The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Mistake of the gods

    Mistake of the gods

    Mistake of the gods. Changing size. Sylvie Storm. Neutrinos.

    But I digress more maybe than necessary. Sylvie was calling. I was still dismounting my Vespa, emptying saddle bags, when my cell phone buzzed and lit up and I could hear the call was from Sylvie, my unfaithful half goddess psychotherapist and part time partner, probably calling to warn me off another one of my bad decisions. We shared office space in a little place I owned up on Queen Anne, a folk Victorian from 1907, inherited from my mother. Glaucus, Sylvie said, when we first met, fate is the decisions you make. Sometimes I think she remains my occasional companion just so she can restock this rune of hers into my road weary bag of regrets. Decisions I made? When was there ever a decision I made that was mine alone and not influenced in some way by the gods? And the gods make mistakes. In any case, and to bring to a close that business with Vettebug, and before we go on too much further here, I should probably make clear, I am not some comic book hero, or villain. I am a mistake of the gods. I am at least part human. The rest I’m not sure of, though certainly not from planet Earth. I am able to adjust my size at will, though at a huge cost of energy, and at risk of random results, coming and going. Having made a change in size, I require rest. Indeed, I am often near death. I prefer small sizes, the easier to negotiate and move about without attracting much attention, to move through crowds, for example. To explain in a way you might understand (indeed, in a way I might understand), I’m able to break myself down into an emergent group of neutrinos. Thus I’m able to move through solid masses – walls, mountains, trees, Corvettes. But I say emergent because it’s never totally certain what the group will reform into. In other words, I’m never certain I’ll be able to return to what you might call normal, that is, my normal size, the size in which I choose to live most of my life. I’m subject, then, to a certain amount of randomness, to noise, to use a word the actuaries are fond of. To bring to a close, then, the Corvette incident: I changed the Corvette to the size of a Matchbox toy car. Vetteman was now the giant he wished for.

    “Mistake of the gods”
    is episode 4 of
    Ball Lightning
    a Novel in Progress
    in Serial Format at     The Coming of the Toads

  • Candy Apple Red

    Candy Apple Red

    Chased by Corvette. Vespa. Candy apple red. Not Bulldog Drummond.

    A real nice fellow turns out driving the candy apple red Corvette, vanity licensed MYID. Catches up with me, powers up and flips me the bird as I try to negotiate the Harley kickstand. Vetteman angry with me for some reason. Cut him off. Where? When? My anger management pills must have finally kicked in because I felt little urge to cut Vetteboy down to size and make him eat his license plate. Little, not none. I wanted to feel none, nothing. The little urge didn’t come on from getting the bone, and not even the vanity plate was to blame. Those were little nubbers up along the first base line. You picked them up bare handed, stepped on the bag, and tossed the ball to a kid in the stands above the dugout. Big hitter, little nubber. Maybe the candy apple red drew the little urge out. Very few cars should be painted candy apple red, and never a Corvette, an old pick up truck in retirement maybe, I don’t know, but not a Vette. Candy apple red is a very special color. But like I said, little urge, but not none, but still, the pills seemed to be kicking in. Maybe I should up the dosage again. I wanted to experience nothing. Why did the gods keep me alive? To do their dirty work. Then Vettepunk said it, one of the words, called me one of the names, the names no one calls me and gets away with it, without a bit of divine retribution sits you back on your butt and gives you something to think about other than your Corvette id. First, let’s back up. I don’t ride a Harley. I ride a Vespa, candy apple red. I am not Bulldog Drummond. I am not Mike Hammer. Not Philip Marlowe. I’m not Sam Spade. I stand five foot two, and my eyes are blue, but I’m no stereotype. I learned early on to mind my own business. But minding your own beeswax is not so easy with dudes like Vettedog off leash and full of road rage and megalomaniac vitamins. “That scooter a little big for you?” Vettestalker says, sneer and all.

    “Candy Apple Red”
    is episode 3 of
    Ball Lightning
    a Novel in Progress
    in Serial Format at     The Coming of the Toads

  • Hacked and Gobsmacked

    Hacked and Gobsmacked

    Late for a meeting. "extreme and unusual risk." "hacked and...gobsmacked"

    I was late for my meeting with Walter. I had some explaining to do, but I wasn’t in the mood for working together as a team in the spirit of cooperation toward common goals for the mutual benefit of all. Nor did I feel like throwing any bums a dime. I was their in house Risk Manager. Walter was itself a Risk Management Brokerage, specializing in extreme and unusual risk. Sometimes avoidance was the best answer. I rode down Pine to First and over to Pike to the Market and looked for a place to pull the Harley over and park. Cleo nodded I could squeeze into the space in front of his international news stall. The rain had stopped, the clouds still low and grey and blue and hanging bushed like wads of cotton candy over the diamond. Out on the water a ferry would be approaching, carrying Walter from his The Breakers West on Bainbridge Island. I was late with my quarterly report. We’d been hacked and I was still too gobsmacked to explain it. Walter would want to know who, when, what, where, why, and how. “Damned if I know,” was not the answer he’d want to hear from his six digit plus bonus contracted Risk Manager.

    “Hacked and Gobsmacked”
    is episode 2 of
    Ball Lightning
    a Novel in Progress
    in Serial Format at     The Coming of the Toads

  • The gods Get Bored

    The gods Get Bored

     Riding Harley in the rain in Seattle. Ball lightning. The gods.

    I throttled my green gnarly Harley across I-90 from Bellevue, wind chopped waves blowing over the wall on the south side of the bridge, the water as smooth as a coffin lid on the north side. I raddled through the last tunnel and merged onto I-5 north to downtown Seattle. A glob of ball lightning looped out of a smoke ring cloud hanging over the ballpark. The ball lightning bounced across the closed roof. The baseball stadium looked funereal. No game tonight. The winter circus was in town. On nights like this the gods might get bored and when the gods get bored no amount of prayer satisfies these clouds of gluttony, the local paradise filling like a wet basement. Why so many gods, I don’t know. Even the Catholics (and I am one, though maybe not a good one, whatever good means, but as Reverend Mother Mary Annette never tired of telling us, once a Catholic, always a Catholic), who profess belief in but one God, pray to the Saints and Mary and the rest, who seem to function much like the old Greek and Roman gods, one for every need or desire, one for every occasion, one for every problem, one for every predicament. A god for this, a god for that. A god for the nice, a god for the mean. Finely balanced too, the old gods, but like an unequal arm balance, some more powerful than others, leaving it to the mortals to try to balance things out. Still, evens up: one for light, one for dark; one for water, one for air; one for love, one for hate. Always meddling in human affairs, though, these immortals. Sure seem to get in the way all too often. Always wanting something, too, a piece of the human pie chart, insatiable. Why do we keep calling out to them? Was there a Saint of scooters? Could use a prayer to him now.  Dear Saint Scooter, please get me and my Vespa downtown safely, as an 18 wheeler passes at twice my speed, his mud flap cowgirls waving and laughing. God of lead, god of gold. God of the meek, and god of the bold. God of yes, and god of no. God of hot, god of cold. God of bought, and god of sold. God of gods, who never grows old, oldest of all.

    “The gods Get Bored”
    is episode 1 of
    Ball Lightning
    a Novel in Progress
    in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads

  • Baseball, the Canned Crowd, and the F Word

    Baseball, the Canned Crowd, and the F Word

    At first, I couldn’t find the Dodgers on TV last night, the second game in a series with the Giants in Los Angeles beginning the 2020 shortened season; apparently wasn’t available on the MLB channel in Portland. The Mariners were on the local Root Sports channel, and I was glad to hear the same folks doing the play-by-play as if nothing has changed. Then I was surprised to find the Dodger game on some obscure cable channel. I watched an infield grounder, the batter thrown out at first, a routine play, and then I heard it: Canned Cheering, a canned crowd.

    To be canned is to be thrown out, maybe deriving from the US English garbage can. The 2020 season, delayed about four months by the pandemic shutdown, is being played in stadiums full of empty seats, no tickets sold, unless you count the selfie cutouts available from the Dodgers. That must be where the noise is coming from.

    If you’ve ever played a game of street or backyard whiffle ball, or a game of over-the-line in the local park, you might know you don’t need an audience to enjoy baseball. Rules vary depending on the venue – over the house is a home run, but a foul ball over the fence, falling into the street, is an automatic out.

    “I’m the Dodgers. Who are you?”
    “I’ll be the Giants, Juan Marichal on the mound.”

    The game is on, all a foot, the fantasy as real as real ever gets.

    Because Major League Baseball as viewed from the stands or television is not exactly real. The real game is played behind a facade of hero, dream, and cleanliness. Maybe the canned crowd was brought in because of plays like the one in which Dodger Joc Pederson, on his way to being thrown out at first in the fanless season opener, doubles the F Word while running down the line, his voice fairly clearly picked up by the TV mics in the quiet stadium and broadcast into living rooms around the US – where, what, no one ever uses the F Word?

    Respect is born out of shame, shame a form of control. Language is contumacious; it swells and breaks and rolls like the restless ocean. Words are turbulent, irrepressible. At the same time, cussing is often the evidence of a lazy tongue. That is why I decided to omit the F Word from “Penina’s Letters,” with the exception of the discussion in the chapter titled “Henry and the Punctuations”:

    “The experience of war can not be told in words,” I said, “but when F-words fill the cheeks with froth, a fascist has infiltrated the mind.”
    “Who the fuck talks like that?” Bucket scrunched his eyebrows over scowling lips.
    “My friend, Henry,” I said. “It’s a game we play.”
    “Clever,” Gabbia said. “But getting back to the common soldier, surely words like fuck and shit are as common as cigarettes and coffee. Part of his mess kit, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    “That’s right,” I said. “And, like the mess, rationed.”
    “But surely the unfixed tongue is one of the few freedoms the foot soldier feels, and in the fire of the fight, is a weapon he can unleash to gratify his fear.”
    “To be frank, no,” I said. “But, the foot soldier does make efficient and effective use of his F-word vocabulary.”
    “Do tell,” Gabbia said (148-149).

    Photo: With my brother John at a Dodger game, September, 1975. Photo by Susan.

  • Still Life

    Still Life

    If Dad was usually on bad terms with cars, Mom had little to do with them. She never drove, never learned to drive a car, was never licensed, never carried any kind of personal identification – more remarkable since we lived in a suburban Los Angeles area, one of the beach cities, but west of the sand dunes, and there was no public transportation to speak of, one bus, LA Line 51, as I recall, that passed through town on its way through the beach cities once or twice a day, usually empty if and when you happened to catch a glimpse of it. And the city was located within boundaries that in effect created a small town atmosphere: to the west, the sand dunes and ocean, with no houses built on the west slope of the dunes or near the water like you found in Venice to the north and El Porto to the south; to the north, the airport; to the south, an industrial area of small manufacturing and local taverns and the monstrous and secretive and mysterious Standard Oil refinery; to the east, strawberry fields, a stable for keeping horses and trails for riding, later with motocross trails where we rode bikes, and a small-industry area, and the westside little league baseball park. Now of course, the town is not recognizable for what it was, and I’ve no desire to go back, except maybe to walk along the beach, or out on the jetty, from which I might toss a few Toads posts into the water.

    We lived on a busy 4-way stop corner, catty corner from an elementary school with a large open field where we played capture the flag, football, baseball, and rode the swings. And across from our corner lot, sat what was then called “The Village,” a small shopping center, anchored by a local grocery store standing separate on the corner, and behind it a one story line of shops with wood shake roof and with covered sidewalk, which included a hairdresser, a laundromat, a small gift shop that included a post office window, a small cafe with booths and a bar-counter where lonely people sat and ate their burgers with fries and drank their milkshakes, a barber shop, and a liquor store where you could buy comic books. With the market and village shops across the street, and since she never had a job outside the house, and given Dad’s lack of affinity for cars, I suppose Mom had even less motivation or reason to learn to drive.

    In any case, Mom got rides when necessary from church friends, and from my sisters and me when we learned to drive and got cars. But my sisters moved away soon after high school, and I often took Mom to appointments, to the doctor or dentist, for her or one of the kids. But one day, though I happened to be home, Mom was getting a ride up to the church from a friend up the block. I was in my little room in the garage Dad and I had built for me when I got back from the Army and found my digs in the main house usurped by siblings. Someone came through the yard calling for me. Mom got run over by a car, was the gist of the message. I ran out to the street and there was Mom laid out under the rear of a car, behind the rear wheel. She was ok, though. We got her up and dusted her off. The driver of course was distraught.

    The car had pulled over to pick up Mom who was standing on the sidewalk, waiting. As she was getting into the car via the back door, the car lurched, Mom fell, her legs sliding under the car, and the rear right tire drove over her legs. That was her story, even if the evidence didn’t seem to support it. Rather than argue for or against the evidence, and given that she appeared unhurt, it was quickly decided that the event was clearly a miracle. Folks stopped by for days after, to see her legs, to celebrate the miracle.

    Photo: Kids playing in the treehouse-fort on the side of the house across from the market and Village, mid70’s.

  • Reassessments

    Reassessments

    According to Google Ngram, use of the word reassessment peaks around 1990, a climb beginning in the 20s, rarely used prior to 1900. We suspect what’s driving that curve are real estate markets. But to reassess is still relevant to publications, which is to say, books will go out of print, magazines fold, newspapers disappear – and folks will leave Twitter or abandon once again their high school acquaintances or second cousins found on Facebook. Clicking on a blog one has not visited for some time may turn up: This account does not exist: try another search.

    So too, does one reassess one’s involvement in both writing and reading: annually, quarterly, monthly, daily, or with each post or page. What am I doing here? Who is reading this? Will anyone like? Do I like? Who, what, when, why, where, and how – how to write, and why? How to read, and why?

    When we read a book, we turn the page, back and forth, if you read like me, up and down. So called social media sites generally all work upward: we page up, but as we page up, what’s down continues falling and disappears through some virtual cutting room floor. Usually, only the most recent posts, comments, tweets, pics – whatever – get any attention. Form is in the driver’s seat. And the form of social media sites requires constant replenishment (Google Ngram shows constant and regular use of the word replenish from 1800 past 2000). But the social media publications get replenished even though the stock is still full, even if nothing has been depleted.

    The social media cup is neither half empty nor half full; it’s always full, as this post no doubt attests. Full of what, might make material for a different post.

    Photo: The Teacups ride at Disneyland, exiting the park at closing time, Joe Linker, around mid-90s.

  • Jessica Sequeira’s “A Luminous History of the Palm”

    Jessica Sequeira’s “A Luminous History of the Palm”

    “As I sit under the lamplights, I feel happy, I laugh, I talk to myself, I talk to the books. I talk to the trees, and in my mind the palms form a swaying jungle of stories” (57).

    So ends Jessica Sequeira’s beautiful book, “A Luminous History of the Palm” (Sublunary Editions, 2020), twenty-four short stories in which the author “imagine[s herself] in other lives” (1). The stories range from around 500 to 2,000 words, and are organized in triplets, set off by short notes that illuminate the form of the work; for example,

    “To be luminous is not the same as to be enlightened. Enlightenment comes from the outside and implies progress. To be luminous is to generate affections and affiliations from the heart, belly and bowels of a situation in time, and form part of an organic system that is possibly infinite. It is to avoid abstraction, at least at the start, to prefer the concrete and sensual, the soft light forged by the bodies of stories as they crush together in violence or embrace” (29).

    The concept, of occupying different characters over time, works using the human tool of empathy. What is known? What can be known, and how? How does one get to know? Where and how does the engine of cognition get started? This is not appropriation. It is a sharing of thought and experience. As argument, it is pathos, grounded in the emotional with passion. The reader becomes detached from any kind of narcissistic rendering, from identifying with, relating to, finding relevance to one’s own life. One disappears into another. One’s own interests are subsumed by history, and what emerges are anthropological vignettes, finds.

    The vocabulary is exquisite: “Chinoisierie”; “crassulas, euphorbias, stapelias and aloes.” The words used in each piece form a brilliant cover, the style fitted to the personality of the character: a “Healer, [from] Yemen”; a “Housewife, [from] New Zealand”; a “Surfer, [from] California” – and that surfer dispels and defies stereotype to get to the heart of the new and original. The vocabulary is natural to the character. “I’ve got my shortboard, bright orange, and a new haircut.” That new hairdo – foreshadows a surprising identity, personality, transfixed and transposed by expectations and breaking away from the confines of one’s predicament.

    “We get through the book in about an hour, silently noting its patterns” (53). But why hurry? The Sublunary Editions copy is professionally bound, recognizable as a series, and “A Sublunary Object,” a form that enshrines the short work in a book the reader will want to keep and save and, most importantly, reread and share.

    I love the kind of writing found in “A Luminous History of the Palm.” The design, the ideas, the language, the brevity, the characters, the places and descriptions, how easily they seem to change, the reader entering a new land, country, weather. And the book is encyclopedic, the way Borges can be, and full of mystery, the way Lispector wrote – brief, compressed. As each story opens, the reader feels a kind of petrichor of a particular place and time and the close smell of a person suddenly near and unexpected. The palm trees spread and growing throughout the book are also very cool.

    A Luminous History of the Palm, by Jessica Sequeira, 2020, Sublunary Editions, Seattle, WA, sublunaryeditions.com

    Photo: Lisa at Refugio, 1976, Joe Linker.
  • Birdbrain, Bird-witted, and more on Thought

    Birdbrain, Bird-witted, and more on Thought

    Reflecting yesterday afternoon on my morning post, “On the Coast Starlight,” in which I suggested thought, if we are to try to compare it to anything, seems more bird-like than the train of thought first found in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 “Leviathan,” I thought, to force thought onto a track where ideas are coupled one after another in forward motion toward some predetermined destination results from printing press technology, as McLuhan has shown. Thinking like a train does produce advantages, but the linear notion of thought may put us in a cage. Then it came to me that a reader might have commented that I seem birdbrained.

    Since I’ve had comments and likes off for recent posts, no such reader was able to suggest it, so I’ve come forward to suggest it myself. (Readers intent on comment, like, or dislike, btw, will find an email address at the bottom of the Toad’s About page.)

    But why we have come to disvalue flightiness to the extent we have, I’m not sure. Birdbrain, according to Google Ngram, is a word product of the second half of the 20th Century, while bird-witted has a more storied past, with interesting spikes of usage in both the 1720s and the 1820s.

    I readily agree that my brain seems to be more bird-like than train-like. But upon discussion with Susan, she informs me that only the hummingbird is able to fly backward. Trains, of course, can travel forward or backward, but not at the same time. Yes, but trains can’t leave the track (except to switch to another track), and two trains running in opposite directions on the same track – well, in a quantum train world, perhaps a train may indeed run forward and backward at the same time. In any case, the intelligence of birds is not in question. The question is whether to think like a bird offers the human any advantage over thinking like a train. But we are only speaking to the metaphors, of course, because of course trains don’t actually think at all, and people don’t and can’t and will never think like birds any more than they’ll be able to fly like a bird.

    It’s probable that in the era of trains, people did think more like trains than bird-like, while before artificial locomotion was mass produced, people thought more like other animals think. Now, people no doubt think more like automobiles. And we might update Hobbes to suggest an automobile of imagination.

    The poet Marianne Moore, in her poem “Bird-witted,” leaves no doubt that to think like a bird is to think like a human:

    parent darting down, nerved by what chills 
  the blood, and by hope rewarded -  
of toil - since nothing fills 
  squeaking unfed 
mouths, wages deadly combat, 
and half kills 
    with bayonet beak and 
    cruel wings, the 
intellectual cautious- 
ly creeping cat.
    The last stanza of “Bird-witted,” from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, Penguin, 1982, p. 105-106.
    Photo: Susan and Chicken, Culver City, circa 1952.
  • On the Coast Starlight

    On the Coast Starlight

    We climbed aboard the Coast Starlight in Portland, bound for Los Angeles, 24 train-ride hours away, but we stopped unexpectedly somewhere up in the Cascades southeast of Eugene. Snow was falling. In those days, you could walk between the cars and open the top of the dutch door for some fresh air. The air was raw and cold, the woods dark, and the smell as strong as a cigar of pine sap. The tracks followed rivers, valleys, passes, built along paths of least resistance. It’s possible now to consider the railroad a naive form of travel.

    When we speak of losing our train of thought, we are comparing thinking to a train, I suppose to indicate how one thought after another coupled together are all headed in the same direction, or should be, if the logic holds water, but thought does not move like a train, the engine a thesis statement, the coal car fuel of claims, the cars one example after another, all following the same track of thought, the dining car full of opposing arguments, the caboose a bright red conclusion.

    News travelled slowly on trains in those days. Long and longer minutes passed without anyone new coming into our car. Our conductor reappeared and explained we were stopped because a freight train ahead of us had derailed. At first, it wasn’t clear how long we would be delayed. Equipment to reposition the freight train was en route to the wreck. Minutes, as it turned out, became, as they always do, hours. The conductor came through our car again to announce we would all be treated to a free dinner in the dining car. There was also a club car where we could hang out while waiting.

    Thought, if it moves at all, is more like the flight of a bird. But Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book, “Leviathan”, put us on the track of thinking of thought as a train, to wit:

    “Of the Consequence or TRAYNE of Imaginations. BY Consequence, or TRAYNE of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mentall Discourse. When a man thinketh on any thing whatsoever, His next Thought after, is not altogether so casuall as it seems to be. Not every Thought to every Thought sueceeds indifferently. But as wee have no Imagination, whereof we have not formerly had Sense, in whole, or in parts; so we have no Transition from one Imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our Senses. The reason whereof is this. All Fancies are Motions within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense: In so much as the former comming again to take place, and be predominant, the later followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, some times another succeedeth, it comes to passe in time, thatjn the Imagining of any thing, there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next; Onely this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.”

    I ordered a salmon steak and a glass of red wine. I don’t remember what Susan ordered, but since she dislikes fish, I suppose she might have had a filet mignon with a glass of white wine. We were not in a hurry. Had we been in a hurry, we would not have taken the train in the first place.

    By the time we pulled into the station at Santa Barbara, the train was five hours behind schedule. Another, new conductor had come aboard in San Louis Obispo. A group of passengers who had been on board even longer than us, having boarded in Seattle, were told to wait at the door at the end of our car. It was noted this door had not previously been used at any of our stops; nevertheless, our new conductor insisted the group wait at this door. An anxious wait ensued. The door did  not open. The train began to move. The group would have to travel with us all the way to Los Angeles, where Amtrak would put them on a bus which would drive them back to Santa Barbara.

  • In Another Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    In Another Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    He turns to an empty
    whiskey barrel,
    wondering if there is life
    on the red planet,
    or under the Venus cloud cover,
    or inside her
    granny panties.

    He reaches for his watering can,
    always a few drops to go,
    dribbles a few words
    of too late love.

    They sit across the bar
    from one another,
    smiling back and forth.

    The water runs out his mouth,
    over his lips,
    and down his chin,
    his clear-cut neck,
    a waterfall of love’s
    last cleaning.