: lower black pain.

Wizards, fairies, unicorns, and talking animals dominate children’s fantasy literature, but the Tall Tale, our All American domestic folklore of the Wild West, features strapping human beans like Johnny Appleseed, Pecos Bill, and Paul Bunyan.

Included in this line-up is John Henry, the steel-drivin’ African-American railroad worker. Revered for his strength and character, John pits his skill at hammering railroad spikes against a newfangled steam powered robot. His story is that of human against machine, Man versus the Industrial Age, and he wins, and then immediately dies, so…it’s a bit dark.

None of the other characters were as curiously doomed, and though I super appreciate his cultural addition to the collective character base I never really dressed up as him for Halloween. He’s a hero, no doubt.  I’ve picked up a sledgehammer; there is no chance I could be able to work with that all day, much less trick or treat with it.

I mean, I was seven.

I did dress as Captain Marvel once (the golden age one, not either of the current movie ones); and one year I was a werewolf with a full head mask I had wanted for two years that I was given on my birthday to much lycanthropic glee. But never John Henry. However, there have been other Americans Named John that I’ve greatly admired, and in some cases, been able to emulate.

John Williams’ music filled the house for years; the album cover of the Star Wars original soundtrack was more dog-eared than any other in our collection. I’d watch the record spin and wonder how the impossible beauty of Princess Leia’s Theme came from those nearly invisible grooves. In an age beset by disco and synthetic sounds, a twelve year old spending hours in front of an orchestral 4-sider should have been unlikely.

Later, when I actually started composing, John Williams’ unpretentious honesty to create what might as well have been classical hip-hop (head bobbing grooves and riffs you couldn’t stop humming) fueled my confidence that I could arrange sounds and connect with people that way too.

I didn’t even know at the time that he’d written both the Land of the Giants and the Lost In Space themes (season three is just the best). And the NBC Nightly News theme? What?

Legend.

“The Hotel New Hampshire” was my favorite novel in high school. I would’ve bought the album and t-shirt if they had one. I read and re-read it, then went backwards through all of John Irving’s work to read everything he’d written before it. It was, all of it, incredibly inappropriate age-wise, and absolutely foreign to any experience in my bi-state area.

Most of his stories took place in a mythical place called “New England”; where buildings had “charm” and the air was “crisp” and leaves “crunched lightly” beneath your feet as you walked on the wide white sidewalks. Kansas City leaves made a kinda squncsh sound, and our air was just plain cold; his description of a “Typical American Life” was just the kind of science fiction I needed to encourage me to write stories about up crazy made-up places too.

And Jonathan Winters.

You may have an artist you love, possibly a musical artist, whose work touched your life deeply, melding with time and space to create memories so potent that, when you hear these songs again, your mind, no, your whole being floods with emotion.

That’s how I feel about sticks.

Give Jonathan Winters a stick, and he went bananas. It was a fishing pole, a rifle, an antenna (both insect and television), an oar, and a swashbuckling sword, all in the space of 60 seconds. His perspective on the world, and the comedy that generated from it, was my cement foundation, the point where I calibrated my logic barometer to sea level.

There was no imitating Jonathan Winters, he was a verb, something happening, not someone just being. And in my passion for his art of what, ok, was probably (quite clinically) lunacy, I luckily inherited his courage against embarrassment; I never worried about outside reaction but dedicated and committed myself to live life from the inside out. And he was the master of tall tale telling…positively heroic.

Halloween costumes are stories that we wear, and we want to represent the character’s bravery, but not necessarily duplicate their experiences. I mean, I would punch Thanos dead in the face if I was Captain America but I’m not just out looking for trouble. John Henry’s story, spanning from slavery to tragedy, was a deeply layered passion play that exceeded my load bearing weight as a grade school kid, yet for a while it was the only story of a black hero, and though I couldn’t imagine being him, I loved to hear his tall tale told.

I never dressed as Jonathan Winters for Halloween either; early 60’s comic, that would have been, what, a black suit with a tie? Gotta be careful with that; add a candy cigarette and suddenly I’m Lenny Bruce! That’ve been fun.

I don’t think he would have said “trick or treat” though, he might’ve…hmn…yeah….probably wouldn’t have gotten any candy that year.

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Learning: the wisdom of the past passed forward; a bit of a time machine where we study the actions that made something happen in order to make it happen again. We learn, and then use that knowledge to learn more, our brains like… sourdough starter. And we don’t invent the things we’re learning - they are what we call established knowledge, tried and true, often of deep import like driving, or the instructions on a box cake.

But then, ah then, there is air guitar.

For me, it’s all Jack White, but you might prefer, let me see, Guns and Roses? Perhaps you’re an air piano player, smashing the break on a Little Richard track or unable to keep your fingers still when you hear Billy Joel opening “Only The Good Die Young”. No? How about a Mick Jagger croon of “She’s So Cold”, or Adele, or Aretha Franklin? A sassy R-E-S-P-E-C-T where you lean kinda forward, invisible microphone in your hand.

We have all performed an air instrument of some kind, but we never went to an air guitar class. Nobody teaches us how to pretend to be rock stars, just like they didn’t offer tutorials in pretending to be superheroes or animals or corporate executives.

So where do we learn how to imagine? ‘Cause back there a little bit ago I forgot how to do it right for a while. I could only imagine the worst of everything. I mean, the easiest dream, the lottery, right? I thought about taxes, and then not getting too flashy a car because somebody might steal it, and then how I’d finally be able to afford one of those full body MRIs – just to make sure, y’know…

Imagination done poorly.

Imagination, in the beginning, is paired with play: action without lasting consequence or even specific direction, where it doesn’t matter how high you fly because you haven’t learned that air thins and gets super cold the higher you go so you’ll definitely need a jacket and probably some kind of scuba gear which will be heavy and probably get frost all over it and THERE I GO AGAIN.

Adulthood, pulling imagination away from play and putting it on the shelf with The Odds, where we become, each of us, a beleaguered Han Solo demanding that C3PO stop telling him why he can’t fly though the asteroid field. That’s us, as adults, flying wild, LOGIC just over our shoulder, blathering on about how historically this hasn’t ever worked and there’s really no obvious reason that it should this time… You think since that voice is trapped in your head with you it would be a little more encouraging regarding the safety of it’s home, but like C3PO it keeps hammering away, like a scorpion on the back of a frog.

As kids we imagine and it’s all about the moment, not the future. Not about what might happen. Imagination was the point – that is what we were doing. Playing. Imagining. Having fun.

So to find my way back, I started having fun again. My gateway was Mattel Electronics Football II. The green one, with the ability to pass. If you haven't heard of it, it’s a handheld game from 1978 with three rows of 10 red LEDs, which light up either bright or dim – the goal is to move the 1 bright light down the field avoiding the dimmer lights. It’s amazing, because when you get sacked there’s this beeping sound and when you kick the ball it trills that melody you always hear before somebody yells “CHARGE!”.

My daughter caught me playing it and thought I was insane. I explained it to her, in detail, and she thought I was insane. I tried to put it in time / space context, described the state of digital entertainment in my childhood.

“Those are just lights.” she said, somewhat mirthlessly, yet still with a smile on her face.

“Yeah, I know, I know, but in my head it’s a whole football team. You kinda have to imagine it.”

“All the fun part’s in your head.” she said.

Mouths of babes, right? 

I learned to imagine by watching others and reading books, but mostly by playing and making mistakes, particularly when studying something like guitar or drawing… something unexpected happened, and then I kind of went with it to see what would happen next, and before long there was a pattern, then a song, born not of intellect but mostly because no-one had ever made the exact same mistake before, and there was no lasting consequence, no specific direction. That’s probably why it’s called playing an instrument.

Now I keep myself surrounded by  yo-yos and bubbles and tops and playing cards, and most importantly my guitar, which I don’t mind practicing, or making mistakes on. Although I fully understand that I’m probably never gonna play this beautiful piece of wood and metal as well as I can shred on my sweet, sweet axe made completely out of oxygen. Honestly, it’s pretty impressive. And not one single lesson.

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Maybe it’s me: I just think that if we’re gonna do a job, we should get paid for it. Teaching is absolutely the Most Noble Profession, and community service is a pillar of society, it’s just that… nobody asked any of us, and if they needed tutors they could have just asked for volunteers and we might have made time for it,  but instead they interrupt us right when we’re busy to help them identify boats, or bicycles, or traffic lights, or determine how high a land elevation has to be before it’s considered a hill, or where the edges of a crosswalk are (which is  #curbtocurb: definitely).

“Machine learning” refers the algorithms that look for patterns, and then by examining said patterns define inferences which are assumed (if computers can assume yet) to be, for the lack of any other information, true. And every time we prove that we are human online through those nonsense recognition tests we are teaching computers. Machine learning is a bright yellow brick in the road to Artificial Intelligence, two words that chill the bones of anyone old enough to remember the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or WarGames. Or that second Avengers movie with the voice of the mean guy from Pretty In Pink.

Back in corporate days, my office was the place where all the weird new technologies were tested; so eventually I had a Series One Alexa, which my creative partner and I quickly realized had been designed, built, and tested almost entirely by men, because whenever she asked for anything, she’d be given either entirely wrong information or (and this was worse) absolutely ignored. A casual ask about the weather worked fine when I said it, but the exact same words from a female mouth produced what we could only recognize as a super authentic form of cyber-bullying. An email to technical support prompted a terse reply to be patient and give time for Alexa to learn about our voices. This advice may have been influenced by the fact that my friend, who is not at all a shrinking violet, had many choice words for Alexa, which she’d later found had been recorded in full and sent to Amazon to assist development and research; although no level of either would allow Alexa to do what she’d requested with what she’d requested she do it with.

Around the same time, they upgraded the bathrooms in the entire building, a 30 plus floor behemoth in the center of midtown Manhattan. Everyone was talking about it, the air was abuzz with excitement. So I went, eventually, but the bathroom on our floor was broken and nothing worked.

“Did you like it?”

“I didn’t get to see any of the new stuff, our bathroom is broken.”

“No it’s not, I just went in there!”

The new stuff referred to the automatic flush, faucet, and paper towel dispensers, which worked pseudo-magically with a “wave of your hand”… well, the palm of mine, ‘cause when I went back to investigate I found that the tops of my hands weren’t nearly reflective enough for the magic to happen. They had to call back all the cyber-plumbers and adjust the whole works for brightness and contrast… I guess the sensors learned a little about diversity.

So the machines are learning, and we’re teaching them, but all they ask from the depth of human experience and history seem to be our faces, shopping habits, and ability to determine the correct orientation of a ceramic frog. Have you gotten that one yet? The all white half inch ceramic frog turned every which way like an amphibian marshmallow falling down a staircase? It’s absolutely ridiculous, yet I’m worried to be wrong, I’l get locked out of my bank account and then when I call they’ll say, “The REAL Jd Michaels, being an cultured, sophisticated man about town, would definitely be able to find the letter z in the Jasper Johns meets Escher digital mashup displayed in an inch by half inch rectangle. Access denied!”

Now there is Siri. We like her. The voices were a bit of a tension; there are many to choose from now, all very diverse. One is an African American woman, which you think culturally might have been a draw, but she sounded way too much like my mom to keep bothering her with questions all the time. I settled on the one which sounded the most like Tony Stark’s AI named Friday; she has an Irish lilt which uplifts even the lowliest request (though she always sounds like she’s rolling her eyes whenever we ask her to play KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty” We do that a lot.).

But I’ve always told her “thank you” for stuff. I mean, I asked and then something happened, and I’m honestly grateful. Even if she isn’t a person she represents the work of hundreds of people and maybe they’ll hear it somehow. It’s not quite an unrequited relationship, as she responds to these casual comments with a pre-programmed charm. And no, I’m not afraid of the machine uprising or anything, it’s just that displaying respect and fostering dignity comes from me, and it’s more weird to not do it than to just go ahead and say thank you once in a while.

If you’ve ever held a kid’s stuffed animal while they were eating ice cream or in the bathroom you know that when they come back they expect you to be holding it with care, because they care about it. Hold Teddy by the ear you’d clearly be regarded as a psychopath. With all the technology I interface with everyday it would be easy to get in the habit of being non-appreciative or even cruel –  no victim, no circumstance, nobody around. Maybe that’s what I’ve learned from the machines. Treat everything as if it has feelings, because even if it doesn’t, I do.

Except for that Alexa thing ‘cause she was kinda after us. That got personal. Totally justified. Not pluggin’ that in again.

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In the song “ABC”, Mr. Berry Gordy defined reading, writing, and arithmetic as the “branches of the learning tree”. For myself, education has always bloomed far lusher than that Charlie Brown Christmas-esque image. There’s art and science and language and circus skills and then practical stuff like learning to tie your shoes or re-close the bread bag with that little flat plastic thing. Life in our glorious age is a series of “Challenge!” and “Challenge accepted!”; every time they update the software on my iPhone, it’s back-to-school time.

The Jackson Five single “ABC” reached the top of the charts in 1970; and (hold on tight for this one) it got there by knocking off the song “Let It Be” by the Beatles. I know, I know! I know. I didn’t know that either. But what I’m most embarrassed not to know regarding the song lies within its lyrics – the learning tree: not the spindly metaphorical branch in the song, but the book and film by a man named Gordon Parks, who I now realize is my closest real life connection to both Buckaroo Banzai and Doctor Who.

If you’re not familiar with Mr. Parks, he was born in 1921 in Kansas (same as I, well, the state, not the year); and in his lifetime became an award winning photographer with Life Magazine, an author of novels and screenplays, a classical and jazz composer, an iconic filmmaker, and could probably make a brilliant martini and a pretty serviceable Waldorf salad. As a kid I was familiar with his name, as there were places named after him in Kansas City, but he didn’t come up in school because right around that time he directed “Shaft”, which was not on anybody’s grade school syllabus.

The Learning Tree is his first film, and if you research it the first thing you’ll find is that it was the first film to be directed by a black person for a major Hollywood studio. He also wrote it, and produced it, and composed the music. I’ve always been tetchy about the “first black” anything, but in this case I get it; his direct circumstances necessitated extra effort on what was already a pretty challenging road. Despite all that, The Learning Tree was in the first group of films added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, along with Dr. Strangelove, Singin’ In The Rain, and Citizen Kane.

———-

Now, no one explicitly told me I had the permission to want to grow up to be a multi-hyphenate. It was hard enough wanting to be one thing. After church one Sunday, a lady from my Grandmother’s missionary group stopped me and said I was getting so big. My Grandmother said, “Well he’s doing really well at school.”, so the woman said, “Well, I guess you’re gonna be a judge like your Grandpa!”

When I told her that I wanted to be an author, she said my name was just fine and I shouldn’t change it. Explaining further that I wanted to be an author of books and not change my name she paused and said, “Books? Why you wanna do that?” I then waxed on (as you can probably imagine) about Encyclopedia Brown and William Shakespeare, which went nowhere. I remember my Grandmother looking very nervous; she was about to steer me away with her Vulcan nerve pinch thing when the woman stopped her and said quite seriously,

“Well, that’s nice. That’s a good thing. I…” and here she paused, and in this moment her eyes went back sixty years, her face reflecting something… then she looked at me, much differently, and I realized that whatever it was she’d been looking at, she didn’t want me to see it. “You could be a Black writer…” she said, carefully . “You could do that.” My Grandmother’s hand slowly lowered from it’s hovering point near my left ear as the woman added, as if she was inventing something, or creating a recipe from scratch, “…like, WEB Dubois. Or Langston Hughes.”

She didn’t name Gordon Parks; his success was still being written, the bridges he’d built untested. I must’ve looked like the most naive vulnerable little blue polyester suit wrapped ten year old, dreaming of the impossible, wanting to build paths rather than walk them, but for that moment she believed, if not directly in me, that the world might just allow a little impossible, if I was careful. The times we each lived in were not directly comparable; when life depended mostly on remaining alive one just didn’t have the room, philosophically, to PLAN. Instead you had to learn to dream. So why not dream big?

“Yes, you can be a black writer. That would be nice.”

So the little boy read books, comics, magazines, encyclopedia volumes, all day long, even at night under the blanket with a flashlight. Fully dedicated. As for writing, he wrote all kinds of things, constantly, and though he would never be an arithmetic person, he learned to love it through technical and somewhat socially isolating mathematical card tricks. Then he added art and music and science and, that boy is me: I just wanted to make that clear.

And for circus skills: I can juggle three things for like 18 seconds (might be useful at a really short circus). And I do use the little bread closing thing, but honestly after you eat four slices you can twist it really hard and just double it under the loaf. We are, all of us, multi-hyphenate, and should give ourselves the permission to be proud of the various verbs we’ve learned to do, though I wish I’d known more about Gordon Parks earlier in life, ‘cause he’s a…

…ok, I was gonna directly reference the Shaft theme song here, but my mother reads these. Y’know.

Although The Learning Tree has been uploaded numerous times to free online sources, I went ahead and ordered the two disc remastered Criterion Edition. Inspiration should be high definition.

Mr. Gordon Parks’ most impressive achievement, for me, was becoming an old black man, as the words themselves present a modern miracle (factoring in disease and various historical pitfalls), so it is a truly inspiring feat. I’m not gonna EGOT, but if I can get a head full of grey hair, I will rock it like a Pulitzer Prize.

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I am taking a break between seasons, which I’ve never been able to really do before because I’ve never really had a season of anything, but things are crazy here and it’s back-to-school time and I’m recovering from another bout of some sort of biological injustice and just need a little bit of a moment to get my metaphorical Trapper Keeper together. Also, my real one. Ok, it’s from Kinokuniya but does have the plastic index separators and a pencil holder that fits right into the metal ring binding, so, I mean, well, it’s designed for grown ups. (I put some stickers on it, though. So.)

I miss back-to-school time. It brought me this keensense of renewal that was most traditionally associated with the exact opposite season; there were new clothes, new school supplies, once every few years a new backpack. I remember my first real JANSPORT. I thought I was James Bond with all those pockets and sections.

And before that was the lunchbox era – machine pressed metal Saturday Morning Cartoon ads with matching liquid containers, which actually used to be made of vacuum glass until the overwhelming amount of legitimate litigation opportunities from thousands of mirrored shards mixed with hot soup prompted innovation over tradition. But those plastic ones never really matched the metal boxes; and usually they had this appliqué - somewhere between a sticker and a fake tattoo, it didn’t immediately scratch off but still wore down week by week, subtlety expressing the erosion of innocence as the school ground relentlessly forward…sigh.

I told anyone who ever got me for a career mentor that the question they should always ask themselves was “what do I want to learn next?” And today was the first day of school here in New York. and I made this deal with my daughter that is she would take these 10 minute drum lessons for 30 days then I would take some difficult lessons too.

So I found this Dweezil Zappa lead guitar course that I had bought three years ago, y’know, in lockdown when the whole world was a possibility circus, but I never really had the time to actually do any of them. So I’m doing that.

Also, I’m in ASL classes; I’m trying desperately to better communicate with all my new colleagues on this big project I’m a part of so that’s happening too.

Also, as previously mentioned I am learning the banjo, so Artistworks offered 75 percent off the Noam Pikelny lessons that I had subscribed to, done twelve of, and then kind of let lapse, so I’m back on that horse. And the drawing lessons. Also 2020. I was investing in my future – actually, the whole idea of a future back then; I was envisioning and using The Secret and girding a whole lot. I was subscribing to hope. A lot.

There’s that giant rubber band exercise thing, which I now know is supposed to be exactly like pilates only where the 1700 dollar reformer machine has been substituted with… giant rubber bands. On top of the space I’m saving, that is a $1600 bargain (can’t let that pass by).

So with the slight of hand practice and deep dive into After Effects, that’s pretty much it. She’s doing the 10 minutes a day of drum practice, and I am setting a good example. That’s what I’m doing. So I should probably add that to the list.

In any case, thanks for your time, and see you next week for Season Two.

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Last Saturday was “soda fountain day”, something we celebrate every year; also, a product of our desperation to create “staycation” events during the lockdowns. Most of these have taken the form of obtaining an ICEE slush drink and novelty straw, then giving ourselves conspicuous brain freeze outside in front of the 7-11. But in recent years, we’ve staged taste tests between classic sodas.

This week the contest was between Sprite and 7up. We did not include Sierra Mist. We purchased a 16oz plastic bottle of each at the gas station mini-mart down the street. To fulfill the “obligatory learning moment requirement”, I briefly narrated the historical cultural significance of the competing brands, (though, as not to influence the judging, I did wait to share Geoffrey Holder’s wonderful laughing commercials). Then we carefully tasted each, passing the bottles between us like exquisite hobos.

It’s a great hot summer day activity, and a treat mostly because we don’t really drink soda, not for any hoity-toity reason but because none of us have a consistent taste for sugar (except for cake – we all love cake (even though we only put in half the sugar most of the time to offset the icing. (Mmmn. Icing.)))  We do enjoy candy on Halloween. And holiday cookies.

It’s just that soft drinks are really sweet. And chemically complicated. I might be able to guess the molecular composition of potassium citrate, but calcium disodium EDTA seems more than a bit obscure. Yet the most mysterious and commonly added ingredient we found on soda labels was “natural flavors”.  After a lengthy family discussion, we agreed that, in a court of law, onions, tree bark, and potato bugs would all fit the category of a “natural flavor”.  Why be so vague on the labeling if there’s nothing to hide? [#MontyPython-Crunchy Frog]

Between the three of us, we only drank about 2/3 of those 16oz bottles before we capped them and got glasses of water. We have this under-sink filter thing that takes out loads of rust and stuff so it’s really delicious. I mean, we’re not hippies (probably), but we lean toward necessity over convenience. Hydration is necessary, High Fructose Corn Syrup is not, it kinda actually makes me thirsty, it’s super intense, I mean, we sweeten our tea with maple syrup. (ok that does make us sound like hippies). Anyway, the simplicity of water honors necessity by perfectly integrating form and function.

I’m thirsty. Here, have a glass of water!Situation. Resolution.

It’s the situation I’m always confused about with the invention of contemporary potable liquids. For instance, there’s a new hard seltzer on the market with Vitamin C. So that’s water, that’s carbonated, with alcohol, a touch of fruit, and for some reason – Vitamin C.

It’s a convenient answer to those times you’re thirsty for a juice box, a shot of vodka, and an Emergen-C packet. The overwhelming awkwardness of ordering that drink at a bar, and the subsequent embarrassment at being asked to step outside and perhaps find an alternative bar, has been completely taken care of by this product, and I, for one, very much enjoyed checking that box off my list of immediate concerns.

Also, there’s a coffee made with 85 superfoods, including berries, mushrooms, super greens and probiotics. It does not come in a pumpkin spice variant, proof the developers are serious about nutrition, but the core question is why drink 85 things? Is there no clear alternative? Two smaller drinks of 40 and a bump of 5 things maybe?

Is nature’s true evolution absolute convergence? I mean I remember when you couldn’t bring a liquid into a bookstore because everything there was made of paper, and now bookstores sell liquids. I was ok browsing without coffee because I needed two hands to open the books I was looking at. Maybe it’s old fashioned, but life is already pretty complicated, and I just don’t want what I don’t need. Even if it’s convenient.

Robert Fripp, the incredible guitarist and human being, wrote about Honoring Necessity; to me, that’s finding the water in everything. Underneath the chemicals and flavoring there’s water in there somewhere. In art, poetry, and high magic, water represents emotion.

This is the sixteenth in a series of sixteen columns; I want to thank each and every one of you for being part of this. I wish I could send you hats or t-shirts, but I don’t believe I chose a brand name that would be very good for you to wear everywhere. I so very much appreciate that you’ve appreciated these, and hope that they’ve been refreshing in a water kind of way. Every so often I wanted them to be fancier; at most you can be absolutely sure that they honestly reflect my “natural flavor”.

Sprite won, by the way. Sorry, Geoffrey. Next year I wanted to go for a Cragmont Pop Olympics, but Safeway doesn’t make it anymore. In any case, enjoy a cold one this holiday weekend, in the hot sun, if you can. By cold one, I mean, glass of ice water, of course, because, as previously mentioned, I’m probably kind of a hippie.

Thank you for your time.

See you next week.

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I took a walk.  In Manhattan.

Driving is easy; I parallel park the car like I’m bulls-eyeing womb-rats in Beggar’s Canyon, but walking it’s just me. I used to walk there everyday, but then I retired, and lockdown, and everything. I felt a little vulnerable; I mean, I wasn’t barefoot, guess you can’t be more protected than Doc Martens, but I’m only mentioning it because I was a little nervous, which was weird.

It wasn’t my very first POCO walk, but it was the first one where I didn’t have a plan. My normal New York pace of walking is pretty direct; a couple of decades working in midtown created this no-nonsense stride from Point Of Origin to Specific Destination. The environmental uncertainties of COVID made every trip outside even faster and more direct. I was like a pinball with excellent GPS. No lookin’ around. Here to there.

But this was just a walk uptown; maybe I’d find that bookstore, get a little exercise in, see what was “goin’ on”.

(Oh, sorry: POCO is something I’m trying out for “post-covid”. Though the obvious problem is, I know, that band from the 70’s that sang “Crazy Love”.  Well, and COVID still, I guess.)

I was bedecked in my new fancy mask from New Zealand, which is made of wool (but, y’know, not knitted ), and I ambled semi-purposefully north to the soundtrack of J-Hope’s first album (because the new one’s awesome but really super intense).

I didn’t need to be anywhere in the city. It was… nice. How often do any of us not have to be anywhere?  In the past I never had a choice as to whether or not I wanted to engage with the world. School and jobs necessitated interaction and I had to get used to whatever the commute brought my way. This time, I think I saw a lot more, because I took the time to look.

(POCO’s top 40 hit “Crazy Love’ was from their 13th album, “Legend”, the cover of which an ink sketch of a stallion that was drawn by Phil Hartman, the guy who became a comedian later and was on Saturday Night Live;  he was Troy McClure on the Simpsons,  and in “Jingle All The Way”.  He was actually a graphic designer before he got into comedy.)

Anyway, a great deal of the people I saw were talking on the phone, I assume, though I wear earbuds to the grocery store just to camouflage the fact that I’m talking to myself. Every block there were People Having Moments  – a harried family of tourists wearing different clothes but all with the same hairstyle, a couple arguing either to each other or the people on the phones they were both holding, two inebriated fellows wearing dirty track suits but impeccably clean shoes – little worlds, three-pace-wide theme park lands. We all kind of swept past one another, stories smoothly circulating like one of those formal dances in Jane Austen movies.

I wandered. And I got a bit lost. Not in the streets, but in the past. Storefronts that I recognized were next to ones that were closed, which were next to completely new places. I had to turn off my memory and actually navigate. There was a fully operational 22 story tall hotel where I remembered a shoe repair shop. A one story shoe repair shop. A few times I just kept going down a street hoping I would recognize the next one. I only walked about 18 blocks, but by the time I did find a bookstore, I was winded.

(The band The Eagles has two former members of POCO in it. And POCO’s fans call themselves the Poconuts. I thought that was cute.)

On the subway ride home I checked the map on my phone to see how many steps I’d gotten in. Steps are my new currency, digital pirate booty meant to tone one’s own. The blue line showed my random path and wrong turns that weren’t wrong at all since there’s no wrong way to go when you’re not going anywhere particular.

But I had walked somewhere, I felt like I’d walked from 2018 to 2022. Nothing was different, everything was new. The distinctive sound of a happy teakettle whistle made when the subway takes a turn had clearly been replaced by the tooth loosening scream of a dozen 300 lb. steel discs grinding over metal bars at a force of 40 tons. That was new.

No, of course it wasn’t. I was. Am, it seems. And right here is where I’m supposed to write that “I guess I’ll have to get used to it all over again”. But I don’t really want to. I used to have a method of survival that included a series of sensory blinders that I don’t think fit me anymore, like all of my suit pants, and it’s not an issue of getting in shape (well, the suit pants are) but rather a desire to update my style, survival wise.

I used to always have somewhere to go. Now I’m still going places, but at a more human pace, I think.

Didn’t they sing “Africa”? No, that was TOTO, not POCO. Right.

POCO’s not gonna happen, is it? Hmn. Yeah, I can see that now.

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The blanket’s name is Ned. I didn’t name it, but it’s my blanket, or it was until everybody discovered how nice a waffle weave blanket is – just the right amount of weight yet still breathable. I’m not bitter about it, I just never thought to name it. I wanted one for ten years, and finally ordered it, paid for it, it came to the house, I unpacked it, put it on the bed and you’d think it would be “mine” in the mind of the family, but then my daughter decided that it was Superior To All Blankets and subtlety referred to it as “our” new blanket in discussion, which I let slide for two weeks until at last she said, when I was pulling on one end and she the other, “Let go of Ned!”

“Who’s Ned?”

“The blanket. The blanket’s name is Ned.”

“It doesn’t have a name, it’s my blanket.”

And that was where she won. Right there. Because the blanket did have a name, it was Ned, which she knew it but I didn’t, proof that I didn’t care about the blanket… I didn’t even know it’s name, thus, it was never really mine.

——

We have a cat named Loki, because he came to the house filled with a specific brand of potential mischief, which quite quickly morphed into an indefensible charm, so LOKI. We love MARVEL movies, and Tom for a cat was universally agreed upon as what the kids call “basic”, while Hiddleston was just too long with no desirable abbreviations.

When Loki joined the family he gained an older sister, a black cat that we’d named Lucky, because children love irony. It didn’t occur that the cats’ names would rhyme (or lilt or whatever) until just after we’d all agreed on Loki, and by then we couldn’t take it back, because we’d done the whole Lion King thing and held him up and said his name already.

——

My name used to be Juanz David Anderson. J - U - A - N - Z.  My mother and father divorced shortly before I was born, but being that my mother was a woman in the 1960’s, when she went into labor they immediately set out to find my father to let him know. He was bowling, and filled with Budweiser and toxic masculinity got in his car and decided to create a name to extend his legacy. The choicest hops and barley, combined with the names of his two older brothers, John and Lawrence, set up an Arrested Development style scene where he mouthed the two over and over until he came upon a sound that would define my first decade of existence.

John. Lawrence. Jourence. Juanz.

No idea where the z came from, but my father was convinced this was a name fit for a King (of Beers). He told it to the nurse who was outside my mother’s delivery room door, where she had, as was custom, been rendered entirely unconscious for the procedure and was unable to comment. But before her nap, my mother had emphatically locked in my middle name; David, same as my Grandfather and I believe several generations before that. Sturdy and biblical, it would balance the Boggle-based randomness of my first name for some time.

I never had a chance to use David as my name in grade school because I went to the same school until seventh grade. Everybody knew me already and had learned to pronounce it. My good friends could even spell it. But I was not satisfied, and dreamed of superior nomenclature. I knew that Gene Kelly’s real name was Eugene, and that Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach. I wanted to be an author, so I asked my mom if I could have a pen name, or a stage name, and she not only agreed but said that when I was older I could even change my name.

Well.

Influenced by the best in arts and culture, I asked my mother if I could be named “Han”. No. Chewie was also out (though later on I did meet a guy named Chewie). She countered with Luke, also biblical but a bit of an interstellar crybaby if you asked me.

I discovered that Dynamite Magazine, the grade school Scholastic magazine that I subscribed to, could have ANY NAME on it and STILL COME TO YOUR ADDRESS. I used it to experiment with names, until I found the one that looked best on a direct mail label.

So in 8th grade, when I went to my new school, my mom said I could present myself as my new name. First day there, all of us in the gym, roll call.

“Angela?”

“ – Call me Angie!” “…ok…” said the teacher, scribbling on the ledger. “Robert?” 

“I’m Bobby!”  “…ok…” Scribble scribble scribble.

“J—“ and here the pause that I recognized as part of my name, while synapses flashed supernova-hot to try to create order from chaos. “Jwa-jhewhan-zee?”

“Call me…” (pause for effect) “Brandon Michael Chase.”

——

The principals office was nice. He was rarely there, so most of the time you ended up speaking to the women in the office. They ran the school (I saw them often, but just for fun, really, I didn’t cause much actual trouble).

As this was my first visit, and I was there for clarification rather than punishment, they were very nice to me and there may have even been a cookie exchanged. I explained that my mother said it was ok for me to be called by my new name and they said they just couldn’t do it because, well not in their words but, my selected label was in no way a derivative of what was on my government paperwork, which they were bound to follow.

“But I have a cousin who’s J.D., he uses initials… you could do that too – it looks just like this…”

And she wrote down, in blue ballpoint pen, a capital J, period, and a capital D, period. I still had to keep my last name.

But three years later in a junior year trigonometry class I got an idea… get rid of the periods, lower case the d, smash it all together and just spell my name the same way everybody else does. This was the turning point, because that summer I was cast in a show at Worlds of Fun, the local amusement park, and they allowed STAGE NAMES for their performers!  I pulled Michaels from the original suggestion and we had a winner. The next year I was 16 and could legally change my name because I had been using it professionally for a year.

Now, free climbing through my fifties, I’ve given my name to two other people to see what they can do with it. It is weird to have your name evolve, but we all evolve so why not have different names?

No wonder I love Doctor Who so much.

Anyway, just to clear the record; Lando? Never even on the table; and given how the 80’s worked out for some comedy legends I probably would not have enjoyed being a “Chase” forever (though I do admit that would be a pretty cool first name if we, y’know, ever adopt another cat).

©2022 Jd Michaels.

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I’m not really from a “reading the instructions first” kind of family. We changed light switches, tried out new appliances, even opened up a coconut for the first time by winging it, mostly. I mean we turned the electricity off, or looked at all the pieces, or laid out some newspaper first, but we didn’t begin with directions, just basic knowledge broadly combined, confident, as if we were frosting a cake with a paper knife.

I gained a great passion for learning the basic building blocks of everything very early on; I love how colors combine in light and in paint, I love the periodic table, I love the basic moves involved in slight of hand, magnetism is amazing, electricity is fascinating. In college a classmate introduced me to The Blue Strawbery (sic) cookbook; it teaches the basics of culinary science without any specific recipes… that is my jam (unintentional pectin reference) because in the kitchen, where some use cookbooks, I employ ingredients and enthusiasm.

Knowing the basics prepared me for a world where “the way things were supposed to be” didn’t actually work out in my favor, so following those directions weren’t always a great idea, and it was important to not be afraid to try something new, and sort of serial fail until, well, you didn’t.

That is why I have a banjo. [If anyone would like to cosplay as my family this Halloween, don’t forget the noise-cancelling headphones and infinite patience.] I bought it in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was on sale, I mean, it was discounted. I also got a harp at the same place (just a little one). I do not play the banjo well (as of yet), but I enjoy experimenting with it, believing in my heart that my absolute lack of experience surrounding the instrument will be my path to (as of yet) unheard of chords and combinations.

Hey, I’m not gonna be onstage with Punch Brothers and if I meet Steve Martin I’m probably gonna ask him about art history, so playing the banjo professionally? Not a goal. My theory is one of discovery through innocence. Not ignorance, because I did buy books and online lessons, of course. Pete Seeger and Mel Bay are patiently doing their best to teach me as much as they can, and I practice, but then I begin fiddling about. I do so very much enjoy the fiddling about.

That’s what the banjo’s for, to be a new thing, something kind of impossible that I can learn to understand, but also have the freedom of interacting with in new ways. And I’m learning the basics, which is great, but mastery without imagination is just expert imitation, so along the way to getting good I’m really enjoying not being all that good at all.

My favorite thing to play so far has been the song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. It’s a gothic shoegaze classic from a band called Bauhaus. You don’t need to know the song, just understand that it is the least appropriate thing to play on the banjo. It’s the music you would hear in the mansion of a rock star that turned out to be a vampire on a Scooby Doo episode. All those bright tones kind of clash magnificently with the source material in a new way that just kinda warms my heart.

The joy of discovery. Each time I hold the banjo, I am a happy puppy, playing with a musical stick. Am I reclaiming a cultural tool? Sure. Am I making joyful noises? Absolutely (well, y’know, except for the Bauhaus).

But is it music? I’m sure John Cage would back me up, albeit quietly.

I’m taking it step by step. Combining simple creates complex, and music is the very best science when it comes to that, because if you do it just right you hear the simple ringing out no matter how complex the piece. Harlan Howard, who co-wrote “I Fall To Pieces” for the late great Patsy Cline, assured us that all we need are three chords and the truth and I know, like, five chords now so, Yay. That’s enough to fiddle about.

Ooh. I don’t have a fiddle yet.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead - Bauhaus (1979)

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As a child of the 80s… well, 70’s… the high 60’s, my concept of luxury should have been heavily influenced by television shows, particularly one entitled Dynasty. I’m sorry, the title of the show was “Dynasty”; the people on the show were entitled (misspoke there). It was a television program about rich people and their problems. These people lived in a world filled with luxury.

They changed clothes more than once a day. They all had swimming pools and large brimmed hats to wear as they sat next to them. They never did laundry, or dishes, or vacuumed. They had incredibly sumptuous tables of food in vast dining rooms, but rarely ever ate anything, and if they had pets, they were incredibly small white dogs which never pooped.

And they were all quite stunning, if a bit culturally monochromatic, except for Diahann Carroll in the show’s 4th season who played Dominique Deveraux (an iconic role that I hold directly responsible for my mother’s experiments with shoulder pads in her dresses for a very very very short while.).

There were multiple people to drive you places. An endless supply of clean towels. Closets with lights in them. Their velvet was our velveteen, their cloth napkins our paper towels, their stemware our tumblers that the gas station gave us with a fill-up.

I grew up in one of those small neighborhoods that had been abandoned by whites 30 years before, enjoyed a working class African-American renaissance then sharply declined socioeconomically in the 1960’s with, I suppose, nearly everything else.  Our sidewalks cracked, the trees which had once lined the street were lost to blight, and windows were barred with decorative wrought iron. But we never felt as if we lacked anything, to have was to have enough, to have more was… ridiculous, there was no use for more. My mother worked miracles and extra jobs to feed us and sent me to an amazing grade school, which was private, and absolutely a luxury, and taught me at home on top of my regular lessons, because love and learning were the only two things there could never be enough of.

In our house, those plastic filling station tumblers did represent luxury; made from the highest quality plastics with a chandelier cut vertical pattern resembling crystal, they caused light to play ever so jauntily through your fruit juice in the morning. They weren’t expensive, but they weren’t necessary, and so the unnecessary, not the extravagant, is still my personal concept of “luxury”. 

But top of the list of unnecessary things we might someday be able to attain was the humble and super expensive (I was told) Dixie cup. Oh, how I longed for the plastic dispenser with the thick foam sticker that we could put in the bathroom so that we could brush our teeth and then get just the right amount of water to spit with. That’s the only thing I think they were good for, unless you were one of the Borrowers, which, I don’t think still works out scale-wise.

My grade school, a Catholic private school that decided to admit not only boys but a large number of minority and lower income students on scholarship basis, allowed me to mingle with kids from all over the city, including the very wealthy enclaves so foreign that we’d never even driven past them. They had Dixie cup dispensers in every bathroom, just like on tv, even the ones with the jokes on them.

One of my classmate’s parents used to have a “cookie party” every year. My mother had no idea what this was - she couldn’t figure out the event that was being celebrated. Was the cookie invented on this day or did they have some new breakthrough in baking that needed annual marking? We showed up with 24 Toll House cookies presented on one of the plates we only used on holidays. The family was kind and open and more than a little curious about us, in a good way. My mother was whisked away to drink tea without a bag in a cup smaller than she thought in any way practical, and I went upstairs to play with my junior host and other friends from school.

His bedroom was the one from Escape to Witch Mountain, with enough room to hold a train set that was fully assembled as well as a desk and a bed and a GI Joe fort with the zipline feature and enough room so Joe could actually travel a significant distance. Our host was generous and kind and we all had an amazing time. Cookies were set up for us downstairs, but he wanted us to have something special, so we all followed him into the kitchen. An older man was standing there in a black suit.  Our host excitedly asked “Where are the cherries?” and the man turned to the cabinets behind him and retrieved a new jar of maraschino cherries, another item deemed absolutely unnecessary in our house. The butler opened the jar and held it out to our host, who took several. The rest of us kind of hesitated, but the man saw our apprehension and gently nodded, and everyone took one. I was the last in line - I vividly remember looking up at this older black gentleman, the age of my grandfather, holding a now nearly empty jar of something I thought unattainable. I took one, shook it gently to get all the syrup off so it wouldn’t drip on the floor, and told him “thank you”.

I kept the stem of that cherry.

In the car on the way home I told my Mom this story of course, and she had stories of her own, all these women taking four of five bites of cookies she thought were already bite-size, talking about all the things that they did everyday which had sounded impossible for a moment until she realized that homemaking was their profession.  “That was fascinating” my mother said. “Well, I guess that’s the way some people live. It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Not a comparison or a value judgement, just observing ethnographically. We were travelers, explorers, eager to learn about other places but never assuming any lack in our own home. But we never got Dixie cups. Maybe once, when they were on sale at a TG&Y that was closing, but without the dispenser.

The other thing was Handi-wipes™. My grandmother had some and used them in the kitchen because to her the idea of paper towels was extravagant, but a paper towel you could use over and over was a rag fit for royalty. My mother was unconvinced, even though they cost less than paper towels you couldn’t scrub with them and they only really rinsed out successfully maybe five times or so before dissolving. We’re sponge people, durability, versatility, a scrub side, an absorbent side.  And though still aesthetically I’m drawn to those blue and white stripes, Handi-wipes™ are a premium household item that even after 45 years I cannot bring myself to actually buy.

Handi-wipes™ are the sort of thing that come in different colors so they can match your kitchen… so that your sink area isn’t too jarring for visitors scanning the room.  It reflects a standard of living that in my imagination would probably not include wiping anything at all…so. Rags for show? A sponge is fine, does the job.

My idea of luxury is tightly bound to my commitment to the concept of enough rather than more. This is easier to visualize when time is added to the equation. More wine, eventually, becomes enough wine. More potatoes?  Enough potatoes.

Is contentment that closely associated with attainment? Does happiness always have to be “pursued”. That makes it seem like joy is a little bunny darting away through the woods. Oh, ok, well, that does sound darling, maybe happiness is a little bunny darting through the woods, prancing here and there ok bit off course here.

The idea of luxury, kind of like capitalism, depends on our dissatisfaction with the quality or quantity of whatever we currently have, and frowns most heavily on such random frolicking. But for some of us, “more” and “all” weren’t concepts that were ever on the table, we just wanted “enough” of whatever. Thus I am a grateful bunny. With a sponge.

Maybe Christmastimes or a birthdays bring the occasional “extra”, but nowadays I’m just looking for an extra hour’s sleep. Take heed, mighty Carrington family; the riches of your dynasty cannot compare to the afternoon nap, where no one calls and there’s a little breeze and the sheets are cool, and there’s plenty of time before dinner.  That is luxurious.

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