That's All Folks!

Oh, man, there's a new Whack-job in town. He's relentless. Clarence Stimms started out as a standard inquisitive patron; he said there was currently some scandal with the former governor of Alabama, and he wanted to read about it but the Baltimore Sun had let him down. I found him some articles on LexisNexis and sent him on his way.

He came back. They always come back. He mentioned several political scandals he was interested in: McGreevy in NJ, Ryan in Illinois, Taft in Ohio. I foolishly played along. Soon, I would have no part in a long coversation other than to nod in stupefaction. He told me about being an African-American Reagan Democrat who supported Dan Quayle for President. He told me he was offered a job on Bob Dole's campaign in 1988 by a guy who saved him from choking to death at the Steak and Ale. "I coughed up a chunk of gristle after the heimlich manoeuvre and there was steak sauce on my neck and some dude offered me the position of Chief of Staff and a diesel Mercedes and a salary of $100k. I didn't take it because I had something else to do. But I read 8 papers a day because if that opportunity comes along again I'm not going to turn it down." He explained how Bush I could have been re-elected, how Quayle could have beat Clinton in '96, how Dole, had he simply said he was a Reaganite, would have walked away with the contest that same year.

Clarence is a formidable-looking man, standing straight and strong at about 6 foot five, with a glistening clean-shaved head and angular features. His hands are enormous and his fingers are at least 8 inches long, ending in thick yellow nails with dirt caked beneath them. He was wearing slightly shabby chinos, a clip-on tie, and a stained button-down shirt with a black nylon jacket over top. On the jacket above Clarence's left pectoral was a decal featuring two red horses on a yellow background. "The Blue Grass State: I've Been There!" was the legend. He's got the yellow teeth and yellow eyes and strong odor of a cigar smoker, and sure enough when he was leaning over me at the Desk, treating me to his 55-minute harangue, I saw in his shirt pocket beneath his jacket a wrapped White Owl.

He told me how he eats lunch on Capitol Hill every day to eavesdrop on insider conversations. He told me about being able to judge which Senator will sit in which chair at what time from sitting in the box dozens of times a year. He mimicked Senators Mckulski and Kennedy and Grassley. He was a meteoroligist for the Federal Government. He rides the MTA. He is a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Catholic, and a Baptist. He believes they're all "going in the same direction." He thinks Clinton won because he said he admired Reagan. He loomed over me, hands splayed on the desk, yellow eyes piercing into my soul, square ink-dark face vivid against the white ceiling tiles. "Geoff, there is no way any man can learn morals alone. We must seek out our teacher. We need religion. If we don't seek our teacher, our teacher will find us when we're ready." Sometimes when I'm confronted by crazy people I start to think crazy thoughts myself. I actually wondered if Clarence was sent to me like some modern burning bush to tell me things.

Then it was back to Capital Hill bars and riding the Greyhound and the MARC train and some odd monologue about seats for the handicapped and those who have no religion are the ones who need signs telling them to get up when the handicapped are on the bus or the train. Then he explained how admirable were George W. Bush's management skills, but he'd lost his confidence after 9/11 and was fumbling badly since. I heard Clarence's peculiar take on Iran/Contra and how supporting the Contras was what sealed the fate of the USSR. Clarence summed up Reagan's brilliance: "He broke the law in ways that wasn't breaking the law."

I've encountered many crazies during my days in fast food, book retail, and library service (not to mention my days as an English Prof). Clarence Stimms is perhaps the single greatest looney of them all. He shook my hand, told me he lectured me because I "looked intelligent," and said "I'll be in here a lot. I want to catch up before the next elections because somebody is going to offer me that campaign manager job I turned down years ago." Then he laughed and ran off. Strangely, I can't wait. Tiny Drum tried to cut in but Clarence held him off. Gotta love that.

Number #33

When Dr. S assigned this for class I assumed it was ironically titled, but Islam Explained to Children about sums up Ben Jelloun's book. A French Muslim father tries to explain to his worried son what the fuck happened on 9/11, and covers the history of Islam and its cultural highs and lows in striking detail for such a small volume.

Along the way Ben Jelloun makes pleas for tolerance and women's rights and democracy and the separation of Church and State, while attacking fundamentalists and Islmasists and intégristes as backward-thinking and destructive of a once-glorious civilization. Most importantly, he advises his son that doubt is a key component of faith--those who don't doubt they know God's will deserve vigorous criticism.

I don't believe I'd ever read an entire French text without once referring to my dictionary. Kid's books are the way to go!

Bad Timing, Dude

They could have done this before my trip last January.

The Honeymooners

I asked Julio if he and Yo! Adrienne were going to have a honeymoon. He said it would be in Italy this summer--he's teaching a 7-week course in fresco painting at The International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, and she'll join him for a couple weeks. You can see his bio here.

How did Julio and I meet? 25 years ago on a school field trip to the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, I was seated on the marble floor beneath a spiral stone staircase with many classmates and heard a moist slapping sound. I looked to my right and saw a driblet of spittle on the floor. Then another appeared. Looking up, I saw Julio and another young hoodlum with upturned Izod collar, trying to spit on me. I gave chase, and threatened phsyical harm. For weeks I pushed Julio around when I saw him. Then one day he was singing "Hello, I Love You" at his locker. I'd recently received Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine and thought it the coolest thing ever. "You like The Doors?" I asked, because at that time, nobody our age liked The Doors. Things progressed from there. We had a secret language featuring odd gestures and onomonopeai of filthy origin, were generally behaviorally challenged in school but excellent students, and eventually Julio was removed from Hereford High and packed off to private school to calm him down. We saw each other less, but still regularly, particularly when we were dating twin sisters. I think we got into trouble every time we hung out. Once we drank a bottle of Beefeater's when my folks were out of town and I barfed but he didn't. The next day his Dad called my Mom and asked her why his son was paralyzed after staying over. She hadn't known, of course, and I got into major difficulties. Then we were arrested for public intoxication, underage possession of alcohol, and trespassing on public park grounds after hours--I'm "banned for life" from Oregon Ridge Park. I remember clearly the park ranger telling us he was closing down and yet we continued playing Thumper with the twins. Then the cops were chasing us through the fields, yelling "don't run, we have your car!" After, I was forbidden to see Julio by my parents, as if he were responsible for my behavior.

While Julio descended into full-fledged alcoholism and major drug abuse, I continued flirting with full-fledged alcoholism and stuck to minor drugs like pot and mushrooms. We got back in touch shortly before entering our 20s, and by that time Julio was clean and sober (and has been a teetotaler since). I could go into the major synchronistic events I associate with or friendship--but that's another post. This one will suffice: immediately before our friendship was renewed I lost my friend Chumley in a car accident on New Year's Eve. When I told the story to Julio he said his father was the one who found him dead by the side of the road.

Now we've been Best Men at each others' weddings. That makes me feel old.

[sorry if this post is disjointed--I was beset by a tag-team of Assburger and Tiny Drum. Assburger expounded his theories about Greek and Roman literature and history before discussing Iran and China and North Korea. Then Tiny Drum cut in and told me about his presentation and asked me about plagiarism--ugh]

Number 32

I like reading far-out books about esoteric knowledge, and came to Steiner via his crazy biography. Steiner trained as a scientist and engineer, then started going nuts over Goethe's color theories, which he thought were of exceptional importance. He was called upon by Nietzsche's sister to catalog her catatonic brother's papers--Steiner saw the poor spyrochete-addled philosopher propped up by a window and drooling, poisoned by the venom of Zarathustra's serpent. This had a powerful impact on him, and shortly thereafter he encountered a mysterious adept on a train and devoted himself to occult practices. I don't know that I believe in Steiner's 'higher worlds'--but I find his little guide to meditation practice an interesting melange, and was shocked I tell you SHOCKED that anyone would dare give away the dread secret of the Higher Guardian...nia, ia, shubb niggurath, azathoth piping mindlessly in the ether. Cthulu zi kur!

Fortunately I was spared exposure to the hidden knowledge, for my own fear grew so intense I fainted dead away.

May Day

[photo credit]

I agree wholeheartedly with President Bush that the Star-Spangled Banner should only be sung in English. Everyone knows after all that English is the language of America, and was the exclusive tongue on our lilly-white continent long before any lousy Spanish-speaker set foot here.

Uh, except for that guy who 'discovered' America. And, um, the Spanish settlers who were here long before the French and English, in Florida and the American Southwest.

Hey Bush--I think the Bible should only be read in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. By your logic, if you can't read those languages then you can't be a Christian! If you read the Bible in translation you must be too stupid to learn, or too lazy to bother.

Dumbass.

The Regulars

A bad week for encountering my least favorite patrons--the mentally deficient, the hopelessly inept, the lonely who turn for companionship to those suckers unlucky enough to work public service stations. Already I've put up with several of the most intolerable frequent offenders:

Assburger's foolish soliloquies about the Library of Congress and staplers and tape dispensers are driving me mad; Gimpy Bill's "hey bro!" and lascivious comments about co-eds are painfully unfunny; Pride and Joy's pointless Christian evangelism and porn-viewing on public PCs (I'm sure he only visits those sites to email about the states of those poor nude young women's souls) make me cringe; Dante Inferno's insipid re-telling of the reasons why he got fired from KFC wasn't interesting the first four times; The Turk's ability to torment me via phone (now that he's living in Ephesus he can no longer visit) still surprises; Ataxerxes' request for "help" with his "research"--which, as usual, translates from the Persian into "do this work for me", peon--remind me I need to find a new job.

And of course, there's the despicable Tiny Drum, daily confounding me with requests to edit his scrawled PhD(eficiencies). I just told him I can't read any more of his papers because he needs a tutor badly, and his face dropped. "You have major problems with subject/verb agreement, your tenses are all over the place, you don't have an inkling about the appropriate articles to use before nouns, you randomly pluralize, you've never in your life written a sentence free of comma splices, you use semicolons in place of commas, and are completely incapable of putting an apostrophe in the proper place on any possessive. On top of all these problems, your writing is vague, unclear, and disorganized. Go to the Writing Lab. I'm not going to be here forever, and so long as I keep editing this stuff your writing will not improve." His response: "I know, but I don't have time to go over there." My response: "I don't have time to keep reading these papers. Editing won't help--you need a tutor. I strongly recommend it."

I feel better now. Sorry for the rant.

Congratulations

Last night at 10pm I got a call from Julio. "Are you busy tomorrow between 10am and noon?" No. "You want to go to a wedding?" he asked.

Apparently Yo! Adrienne's folks were in town and they'd told both sets of parents at a dinner this weekend about their engagement a couple months ago. Then, Sunday night they decided to get the marriage out of the way while her parents were in Baltimore. Hence the last-minute heroics.

The deed was accomplished at 11am this morning at the Clarence Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse in Baltimore. Julio had no ring so he used a strange antique silver thing with an enormous turqoise stone like an abcess. I thought it was a mood ring. He told me he'd found it on the sidewalk years ago, and when he busted it out during the ceremony Yo! Adrienne nearly collapsed in hilarity.

Julio's mother was so happy. "I thought it would never happen," she said. Of course I'm used to seeing her at the worst moments: fuming after catching us with Hustlers, bailing us out of jail, scratching her head when we returned the car in less-than-perfect condition, the remnants of a wire fence wrapped around drive shaft and axles. Most of that stuff happened more than 20 years ago.