The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Month: September 2025

  • Pickup Truck Strut

    My Heavy Metal brother was here: “… It’s a long, long road, from which there is no return, while we’re on the way to there, why not share?” (Lyrics from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” by Scott and Russell, and a 1969 soft rock hit by The Hollies). And share we do, for example the “Live at 5” pandemic concerts we played weekly on Instagram Live; by the way, Instagram now limits “live” streaming to Instagramers who have at least 1,000 followers, creating a perceived scarcity – as if anyone watches anything to its end anyway, attention spans diminished as they are these days. So now we record short videos and post them as pre-recorded videos to Insta but also to our YouTube channels.

    Anyway, while CB was here, he wanted to do a cover of “Stray Cat Strut,” the 1981 hit by the rockabilly group “Stray Cats.” Mainly, he wanted to try out my Gretsch1, which is good for playing in the rockabilly guitar style. It’s interesting that once again the British brought back a defunct American song style. Rockabilly was a 1950s sound originating in the South by players like Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes, 1956), Gene Vincent (“Be-Bop-A-Lula,” 1956), Buddy Holly (“Midnight Shift,” 1956), and Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues,” 1958). Rockabilly, the word, comes from a combination of the rock in rock ‘n’ roll, and the billy in hillbilly music, a description of mountain folk music, which evolved into country western, but which is still played in its original forms where it’s usually called old-time music.

    Though his preferred guitar sound is heavy metal, CB is more of a perfectionist than I am on the guitar or with vocals. He also knows more than I ever will about guitar electronics, pedals, influences, and songs and players of the Metal sound. But I do like a raw sound, and a simple format. The original Buddy Holly and the Crickets, for example, was a simple trio of electric guitar, drums, and a stand up bass, and in those early recordings, you can hear the instruments individually, and it’s not a wall of sound coming at you like an electronic tsunami. Even when the rhythm guitar was added, the sound was still clear and concise. Meantime, volume has reached a reducio ad absurdum in some musical venues and recordings. Ironically, that loudness is often subdued by streaming platforms using loudness normalization.

    After CB left, I decided to give “Stray Cat Strut” a go, but after a short while gave up on it, but as I studied it, I found both its lyrics and chord progressions interesting. The cat is a cool cat indeed, and I ended up taking the idea a couple of steps further, into the arena of the absurd, with an anthropomorphic pickup truck the main character. I satisfied myself with a short imperfect recording in a kind of country style, though others may of course have a different view of it. I made two recordings, one with vocal (with the 1970 Yamaha Red Label FG180), the other instrumental (with the Gretsch). Song chords and lyrics below, and link to YouTube instrumental recording at bottom.

    Pickup Truck Strut

    G7                                      E7
    Sitting in a lot watching the lights go by
    A7                                   D7 
    Gas tank on empty, tires pretty much flat
    G7                                  E7
    Surfboard sticking fin up out of my bed
           A7                     D7     G     
    I'm an old pickup truck and I got no strut

    C7                  B7
    Stray cats climbing into my cab 
    E7                      A7
    Kids stealing all of my mooncaps 
    C7                      B7
    I don't take off chasing Chevys in town
    E7                     D7
    I rumble away from the big city crowd

    G7                        E7
    Surf guitar playing on my radio
    A7                          D7 
    Stand up bass, high hat and snare
    G7                   E7
    No red Corvette candy apple chic
          A7                          D7     
    I got tools and a surfboard in my bed

    G7                            E7
    Sitting in a lot watching the lights tonight
          A7                D7           G  
    I'm a used pickup and I ain't got no strut
    1. The Gretsch is a G2420 Streamliner Hollowbody Electric Guitar with Chromatic II Tailpiece – “Village Amber” finish. Year 2021: with Maple Top, Back, and Sides, Nato Neck, Laurel Fingerboard, and 2 Humbucking Pickups. ↩︎

  • Sliding Into Saturday

    Since quitting a traditional 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday job some time ago, my sense of Saturday has changed. While working through the week, one looked forward to Saturday, sleeping in, hanging out, taking it easy – none of which happened, since one was forced to squeeze into that single day a week’s worth of chores and outside commitments. And it’s almost impossible to sleep very late when you’ve been getting up at 5 every morning all week. And I usually had work to take home. Have laptop, will travel, and work through the weekend.

    So I begin this blog post on a Saturday, thinking of those Monday through Friday working readers today sleeping in, sliding into their Saturday, or having walked down to the corner cafe, opening their laptop looking for a brief and casual post that gives Saturday its day off due.

    I finished reading Satoshi Yagisawa’s “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” By way of review, I remember this passage, from page 90:

    Wada picked up the book and showed it to me. I secretly breathed a sigh of relief that we’d moved on from the last topic.
    “Oh? I don’t know. Is it a good book?”
    “It’s hard to say, actually. It’s kind of one of those tragic love stories. The author is a guy who had this one book and ended up dying in obscurity. When you read it, the writing can be clumsy, and there are a lot of places where it feels like it’s missing something. But there’s something about it that fascinates me. I’ve read it around five times already.”
    As he talked, he was staring at the oil painting of a road in the hills on the book jacket. There was something tender in the loving way he looked at the book that ended up making me want to read it.
    “Really? Five times? Maybe I should check it out.”
    “I’m not sure I can really recommend it. What are you reading, Takako?”

    That’s sort of the way I felt about the book itself, that I was reading (I just finished it last night), “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” I mean, the writing did seem clumsy in parts, but the story and the lonely narrator and the neighborhood of bookshops in Tokyo were at the same time, if not fascinating, charming and diverting, inviting repeat visits, though I probably won’t read it again, let alone five times. And I do recommend it, for what that’s worth, to someone awake too early on a Saturday with nothing to do.

    I’ve noticed that naming blog posts after a day of the week seems to have found followings, like “Wordless Wednesday,” or doors on a Thursday, or flowers on Friday. So I thought I’d put up an old photo slide on a Saturday, and call it “Sliding into Saturday.” This one’s from December, 1969.

  • Poetic Tie-in Puzzles

    I’ve been enjoying the New York Times game called “Connections,” even if it’s usually as stacked as a one armed bandit in a Western saloon. And I noticed they’ve created a sports version called “Connections: Sports Edition,” which I’ve not tried. I’ve enough sports watching my home team Dodgers falter down the stretch. But it occurred to me to try my hand at a poetry puzzle version.

    How to Play: Find the solution that ties all the words in the puzzle table together. Click the footnote number in the bottom right hand corner of each table to view that table’s solution. Or feel free to post your own solution in a comment to the post.

    Puzzle #1:

    orangemonthwolfmarathon
    galaxyangsttwelfthproblem
    silvercircleninthshadow
    musicchaosdepthrhythm1

    Puzzle #2:

    supercalifragilisticexpialidociouslyasslowaspossiblesesquipedalianconnectificationly
    essayificationifificationallyirresistiblyunnameable
    antidisestablishmentarianismincomprehensibilitiesmultitudinouslyuncharacteristically
    irresponsibilityeveryapproachinglyexistentiallityhippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia2

    Puzzle #3:

    moonyellowtumbleguitar
    soundyardyearnquill
    whippoorwilldandelionnightcrawlersingular
    lazuliwanderlusthollowoils1

    Solutions:

    1. English words difficult to rhyme. ↩︎
    2. Long words set in small font. ↩︎
    3. Country western song pastiche. ↩︎

    Definitions to words in Puzzle #2 above:

    1. From Disney’s Mary Poppins, here changed to an adverb, a multi-compound word.
    2. A musical term: “As Slow As Possible” (notable example, John Cage’s organ composition ORGAN²/ASLSP).
    3. A person who uses long words, from Latin for a foot and a half long.
    4. Making connections.
    5. Making an essay out of it.
    6. To be unable to move forward for fear of “ifs.”
    7. The correct spelling of irresistably.
    8. 1953 Samuel Beckett novel: The Unnameable.
    9. Once considered the longest word in English. Refers to a 19th-century political movement in Britain opposing proposals to disestablish (separate) the Church of England from the state. It’s a turnaround word.
    10. Can’t make sense of things.
    11. The Strand on a sunny weekend.
    12. Wearing the wrong uniform.
    13. Taking off on a closed out wave.
    14. You never quite get there.
    15. An overused word that used to mean something.
    16. Fear of long words.

  • Convenience Store Woman and Other Books Briefly Noted

    Last night around midnight I finished my nightstand book “All the Lovers in the Night,” the second of three Japanese fiction books I recently picked up. I read it after “Convenience Store Woman.” Next I’ll read “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” Meantime coincidentally I heard about “The Second Chance Convenience Store,” by the Korean writer Kim Ho-Yeon, so I added it to the stack on the nightstand.

    I had been about to begin reading again Penelope Fitzgerald or Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor, after “Seascraper” and “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” both of which followed “The Dissenters.” The last Elizabeth Bowen I read was “Eva Trout.” My reading of course is a tale neither here nor there nor anywhere, but I try not to write book reviews, ever since Jessica commented, “It’s not a book review,” about something I’d written about one of her books, a simple reflection, drawing unexpected connections. But I was happy with that, with her comment. Too many book reviews seem template formatted and start to sound too similar. But blurbs, blurbs are the worst, exaggerated cartoons of reviews. Before “Eva Trout” I’d read “Spring Garden” and “Forbidden Notebook.” I also read, back in May, a book of short stories one of my brothers wrote, titled “Roxy, Reincarnated.”

    But the last book I read, just before deciding on the Japanese trio, was “The Invention of Morel,” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, influential Borges friend and collaborator. I found the Casares book interesting but not suitable for midnight reading, though some may find it precisely written for the middle of the night. Still, I find it’s still with me, its strangeness. And it too is a kind of cartoon, exaggerated, comic book matter. It deals with metaphysics and light and predicts television and movie popularity. Think of the characters as all movie stars, among which you walk, but they don’t see or hear you. Indeed, one should approach such books with a keen reliance on circumspection:

    “The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. But I may be generalizing about the peculiarities of one man, moralizing about a characteristic that applies only to Morel” (80).

    Yet here I am duped by my own book reviews, if you can call them that, and Jessica said you cannot call them that, and she is right. Earlier this year I read “All Our Yesterdays” by Natalia Ginzburg, thick blocks of prose, this one, as if she were trying to save paper. And I read Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which is not as bad as everyone has ever said, but there seems to be fewer sympathetic readers of Hemingway these days, but which I enjoyed nevertheless. Adam Gopnik had revisited back in a February New Yorker the controversial 1950 takedown profile of Hemingway in The New Yorker by Lillian Ross. Gopnik’s article was a piling on. He claims to have uncovered in recently revealed letters the true nature of the Ross and Hemingway relationship and why Hemingway postured he was not offended by the offensive profile. Something like that. Anyway. Gopnik quotes from Ross the section where Hemingway is buying a belt. Really? I first read the Ross piece in the book format that followed the article. It’s a classic, on that I agree with Gopnik, but for different reasons, but I won’t continue to bore you with Gopnik on Hemingway via Ross any further.

    Nick Hornby used to write a short column for the monthly “Believer” magazine called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” I subscribed in its early days and saved all the issues, like deluxe paperbacks, the thick paper, the cartoon-like covers, until I’d had enough, after a few years, and carted them down to the corner book box where they went like Pokemon cards at a garage sale. Hornby’s articles contained two sets of books for the month: books he had bought, and books he had read, seldom exactly the same lists. Two books on my night shelf I’ve not read and they’ve shifted to the bottom: “The Colony” and “Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons.” “The Heart in Winter” was a gift, but I couldn’t get into it. I’m waiting for the heart in spring to come out. Eileen Chang’s “Written on Water” I’m still reading, slowly, slowly. And “The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick,” also slowly, on page 76, the next essay titled “Things,” following short, magazine like pieces on Faye Dunaway, Susan Sontag, and Katherine Anne Porter. Slowly, of necessity. I might have mentioned in some previous post I read Salinger’s “Nine Stories” aloud to Susan, except I skipped “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

    But I started off here wanting to say something about “Convenience Store Woman.” It’s one of the more original books I’ve read this year. But its form is a novella length cartoon, but without drawings. It’s anime without comics. It’s not anti-literary, though it might appear so to some. It’s a first person narrative of a protagonist who must have a manual to live by, and the manual she finds suitable to her needs is the manual of the convenience store where she works. “All the Lovers in the Night” is more literary formally, but it also involves a single woman at odds with family, social expectations, being different, and aging. And where and what and how to work and establish and nurture relations, and who and what to trust as one navigates the busy streets of a lonely life looking for light in the middle of night, a night light.

  • Scraping By

    One summer, I worked for one of my Dad’s friends in the body and fender shop at a Ford dealership in Culver City. He entertained the idea of getting a race car and I would be his driver. He foreshadowed the advent of the short surfboard. “Why are the boards so big?” he asked. “You could ride a two-by-four if you could get up the momentum.” Another summer my Confirmation sponsor hired me to work as a lab assistant at UCLA, where he was working on a graduate degree, the chalkboards in the lab covered with formulas and equations that looked like hieroglyphs left by sanderlings bicycling around the wavelets at El Porto.

    The first thing my Dad taught me about plumbing was to name the tools, so I could hand them to him when needed. And I learned to dig a trench with the correct slope, for “shit falls downhill.” I worked odd plumbing jobs with him and knew enough of plumbing to know a plumber by trade was not what I wanted to be. Today, though, I feel some affinity for the plumber’s craft, even if my Dad would not now recognize it as the same trade, the new plastic pipe, the special tools, the glues that have replaced the lead and oakum joint jobs. Boiling the molten pig of lead in a lead pot then working the cooling lead sealing the oakum with a cold chisel around the lip of the cast-iron pipe. Yarned and roped, poured and caulked.

    One day, my Dad, a plumber by trade, he would say if asked, asked me what I wanted to do, to be: a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. I wanted to surf, which he knew, his garage a surfboard shop, but while I was a good surfer, I wasn’t an excellent swimmer, like my two best friends who were county lifeguards, but we all knew we weren’t going to surf our lives away. And I played guitar, but as an ambition as aimless as walking on a surfboard, for while I was a good guitarist, I wasn’t an exceptional musician, and had no taste for the business. And cars, beginning with the 1956 Chevy I bought for $75 from Gary, who was headed for Vietnam. I became a wheeled and track vehicle mechanic, MOS 63BC20, which helped see me through school, that talk with my Dad over and out.

    What’s all this got to do with Benjamin Wood and his novel “Seascraper,” recently longlisted for the 2025 Book Prize?

    “The horse needs feeding up and harnessing. He gets into his boots on the back doorstep, rolls a ciggie underneath the rusty canopy his grandpa built from corrugated iron – it’s hanging by loose screws, and one more heavy rain could bring it down. He’s not repaired it yet, as mending stuff like that requires an aptitude he doesn’t have. His talent is for something else – his grandpa would decry it as a waste of time if he were still alive to hear him sing a tune, and if his ma knew anything about the pocket watch he gave to Harry Wyeth in trade for his guitar, then she would make a bonfire of it in their own backyard” (5).1

    That talk with my Dad I replay like old vinyl, now full of scratches of course. I might pick an electrician to be, and maybe I’d specialize in electrical musical instruments. Or I might have moved from carpentry to lutherie. Those are indoor jobs. Do you want to work indoors or out was not a key question for a kid growing up in Southern California, where the weather was taken for granted. There were a dozen guys I knew having conversations with their Dads similar to the one I described above. Families just scraping by, recovering from one war and beginning another, and then another, or couples with a cache of war bonds that would see their two kids through USC or Stanford.

    “It never used to foul his mood this much, the cold, the loneliness, the graft, but that was long before he harboured any aspirations for himself besides what he was raised to want. He used to think it was enough to fill the whiskers up with shrimp each morning and accept the cash for them by afternoon. Providing is surviving – that’s what Pop would tell him, and what else should any man desire? Perhaps a wife, if he could find one that’d have him” (12).

    He has more than a job, an occupation, he’s a seascraper by trade. He both loves and hates it. For love, the culture and tradition, the brawn and brack, the freedom. For hate, the cold and wet and muddiness, the poverty, and not enough time to devote to his true calling:

    “He was thirteen when he first went out to sea with Pop and, in those days, few adaptations to the old equipment had been made – the cart still had two wagon wheels with metal rims, and he felt queasy after half an hour of riding in the seat with him. It was supposed to be a weekend job, that’s all, and it was something he would beg his ma to let him do, believing it to be a rite of passage. Every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa who had putted barefoot on the beach alone with just a push-net and a basket on his back” (34).

    Scraping for money, too. There’s the rub. And he learns and loves to read, fatal flaw. And comes under the spell, though he’s naturally wary, of an outsider who sees just some kind of romance in the beach and sea and fishing for a living, and who wants to make some kind of movie about it, with him the star, and the promise of some big bucks. He’s not sure.

    “The folk club at the Fisher’s Rest begins at eight, and if he wants to play tonight he’s got to put his name down on the list by quarter to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to wait a week, rehearse his songs a few more times before subjecting people’s ears to them. He’s not in a position to refuse that kind of money. ‘I dunno,’ he says” (32).

    What’s the catch? The empty promise of a false calling. And who is calling? You’ll meet all kinds of charlatans wanting to hear your story and help you to tell it. How could you tell? He’ll make a tourist scene of your livelihood. Tom Flett is the only seascraper around who still works with a horse and wagon. The others use motorized carts. He’s like a plumber who might still be using lead and oakum. Idealized and sentimental. The tourist view doesn’t see behind the facade. There’s no money in the songs. There’s no money in the seascraping. What’s he waiting for? To know his song well before he starts singing?2 What’s he going to sing about? Seascraping. Dangerous work, and just scraping by.

    “He’s committed now and has to see it through. ‘Bear with me, then. I’ve got to work the nerve up.’ The guitar of Harry’s is much bigger at the body than he’s used to and its neck seems thicker when he takes hold of it. At least it’s strung the right way up. The frets are old and blackened, but it sounds in tune. ‘I need to warn you, I’ve not sung this more than twice from start to finish. It’ll come out ragged, but you’ll get the gist’” (161).

    Mariposa Surfboards
    1. “Seascraper,” Benjamin Wood, recently longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Penguin Random House UK. ↩︎
    2. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” released in 1963 on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. ↩︎

  • Yardscraper

    Susan came down to say it’s raining and did I want to bring in the cushions. I hadn’t heard the rain, though I’ve got the doors and windows wide open, but I knew it wouldn’t last long, a trace only had been predicted, but I also knew she’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t hop up and go grab the cushions, and in the moment she waited to see if I was going to go out or continue thinking at my laptop for how I wanted to say something about Benjamin Wood’s novel “Seascraper,” I pictured her dashing out and snatching the cushions herself from the rain in her nightgown and slippers.

    I stood at the edge of the porch, cushions safely secured from getting wet, watching and listening to the rain, falling harder now than I had expected. Yesterday morning I was in the yard watering when I felt the drops hitting my hat and hands, but it lasted not even one minute, a trace, and I continued with the yard work, and the sun melted another day. But today as I stood at the opening of the porch and began to smell the dry ground oils stirred by the new rain I suddenly felt almost like an epiphany the end of summer.

    Yesterday I harvested the grapes from the pergola I built 35 years ago, the oil of the cedar boards dry and the wood crackling and splitting and fraying like an old T-shirt. I’ve been thinking for a few years of taking it down. By August the grapes are heavy. Scuttling the pergola will be a hard task. Meantime, the dwarf apple tree has overgrown the grape trunk and the Blaze Climbing Rose has reached the stratosphere, entangling its barbed links through the grape vines and the apple branches, a beastly hairdo that winds its way through the aged cedar board barrettes.

    As I had predicted the rain stopped after a minute or two, my epiphany manifesting the end of summer yet another illusion of insight, a pseudo-epiphany, as too often happens. The rain was but a trace. And while I’ve got my copy of “Seascraper” sitting here by my side waiting for me to say something about it, I’ve lost the gumption. I’m going back out to take another look at the pergola; might even have a go at the Blaze.

  • Middle-Aged Once

    Patrick Modiano’s novella “In the Cafe of Lost Youth” opens with an epigraph attributed to the French philosopher Guy Debord:

    “At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the cafe of the lost youth.”

    I was unable to track down the source of the quote. It’s possible it comes from a memoir or some throwaway magazine article. But it reminded me of the opening to Dante’s “Inferno”:

    “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
    from the straight road and woke to find myself
    alone in a dark wood.” John Ciardi translation, 1954.

    Dante is comparing having lost his purpose or direction in life in middle age, 35 or so, to getting lost in a wilderness where one has wandered off a steadfast, well-worn path. He’s unable to locate himself on some reputable and credible map, either from an external or internal viewpoint. Why doesn’t he back up, retrace his steps? Instead, he forges on in the dark on a crooked path. At that point, a step forward could just as well be a step backward.

    Dante both forges purposefully ahead and rambles on, caught in the web of the woods, presses on like some point man cut off from his platoon, tracking deliberately with some goal of trying to map a new way out. Though he lacks an immediate target, he’s not aimless.

    “I placed the typewriter on the small pitch-pine table in my room. I already had the opening sentence in my mind: ‘Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.’ I was aware that once I sat down in front of the typewriter, everything would be much less straightforward.” (89-90, “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” Patrick Modiano, 2007 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 118 pages).

    Modiano was the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. The only other book of his I’ve read is “Young Once” (1981 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 156 pages):

    “Does life ever start over at thirty-five? A serious question, which made her smile. She would have to ask Louis. She had the feeling that the answer was no. You reach a zone of total calm and the paddle boat glides all by itself across a lake like the one stretching out before her. And the children grow up. They leave you.” (5).

    Both novels are sepia-tinged with the kind of suggestive noir one begins to associate with normal life, which is to say there is no normal, but everyone you meet is obsessed, or ought to be, with their past and future but are actually caught up in the web of their now, hopelessly trying to live in the moment but forced to move on, like Dante, or Beckett, in spite of having lost track of where they are in the moment. Even trying to move back is another futile move forward. Yet at some point, maybe that middle age point, one is given pause, a kind of grace – to reflect, to look back, to sense forward, lost in that very stillness:

    “They did not know that this was their last walk through Paris. They did not yet exist as individuals at all; they were blended together with the facades and the sidewalks. In macadam roads, the stones, patched together like an old cloth, have dates written on them to indicate when the successive layers of tar have been poured, but perhaps also recording births, encounters, deaths. Later, when they remembered this period in their life, they would see these intersections and building entryways again. They had registered every last ray of light coming off of them, every reflection. They themselves had been nothing but bubbles, iridescent with the city’s colors: gray and black.” (154)