Week 585: Random Vexations

This week I’m starting a New Big Thing, which I call Random Vexations. It won’t be a twice a month Big Thing, just a Now and Then, maybe medium sized thing–or small, in some eyes. For something to qualify as a Random Vexation it must literally be randomly summoned by memory, somewhat pointless, possibly entertaining. But you never know, Random Vexations might just be the thing the world has been demanding from me. Unlikely. But you never know.

Sometimes, not this week, but certainly others, there will be multiple Random Vexations due to their short length. The idea is to trim the number of stray notions and recollections in my crowded Idea Pantry; these are somewhat singular and I admit they are not the sort of things that can grow into something longer, yet at the same time these are things I’d rather share than unceremoniously cast out unused. This week I present a Random Vexation that has been with me for at least fifteen, maybe twenty years.

One will discover that a great deal of my Random Vexations were born in the twenty-plus year, two hours a day, five days a week ferry commute that dominated my life from ages thirty-nine to sixty-one (my earliest commute began when I was nineteen, but there was a twenty year span of local work between my ferry riding times; back when the Seattle wage was not wildly higher than the local pittance). Many long term commuters sleep, but I cannot sleep in public places, so I learned to occupy my time with the daily newspaper and its puzzles on the way over and reading on the voyage home. But I also watched people, out of the corner of my mind, which most of us do at some level. I could write a book about the people I have observed–there was one guy whom I could never get far enough away from on a three hundred foot boat–my name for him is “Ratface Fecalskull”. He was a mouthy little turd who repeated his political agenda to his little social group of fellow Fecal-Skulls. It involved imprisoning the homeless and nuking the Middle East–something about him suggested that he had sympathy for OKC Bomber McVeigh and David Duke (a real jewel to google)–so you can count Ratface in the long line of useless assholes that pollute life. But extreme Fecalskulls do not make for interesting or entertaining reading. Just imagining someone who will say the dumbest thing possible is awfully too easy to do. Therefore I discovered that there are finer Random Vexations to be found in people who have multi-faceted personalities, as most of us (all of the immediate “us”) do. On occasion a dumbass will do something smart, but mostly we often see smart people committing stupid and/or pointless actions. I believe the second group will be the chief contributors to my Random Vexations.

Hence….

Leila’s Debut Random Vexation: Gay Lee Marvin Newspaper Slayer

Life loses its zest when all thoughtlessness is omitted. You can’t eat anything that tastes good without it turning into a fucked up political statement (there’s something spiritually impure about people who are not attracted by frying bacon); can’t say what you really think about the work of anyone who happens to be in a “marginalized group” without catching the death penalty, and I dare you to light a goddam cigarette anywhere. With that in mind, I boldly demand that the little gods of cyber-stoning place me in their grubby list because I am going to say few taboo things beginning with the tale of a person I saw for about half of my years on the daily ferry commute to Seattle: Gay Lee Marvin, Newspaper Slayer.

I believe that you can recognize something about a person right away, a trait that she/he shares with many people of different ethnicities; a Chinese person born and raised in China almost always speaks English with a Chinese accent; an American citizen would speak Chinese with an American accent, if any American were to learn how to speak Chinese. Yet I recall the shitstorm during the O.J. trial (I hope he is enjoying payback hell) in which you are not supposed to be able to tell the voice of a Black man from a White one. What bullshit. Dunno why it is true, it does not happen all the time, but it does a lot if not most of the time– it is meaningless and does not infer any kind of inequality, it’s just something that is. Personally, I am cool with whatever items about myself pop up in the minds of others. I mean, BFD, really.

Therefore in that line of thinking, you can often tell when someone is Gay from speech patterns and accents and gestures; mainly this comes from the person boldly spreading the word–which is cool considering all those horrible years of hiding and fear; but I must also declare that every person I have known who has told me that they can ID a Gay Person have been dead wrong nearly every damn time; it is not like spotting a toupee (these are the fools who equate cleanliness, manners and a shy disposition in a male as tell tale signs of homosexuality). I believe that most Gay men do not “advertise” flamboyantly, but I am from Seattle and if you ever get to visit, go to Capital Hill and you will enter a fun and high flying and extremely gay place in which Pride Day is everyday. So, I do have a handle on reality and mean no offense, but there are always the stray Fecalskulls out there, just sniffing.

Anyway, Gay was clearly the case with Gay Lee Marvin, Newspaper Slayer. This dude was hell hella hella hell hell Gay Gay Gay. He was very stylish, clad in Armani–but every Casual Friday he wore any one of umpteen Gay Pride sweatshirts or tees. I didn’t know him outside the occasional perfunctory hihowareya exchanged by familiar faces that only got that way via long coincidental exposure (there were usually over five hundred of us on the commuter hour boats). But more than once I overheard him often discussing upcoming Pride events and such with his friends, so it was fairly clear.

Wealthy, well turned out Gay men are common in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and San Francisco are very much alike (including obnoxiously high prices that prevent me from living in either), so I would not have given this guy a second thought except he was (I assume still is) a dead ringer for Lee Marvin circa Paint Your Wagon, but sporting the The Dirty Dozen hairdo. Lee, for those who do not know about him (an ignorance you should soon dispatch) was as walking testosterone as a person got (yet even though he was wounded on D Day, he was quite sensitive in interviews). If I knew Gay Lee a little better I would have suggested that he dressed as a cowboy wearing a tin nose on Halloween. No, he did not just resemble Lee Marvin, he was his twin–like in Cat Ballou. All things considered, I’d say that everything was as it ought to be with Gay Lee Marvin except one habit of his that I did not like, although it was his right to exercise.

Newspaper reading is a big thing on the commute (I was on the commute so long that I recall actual human newspaper venders standing in front both terminals–it was still popular but in serious decline when Covid ended that long adventure). Career commuters, as it goes with folks who must keep a strict schedule, tend to do the exact same things everyday and I was no different. I read the paper and did the puzzles on the way to work (the trip home belonged to books). Gay Lee Marvin also read the paper in the morning. I usually held on to my paper because I gave it to one of my co-workers, who, fortunately, was not interested in the daily crossword or Sudoku. Many people tossed theirs in the bin specifically marked for newspapers. Gay Lee Marvin was a recycler–but he also made a point to tear his newspaper into at least four pieces before placing it in the bin; I must have seen him do that maybe hundreds of times, and not once did he just drop it in the bin. Many riders would fetch copies of already read papers from the recycling. Apparently Gay Lee Marvin did not like that; nothing else makes sense. I have no shortage of things I dislike about the human race but my antipathy does not include cheapskates who don’t mind reading a used newspaper (but I despise over the shoulder readers). In fact, I temper that further with the knowledge that some people really cannot afford a newspaper, or justify the expense. In Lee’s defense, maybe he worked for the paper and was depressed by declining sales–but that is the best I can do for him, and at best, that best ain’t too much of a best.

Now we arrive at a characteristic that all my Random Vexations share. None have a big wow finish. They just stop, unresolved. I do wonder if he is still doing that, six years along. I placed him in his forties, so unlike lucky me he still has a way to go to retirement. But, and this should not come as a surprise to anyone, nothing under heaven or above hell will ever coax me back on a ferry at 4:50 in the morning. Some things are best left in the recycling bin, no matter in how many pieces.

The Week That Was

The Sunday special was written by my leading Random Vexation. The closest Arthur C. Clarke’s intelligent Childhood’s End got to being a film is the opening to the aggressively stupid Independence Day. It deserves better than that. (I know that a lot of people liked Independence Day–but we all have popular items that we think are shit.)

It makes me a little sad that people such as Clarke and the others who made science fiction what it is today died without knowing the answer to “Is there other intelligent life in the universe?”

And although wits continue to replace other with any, it remains the one thing a less deserving soul, like my lead Random Vexation, wants to know. Tick tock, God. Tick tock.

Monday brought Mehico by Richard Hulse. This is a lively and even humorous criminal affair featuring people who planned a bank robbery, but had to give it up when they were told it was Sunday. But they persevered. The center of the tale, the smiling femme fatale is a piece of work, and the reader longs to know what happened to the group down the road.

J.J. de Melo gave us Mind Sweep. Personally speaking, I find Tuesday to be the day of the week in which thinking is too hard to do. A lifetime of public schooling and work have created the impression that Tuesday is an automatic sort of day; one we sleepwalk through reflexively. But J.J. was able to drive me toward neglected enlightenment with this complicated and engaging tale about memory; it shone in the fog and produced the kind of hope that only understanding that there are still writers out there creating in the human fashion.

The hope created by de Melo on Tuesday took a bit of a blow on Wednesday; that’s when I drifted in for the second time in four days with bailiwick of the billigits. Having stuff published is both a blessing and a Random Vexation. You either make people happy or are as welcome in their hearts as bounce back coronavirus. Yet both are preferable to making them feel nothing at all.

My personal observations have led me to the conclusion that Thursday is the day of the week that people who talk too much talk most. Dunno why that is, but it is so. Just listen. Fortunately there are silent activities to take part in, such as reading The Orb by Aishwarya Srivastava. Ironically the tale involves knowledge gleaned by listening correctly. This is a wonderful “what if?” that works because it inspires the imagination to wonder what things might be like if the event described actually happened; although amusing, it could happen in an infinite universe, given enough time, and probably would happen if the universe was an all around karmic entity.

Matias Tavesio-Diaz returned to close the week with Investigative Report Dossier. This is one of those things that on the surface appeared to be doomed for rejection. But that is why we look at everything. First Matais selected what some minds might find to be the dullest title possible. Then when you look at it the thing closely resembles the shape of a government report–the type of thing that I had been beaten to Tuesday brain death with for years and years and years. But when you read it you find that the thing is inescapably intelligent and engrossing. Let this be a lesson to the Writer and the Editor. The first should write what s/he feels, the Ed. should read the damn thing.

That’s it for another week. Do as much of the usual good stuff as your pancreas will tolerate and omit as much of the other as you can get away with. Bye bye and buy Forward Thinking War bonds.

The Big Close

We close with a recent flurry of words that have come to me from the “Word Daily” site that I do not recall subscribing to but am glad (most of the time) that I have. For some reason I receive either nouns or adjectives around ninety-five percent of the time.

• Weltschmerz (n) Mental depression (or apathy) caused by a comparison of the actual state of the world to an ideal state. (I’m all over that one)
• Froideur (n) Coolness or reserve between people
• Subreption (n) Secret, underhanded unlawful or unfair representation
• Anserine (adj) Of, relating to, or resembling a Goose (a new favorite of mine that I’m itching to get into a wrap)
• Brummagem (adj) Cheap and showy
• Pukka (adj) Genuine
• Tenebrific (adj) Gloomy
• Nugatory (adj) Of no value and/or futile
• Persnickety (adj) Like all Cats–somewhat pushy-fussy
• A Dediticius (n) Someone not granted citizenship in old Rome on account of gross misbehaviour while a slave (I consider that a fine something to be)
• And an “icky” one: Borborygmus (n)-Nasty stomach sounds caused by gas and such

Leila

Tomorrow is Bob Dylan’s eighty-fifth birthday. So, let us use that to connect to the soul of this post in a tenuous fashion.

And…

And…