Fritz the Nite Owl, and above all, Roy Orbison.  In the latter case, he put on prescription sunglasses as a Plan B when he arrived at a concert and realized he had forgotten his regular ones.  For years, I thought he was blind.)

Maybe getting sunglasses at last is a sign of old age.  A friend’s mother used to say that one sign of old age is using a bridge table to play bridge.

It’s True… I am Dizzy

A health problem isn’t really serious when it’s an annoyance, and not when it’s affecting your quality of life or your ability to work, function, think, or enjoy life.  The ideal would be not to have any ailment or condition at all, but, failing that, keeping it to the level of an annoyance is a worthwhile goal.

That is my current feeling about benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which showed up about two weeks ago.  There had been some minor symptoms, such as mild spinning of the world around me when getting up from a chair or from bed.  I have had balance issues most of my life, as a result of many ear infections when I was a child.

This all came to a head on the 21st of last month.  I had taken the day off work, so that Susie and I could protest at Governor Kasich’s announcement that he was seeking the Republican nomination for the Presidency.  (Much as I loathe the man, he is not on my list of “If he’s elected, I’m tithing half my income to Al Qaeda” candidates–Rand Paul and his father head that list, with Donald Trump very closely behind.)

So what happened, die-hard left-wing activist that I am?  I ended up sleeping through my alarm, and missing Kasich’s announcement at the Ohio Union altogether.  So, I decided to cut my losses and enjoy my day off, which meant lunch with Susie at McDonald’s and then going a few doors north from there to Used Kids Records.

In their street-level foyer, at the foot of the steps that lead to the store itself on the second floor, they leave out all the albums they’ve been unable or unwilling to sell.  I stopped in, and bent over to look through the discards.  They lean against the wall at floor level, so I bent over pretty far to flip through them.  (I have less girth than I did a year ago at this time, but bending over for an extended period of time is still not easy for me.)

When I straightened up, the whole area was spinning, very rapidly.  The spinning was quick enough that I actually saw blurry after-images.  I began to fall, but I managed to brace myself on a cabinet that had also been discarded.  (It held an all-in-one from the 1970s–with an eight-track player, useful only for parts.)

I leaned against the wall, panting.  I realized this wasn’t normal off-balance or dizziness.  Once I had recovered, I took out my phone and I called Rardin Family Practice, the OSU clinic where my general practitioner is.  He wasn’t available, but the woman who answered the phone was able to get me in with another doctor later in the afternoon.

I wondered if the dizziness was because I was wearing new bifocals. (Scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Stardate 8130.3)

The doctor listened to my litany of symptoms, and went through the medical history I had on file.  He asked detailed questions about my tinnitus, such as what type I have.  (I either have the air-rushing or the “cricket” type; there is really no pattern to which one I will have at any given time.)  I told him of my issues with balance, one of the reasons I ride an adult tricycle instead of a regular bike.  (The doctor was a Florida native, so he has seen plenty of them.)

That was when he diagnosed the BPPV.  I knew it was some kind of vertigo.  I also knew, remembering Steph’s pre-cardiac surgery issues, that vertigo is more than just feeling dizzy.  The doctor asked me to turn my head from one side to the other, and took note of the nystagmus (involuntary eye motion) that occurred whenever he did this.

The treatment was something called Epley’s maneuver.  (I thought about asking him if that was anything like the Venus butterfly, but he looked like he was too young to know about L.A. Law.)  I hung over the edge of the exam table while he moved my head from one side to the other.  On Facebook, I described it as waterboarding without the water.

I’m supposed to follow up this Thursday.  In the meantime, the doctor phoned in a prescription for meclizine, which is an antihistamine.  I carry the bottle with me, and I take a tablet whenever I feel the dizziness.

And that is quite a dilemma.  I don’t like the dizziness, but the meclizine causes such fatigue that I feel like I’m in perpetual slow motion.  I am still walking in the Short North and Victorian Village during my lunch hour (I call it my in-lieu-of-lunch walk), but one afternoon, after a spell of the dizziness and taking a tablet to keep it at bay, I came back from the walk short of breath and exhausted, even more than the heat could cause.  I was not very productive the rest of the work day, and slogged through the many ex parte orders that popped up on my screen.

So which do I choose from one minute to the next?  Dizziness or exhaustion?

Since We Last Spoke…

The major difference between a blog and a handwritten diary is that it is so easy to let the blog fall by the wayside.  Opening up the diary, that blank page stares at you like an accusation.  I had to come to this site just now and then look to see that it’s been about six weeks since I last posted in here.

I have been single again for a month.  When Betsy emailed me that she thought we should part ways, my reaction was more relief than it was sadness.  I think the evidence has always been plain to me that I am probably not psychologically or spiritually equipped to be in a relationship, and probably never was.  My reaction was to be the textbook anti-stalker.  I immediately unfriended Betsy on Facebook, and then mailed her the pair of pajamas that she had left in my bedroom closet for when she came up to Columbus.

Susie will be following in my footsteps at the Columbus State bookstore in about two weeks.  The autumn semester begins on the 31st, so I’ll be back to 12- or 13-hour work days in two weeks or so.  She was a little shell-shocked from her brief job at Charley’s Philly Steaks, so she was reluctant to go to the bookstore’s open interviews.  She went in on a Monday morning, and on Tuesday, she learned by email that they hired her.  And on Wednesday, she and I went to a clinic off Bethel Rd. so that she could have a drug test.  (That was new to me; I did not have to take one when the bookstore hired me in December 2010.)

I’m hoping the bookstore job will lead to something permanent for Susie.  She will be available any hours the store is open, but at present she cannot exceed 27 hours per week.  I know she’ll be happier working in a bookstore than she would be in food service, so I’m hoping that they’ll ask her to stay at the bookstore once the rush period ends, which is usually right after Labor Day.

Beside the drug test, Susie had to clear some other bureaucratic hurdles before it became official that she is soon to be an employee of Columbus State Community College.  First, she had to prove that she can legally work in the United States.  I wasn’t able to lay my hands on a copy of her birth certificate immediately, so we took her passport to Columbus State’s H.R. office.  She also produced a brand new Social Security card (brand new because she lost hers when her wallet was stolen), and a brand new State of Ohio ID (Ibid.).

Both Susie and I looked forward to Pride this year, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that all 50 states had to recognize same-sex marriages.  (I learned the news from Susie moments after the Supreme Court announced the decision.  She was on her laptop in the McDonald’s near the OSU campus, and saw it on a TV tuned to CNN.  She emailed me immediately–lots of capital letters and exclamation points.)  However, Pride was a washout.

Literally.

We went to the beginning of the Pride Festival Friday night in Goodale Park, and visited several of the vendors’ booths.  (Susie bought the T-shirt she wanted to wear on Saturday, showing the word OHIO with interlocked female symbols for the first O, and interlocked male symbols for the second O.)  But on Saturday, it was gray and rainy from the time Susie and I left the house.  We camped out at McDonald’s and decided to wait until the rain stopped or lessened.

And it never did.  The organizers pulled the plug on the Festival a little after 1 p.m., because by that time, it was still raining, to the tune of one inch per hour.

There’s more to cover, so I don’t want to throw everything into one entry and then wring my hands about not having any material to put in future blog posts, so I’ll end it right here.  That, plus it is now after 2 a.m., and my energy–both mental and physical–is beginning to flag.  It’s becoming harder and harder to hit the right keys.

I like to think that my readers await my blog entries like episodes in a soap opera, like “Love of Chair” (from The Electric Company).

Trying to Join the Workforce

Susie has been back in residence with me since Memorial Day.  She has been devoting many of her hours to writing, and just as many (if not more) to trying to find work.  She has done this both the 21st-century way (by going to Monster.com and the Websites of different businesses here in Columbus), and the old-fashioned way, by seeing HELP WANTED signs in business windows, and walking in to apply.

I have been forthright with her–looking for work is neither easy nor fun.  She is also aware, both from my telling her about it and now from experience, that just because you have applied somewhere, and conscientiously dotted every i and crossed every t when completing the information does not mean you will get called for an interview.  One major change is that at least she gets an acknowledgement email, even if it automated.  In my work-hunting days, pre-Internet, many employers would take the application and that would be the last contact you would have.

Susie did have a job for 1½ days about two weeks ago.  She was hired at a fast-food cheesesteak restaurant on N. High St., near the OSU campus, and she described the hiring situation as being a “minimum wage Hunger Games.”  They hired her and another person, and would watch them work for about a week, and then hire whoever did the better job.  Human resources meets the Colosseum, I suppose.

After Susie, because of her lack of experience and the tendency to become easily frustrated (which I admit she inherited from me), caused a logjam during the lunchtime rush, so the manager told her she was fired and gave her her wages for her brief illustrious career–about $50–in cash.

She took it in stride.  I am thinking the situation would have been even more intense had this been when OSU was in session.  (Summer school began Monday, but there are nowhere near as many students as there are the rest of the year.)

I wish I knew if Susie would consider this a last resort job or a first choice.

Susie picked herself up, dusted herself off, and started all over again.  This afternoon, she interviewed for a sales job at Macy’s out at Easton Town Center.  It’s a long bus ride, but Susie took the initiative to make a “dry run” yesterday to familiarize himself with the place, so she would not be late because of being lost.  (I have never shopped at Macy’s.  Indeed, I have never understood people who shop for recreation.  I do remember Macy’s in its previous incarnations in Cincinnati.  At one time or another when I lived there it was Shillito Rike’s, then Lazarus, and then Macy’s.)

And she has another interview for a desk clerk job at the Renaissance Hotel downtown tomorrow morning.  She had applied for a different job there, but she was not eligible for this job because it involved handling liquor.  But, they’re hiring desk clerks, so her interviewer passed the word along.

The only place I have expressly forbidden Susie to apply is at a convenience store.  (Since they sell alcohol and cigarettes, I am not sure she could work at one until she turns 21, but it seems like every time I turn on the news I hear that one has been robbed.  In Cincinnati, we called them “stop and robs,” since too many people seemed to think they turned into ATMs after dark.)

I also hope she can bypass temporary agencies altogether.  I bounced around several of them in Boston, Cincinnati, and Columbus, and my experiences were not good ones.  Last year, I posted on City-Data.com to ask if the temp agency experience had improved in the 20+ years since I last worked at one, and the answer was no.  If anything, it seems to have worsened.

The worst experience I had with a temp agency was in Columbus in 1986.  I was close to broke, and barely able to afford a tiny room at the YMCA, so I needed work desperately.  I had no phone in my room (this was at least a decade pre-cell phone), and called the agency every morning asking if they had an assignment for me.  As someone with typesetting and proofreading experience, along with a typing speed above 70 words per minute, I thought they would beat a path to my door.

I answered ads in The Columbus Dispatch which promised “hired today, work tomorrow,” and that the sky was the limit for earning power.  On one day, when I made my daily call, the woman told me they had a job for me, they were waiting to hear back from the employer.  Could I call later?

Three phone calls later, they still had not heard from the potential employer.  Could I try again later in the day?  The woman on the phone became very angry when I began singing, “It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.”

My job placement counselor was a woman whose existence I still question, other than on a business card.  Every time I called, she was either on another line, out of the office, at lunch, taking a vacation day, or in a meeting.

Susie peppered Easton Town Center businesses with applications. Instead of applying at each business individually, one can apply for jobs at all its businesses at one site.  I am pleasantly surprised they would have the foresight to streamline the process like that.

I don’t know how long her hiatus from education will last.  I have told her (as has Steph) that I would rather she forego college altogether than take out loans.  College loans are the modern equivalent of the sword of Damocles.

As of November 1994, I have been employed without any gaps, which means that I have mostly missed the wonderful world of searching for work online.  I have read mixed reviews about sites like Monster.com, and I have heard that Craigslist ads are very seldom legitimate.  I usually sat down with the classified section of my local newspaper, pen in hand, ready to circle anything that struck my fancy or for which I felt I was qualified.  Then I would mail out a résumé or call the number, and wait.  And wait.  I can remember when the Sunday classified page was one or two very thick sections of the newspaper, and now it rarely takes up more a column or two.

This time is Susie’s entrance into the working world.  I know that, except for some small under-the-table jobs in Marietta the year after I graduated from high school, work was hard to find in 1981.  Ohio was 49th in employment (second to Michigan) at that time.  I did not work until I ended up in Boston in the fall of 1982.  Within a week, I was washing dishes at a deli in Coolidge Corner, the hub of Brookline, in the shadow of the S.S. Pierce Building and the birthplace of JFK.  (That job lasted about 10 days, when I was hired as a typesetter for The Harvard Crimson.)

I am trying to keep a line from Gibran’s The Prophet in mind: “Work is love made visible.”

Our Revels Now Are Ended

Susie is on her laptop at Starbucks, I am home at my dining room desk with The Boss blaring “Human Touch” while I type.  In 12 hours, I will be in the weekly meeting with my co-workers where we compare notes about our workloads.  The 1928 Book of Common Prayer describes it perfectly: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Long and short, I am home.  On my Facebook page, I posted a video of Soul II Soul’s song “Back to Life.”  The refrain is “back to life, back to reality.”  I don’t much care for the song, but it is so damn appropriate for this evening.  Susie will be walking her shoes off looking for places that are hiring, as well as exhausting her laptop keyboard applying for jobs online.

I dread the backlog of work that awaits me.  My pod already resembles Fibber McGee’s closet, and with my having been gone for a week, I will be buried in work.  I’ve encountered it before, I’ve overcome it before.  I will do so again.  That doesn’t mean I joyously anticipate it.

All in 10 days.  I have been in nine states.  I have walked in a venerable footrace, a phoenix which arose from the ashes of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  Three thousand miles of pavement rolled beneath me after I left San Francisco and began to head toward Florida to watch Susie graduate from high school.

Susie went through changes in the past week.  Until Friday night, she was a high school student.  She is now a high school graduate.  Her worries revolved around tests, grades, prerequisites, and activities then.  Now, she joins the endless line of young people just out of school who are looking for jobs, and she will learn she will not get a job overnight.  She will master the art of frustration.

And until today, she was in Florida, and was a visitor here in Ohio.  (This was a flipflop from the original situation when Steph and I parted ways in 2011, but it looks like we have come full circle.  Susie is back living with me.)

Like any other trip, there are milestone moments, moments where I may (conceivably) look back and laugh, even though there is nothing funny about them at the moment.  I’m slow to come around to that; I am still plotting revenge against the playmate who stole my Matchbox cars when I was in grade school.

The Lone Star Exile.  I knew when I began planning the trip that the California-to-Florida bus trip would involve a long drive across Texas at its most desolate point.  I put a positive face on it at first.  When my bus pulled into El Paso, instead of editorializing about how the city looked even more dismal than I remembered in 1987, I posted on Facebook: The prairie sky *is* wide and high!

Robert Nedelkoff and I became friends because of our common interest in Cincinnati novelist Robert Lowry.  During the time I was waiting for my bus to Dallas, I bought an El Paso post card and mailed it to Robert, mentioning that I had a “layover… in guess where?”  (Robert Lowry published a short story, “Layover in El Paso,” in his short story collection The Wolf That Fed Us.  It was–very loosely–the basis for the Sophia Loren/Tab Hunter movie That Kind of Woman (1959).)

Hours out of El Paso, 450 miles to the east via I-10 and I-20, the bus’ headlights stopped working.  So, my fellow riders and I spent many hours at the Greyhound station on the outskirts of Abilene, Texas.  We were about 180 miles from Dallas, where many of the passengers were ending their journey, and where I was changing buses to go to Atlanta, Orlando, and finally Titusville.

The night life in that part of Abilene revolved around the all-night 7-Eleven and the Subway restaurant.  Greyhound was nice enough to spring for subs for all the passengers, and I was happy that I was aboard a Dallas-bound bus before dawn, even though my checked-through luggage and I parted company at that point.

I kept Steph current with what was happening through text messages.  We were both biting our nails worrying about my getting to Brevard County in time for Susie’s graduation.  I had planned to arrive Thursday morning, with the ceremony the following night.  The people at the Greyhound station in Dallas managed to salvage the situation.  Instead of sending me through Atlanta, Orlando, and then Titusville, they issued me a new ticket, via New Orleans, Mobile, and Orlando, landing me in scenic Titusville only four hours later than I had planned to be there.

This meant, alas, that the clothes I had with me were the ones I had worn across the country, so I made a trip to Goodwill to buy khaki Dockers and a blue oxford for the graduation, as well as some new (to me) T-shirts.

Camera – 30 -.  It’s frustrating to have a camera on which you have spent some good money die on you.  My Nikon digital camera took its last picture last Friday night, and uttered its final breath just after I downloaded the pictures of Susie’s graduation.  I am not angry about this, because this happened after I shot pictures of Susie’s graduation.  All I did was curse under my breath, go on Target’s Website, and order a new one (a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera).

And I revert to my old habits.  A detective who specialized in missing persons cases said that when people elect to disappear, they may change their names, physical appearances, or occupation, but they seldom make an effort to alter their interests or drives.  If a man with a history of compulsive gambling disappears, a private detective would devote most energy to staking out race tracks and casinos.  An alcoholic will most likely be found in a bar.  I’m in a city not 100% familiar to me, and what do I do?  I walk to a record store.

The walk was 5½ miles, which was not much considering all my walking before, during, and after Bay to Breakers, but good after three days of almost non-stop sitting on the bus.  I walked from Merritt Island to Caroline’s House of Records in Cocoa Village.  (And the walk across the Indian River on a very narrow pedestrian strip on the bridge was the most frightening part of the entire journey!)  I bought about $50 worth of vinyl, probably nothing valuable or historic.

So, in addition to wringing my hands about the workload that will fall on me tomorrow, I am bringing some signs of triumph to the department meeting in the morning: My Bay to Breakers bib #29201, and a picture of Susie the high school graduate.

In case you missed it.

A Janus Moment For Us

Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, depicted with one face looking into the past, and one into the future.  (The month of January is named for him.)  After many years of threatening us with it, Susie became a high school graduate Friday night.  And I witnessed it firsthand!!  Steph and I held the two “VIP tickets” that allowed us to sit on the football field (the “H.D. ‘Hank’ Smith, Jr. Sports Complex”) at Merritt Island High School.  We waited through the interminable speeches,  music, etc., for that one moment.  Susie walked across the dais when they announced her full name, and when she got to the end of the stage, the principal turned her tassel from one side of her mortarboard to the other.

(This was different than when I graduated from Marietta High School in 1981.  We all turned our tassels en masse at the end of the name-reading.)

The parents (not all, but enough to make an impression) did not set a very good example on the subject of respecting the turf or other students.  The administrator took the microphone before the event began and asked people to refrain from cheering, blowing air horns, or causing general commotion that would slow down the diploma process or upstage the next student going up there.  (Since Susie’s last name begins with an M, I was all for anything that would expedite the process.  She was just about smack-dab in the middle of the alphabet, name-wise.)  He kept stressing (as he did during the rehearsal, according to Susie) that this was a ceremony, not a celebration.

By the time the D names began appearing, there was plenty of cheering, confetti-throwing, and air horn-blowing.  There was a guy in the stands (where the non-VIPs were) who was laying on the horn for such a long time that someone finally came and took it away from him.

Susie was both relieved and excited by the time the celebration ceremony event was finished.  Both Steph and I thought we would be in tears, but it dragged so long that strong emotion was replaced by a “Can we get on with this?” mentality.  I am sure the students felt the same way.

Once the official event concluded, the westward sky lit up with fireworks, and over the loudspeaker came Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration,” which came out while I was in high school.  (I’m sure the teachers and staff were silently wishing the song could have been Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”)  Several times, the graduates heard that they are now “a [Merritt Island High School] Mustang for life!”

Susie is relieved that high school is now a thing of the past.  She is making a (kind of) geographic change tomorrow, and an even bigger change in situation.  My long safari ends in the morning, when Susie and I board Southwest Airlines Flight 132 for the non-stop trip to Columbus.  I am returning to familiar surroundings.  I’m returning to the bureaucracy (and shuddering at the idea of how much of a backlog will be there for me to tackle), and evenings at the bookstore.

Susie, on the other hand, is in unchartered water.  She has applied for several jobs online this weekend, and hopefully the follow-up calls will be coming.  (Tomorrow is a holiday, so I’m thinking she won’t be hearing anything until Tuesday at the earliest.)  Other than babysitting and doing editorial and proofreading work for her mom, Susie has never entered the wonderful word of work.  She’ll be living with me, so she won’t have to juggle the extra worries of paying for food and a place to live.  And I am going to be generous, letting her stay with me as long as necessary.

Witnessing my daughter graduate from high school is what made the 3000-mile Greyhound journey from San Francisco to Titusville worth every sleepless moment, frustration, and discomfort worth it.  Susie’s school experience has been a rocky one.  She’s run the gamut from home-schooling, Catholic education, skipping a grade, excellent teachers, incompetent administrators, and every high school peer stereotype anyone can imagine, and has a diploma (and an honors cord!) to show as a result, with no problems with the law, substance abuse, or nervous breakdowns to run her into the ditch in the meantime.

She did a great job.  Now we see what lies ahead.

Susie went up on the dais as a high school student, and descends as a graduate.