Anthony Bourdain

I had a dream on Saturday night, yes I did, but first, a little background.  When I am not writing for this blog, which, let’s face it, is most of the time, I am either working diligently in a sideways sort of fashion at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread or I am going to bars and photographing the musicians playing at those bars.  Saturday was an exceptionally productive night; people were out and about, some of them were drinking heavily, and in the presence of a 1980’s cover band, a good many of them started dancing like there was no tomorrow. I am very partial to this sort of photograph. The trouble with photographing musicians in bars is that there is nothing inherently dramatic about what musicians do up on the stage. It is very much like trying to capture effect without also capturing the cause of the effect. After all, the person looking at the photograph of the musician after the fact cannot hear the music.  So what I do to compensate for this is that I try to capture the looks on the musicians’ faces as they play in order to convey the emotional intensity of people doing something they love. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—some musicians are extravagant with their expressions, while others just look down at their instruments trying to make sure that they don’t drop notes or play in the wrong key; it is pretty hit or miss, as is almost anything so dependent on a person’s personality— but what does work on a pretty consistent basis are photographs of people dancing. Dancing means the music is hot and people are having a good time, and who doesn’t like seeing people have a good time? I know I do and I suspect you do as well. Anhedonia, like Marxism, cheese and squirrel sandwiches, and the designated hitter rule have no place in any civilized society. 

As I said, it was a productive night photographically and I got home much at a much later hour than a man my age should be getting home at. I was still wound up; watching other people have fun takes a lot out of a person, you know; and so I watched the news for an hour, which, at that time, was all about Anthony Bourdain dying in France. I finally got to bed at about five and promptly skipped all the preliminary stages of sleep and went directly to deep sleep and stayed there for a while, enjoying the ambiance of the place and the free pistachios with an equally free wine cooler, compliments of the house. Several hours later, I was sitting in my spot at the end of the bar in my favorite watering hole, drinking a Diet Coke and doing what everyone does in such a social setting: I was looking at something on my cellphone. Consequently, I paid no attention to who was coming and going; it’s a bar, after all—someone is always coming and going. A customer came in and sat at the corner and asked Corinne, the pride of Melbin, South Australia, an actual place or so Corinne tells me, for a Corona and a lemon. I looked up to ask Corinne for the bill and stopped. Anthony Bourdain was sitting at the corner of the bar looking at Corinne as she pulled the Corona out of the fridge. As I am never at a loss for words in any social situation I said, “You’re dead! What are you doing here?”  Bourdain twisted the top off of the Corona and looked at me. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Bad decision there. What’s your excuse?”

And then I woke up.  That was three days ago and I am still wondering what my excuse is. I must have one, right?

Since we spoke last...

The trouble is that I don’t really feel like writing anything at the moment. Now, I’ll grant you that this moment has lasted for well over a month at this point, but what is a month in the larger scheme of things? In the long history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present moment, a month counts for less than a nanosecond, and why should we privilege a terrestrial month over a Jovian month, or a month, assuming they have months, of some hitherto unknown xenocivilization who were just wandering by minding their own business before we ambushed them and inflicted our Babylonian system of measuring time on them. We shouldn’t do this: this is both racist and xenophobic and whatever other –ist and –phobia we can throw at it—we can work out what the correct Greek prefix for aliens not from Mexico is at a later date. So let’s stop doing this right now before we give our planet a reputation for being the galaxy’s equivalent of Jim Crow Mississippi or apartheid South Africa. It’s just wrong.

I did go to Virginia for my vacation last month and I did have a great time, thank you very much for asking. I hung out with my cool photographer friends—it was a photography festival, obviously—and I watched them engage in behavior that I would never indulge in myself. I did, however, get a ride home with them when they were all both legally drunk and illegally stoned at the same time, and yes, I know better than to do that, but there were four people in the car, two music photographers (including one of Marilyn Manson’s tour photographers), a museum curator, and me, a harmless bureaucratic drudge unused to hanging out till four o’clock in the morning; and I really wanted to get some sleep. The car we went back to my hotel in was a BMW convertible, which is why I agreed to get in the car with them in the first place. I figured that if I had to shuffle off this mortal coil in a faux James Dean death and glory ride, I might as well shuffle off in style, and I liked the idea of everyone here in our happy little burg wondering at my funeral, we’ve known him all his life; he was a conservative Republican who never did anything interesting in all the time we knew him, so how did he know those other people in the car with him?  One of life’s great mysteries, I think. Thankfully, fate spared me from having to provide an answer to the question.

In other news, in October I will receive a Public Service Award from the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The announcement came as something of a surprise to me, as I am not aware that I have done anything special to advance the cause of colored people here in our happy little burg (isn’t people of color the current euphemism for the descendants of African slaves in this country? Or is colored people kosher so long as it’s the NAACP saying colored people? I am not sure and I really do not want to cause offense by asking).  I strongly suspect that what is at work here is that everyone in town knows that I have working here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread for twenty-nine years now and the NAACP is simply recognizing my extraordinary persistence in hanging onto my paycheck.  The noted American social philosopher and well-known putz Allan Konigsberg (N.B.: dude, you got to keep your hands off your wife’s adopted kids—I mean, do you really need to have someone explain that to you? Like, duh, as my niece feels the need to say whenever she is in the presence of the self-evident) once said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. Apparently, if you show up often enough, you get a prize. I have shown up often enough and therefore I am getting the prize. I didn’t expect, however, that I was going to get the prize from the NAACP. I’m not going to turn the award down; it was nice of them to think of me, and having the award and the small amount of recognition that comes with it will be nice to remember on June 9^th of next year, when the full horror of having spent thirty years working in this place finally dawns on me and renders me completely suicidal, if not vaguely annoyed at myself.  Still, if I don’t count the dead guy in the bathroom or the dumbass who likes to defecate in his Dunkin Donuts cup and then leave the cup near where kids will find it, I suppose it hasn’t been all that bad, if you know what I mean. 

PS: For those of you going to Charlottesville, I can recommend the meat loaf sandwich at The Nook, and the hamburger and the chicken jambalaya at Miller's. Eat outside under the shade of the trees and if you're at Miller's, sit somewhere near that water fountain thing so Brianna will be your waitress. She is great and she is also way cooler that you will ever be. Just saying, people.

Cellphones yet again, I fear, or fishing in the deep blue sea for stuff

I have mentioned a number of times here that I do not own a cellphone nor do I intend to buy one any time soon, I will pass over the reasons for this ongoing personal Luddism, except to say that if you notice that my continued lack of a cellphone makes it impossible for you to call me whenever you feel like disturbing me with whatever niggling little problem you are having at the moment, and if you suspect that this unwillingness to listen to you chew my ear off morning, noon, and night might be deliberate, indeed may even be the point of my not having a cellphone in the first place, then in the interest of personal verisimilitude I should say that you might be right. 

I bring this tiresome subject up yet again because Ms. B., a knowledgeable young woman of my acquaintance, has evinced an interest in buying a new cellphone. This, in and of itself, is not terribly important; people buy new cellphones all the time—I suppose that suppressing the traffic in cellphones is impossible now, much as I would like to try—but this new cellphone is for those people who not only want to take their cellphones to the beach, but also take the pernicious little devices into the water with them as well.  This marvel of aquatic telephony allows the lucky owner to call and annoy his friends and neighbors as he lays on the beach in the south of France, a prospect most vacationers look forward to whether they want to admit it or not, and it also comes equipped with an excellent camera and Internet capability. These amazing and, one assumes, very costly extras permit our peripatetic caller to indulge his hopefully temporary bouts of summertime sadism, wherein he tells his unfortunate acquaintances who are not lying on the beach in the south of France enjoying the fun and sun of their misfortune, and then further complicates matters by sending these same unfortunate wretches photographs of what they are missing.  They will ooh and ahh and say isn’t the south of France beautiful this time of year and tell him that they hope he is having a wonderful time, and they will be calling him nine different kinds of rotten bastard after he hangs up; people are like that, you know.  His friends, assuming that they are still his friends after he calls, do not want to have their noses rubbed in his good fortune.

As for me, I don’t really see the point of taking a cellphone into the water with you, unless you want it nearby so you can call a lifeguard and let them know that you are drowning. The problem, as I see it here, is that by the time the lifeguard figures out what you are trying to say between the screams for help and the frantic gasps for air, you’ve already drowned and the whole exercise is therefore pointless, and to make matters worse, you’ve lost your cellphone too.  Assuming that you haven’t drowned, you are now stuck in a place you will now permanently associate with a traumatic near death experience, and not in a positive manner either. This may or may not be a good thing; you will never go back to the beach, but your local ski lodge will appreciate your business, at least until you cause an avalanche and lose your cellphone there as well.  Faced with being cellphoneless for perhaps the first time since the invention of cellphones, you must ask yourself, what do I do now? 

Clearly, you will have to replace your cellphone, and having spent more than you really should have to get the first one, you may not feel the need or have the means to buy another waterproof wonder phone. You may just chalk this one up to experience and tell yourself to buy a new and cheaper cellphone that you won’t be tempted to take into the water.  After all, you can’t lose your phone in the water if it's not in the water with you, but this, of course, requires that you learn from experience, which is something most people are loath to do until the Internal Revenue Service makes it necessary. And what of all those people you want to talk to and who have nothing better to do with their time than talk to you?  Well, they will just have to wait, won’t they?  You’ll be doing something more important with your time.  What that something more important with your time might be is entirely up to you, but whatever this something more important is it had better not require my looking at any pictures of the south of France that don’t have me in them.  Do something else with the damn thing.

This, however, does not solve the problem of the missing cellphone, which, because it is waterproof, is still usable, even if Saint Anthony of Padua is the only person who knows exactly where it is.  This could still be an expensive proposition, though.  For example, you might open your telephone bill at the end of the month and find out that you have made phone calls to at least eighty-five people in Australia and twenty more to people in Astoria, Queens. Upon investigation, and you will investigate because you are not paying a two thousand dollar phone bill, no way no how not going to happen, as you maniacally screamed at the telephone company’s payment department’s somewhat English-speaking representative in Bangalore, you learn that a Greek fisherman slit a bluefin tuna’s belly open somewhere off the coast of Crete and out fell your now not lost cellphone, and he promptly used it to call all of his relations everywhere in the world. And then he looked at porn, a lot of porn, more Greek porn than you ever knew existed, which only proves that you don’t get around very much and that fishing is a very lonely business.

And this is just the best-case scenario. What happens if something else uses your cellphone?  Dolphins, for example, don’t have access to a phone most of the time, but when they do, they enjoy using their prehensile penises to make obscene phone calls to female police officers, especially in California; why California faces this problem more than other places is the subject of ongoing research, but early and very tentative results from a UCLA study suggest a linkage between obscenity and police pensions in that state. Most fish have no use for a phone, cell or landline, but hermit crabs will have no compunction about using your phone to call their realtors.  The fight for better underwater housing is Darwinian in its intensity and the recent housing crisis doesn’t seem to have affected the hermits’ race for new and roomier homes; they want what they want and they’re going to get it no matter how far in debt they have to go, an attitude I’m sure the bankers loved just a few short years ago, but one that few people can afford nowadays.  That the hermit crabs still act this way shows how economically unrealistic some species can be, no matter how awful the market is.  As P.T. Barnum didn’t used to say, there’s a suckerfish born every minute.

Self-Portrait for Burn Magazine.

AN INDECISIVE PHOTOGRAPHER'S SECOND SOLILOQUY: DO I USE FLASH OR NOT, COMPLETE WITH AT LEAST ONE SIGNIFICANT SPELLING ERROR?

To flush, or not to flash–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous flatulence
Or to take Rolaids against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To flush, to flash–
No more–and by a flush to say we end
The bellyache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flash is heir to, so don’t play with the damn strobe in the shower or when you still have the batteries in it.. ‘Tis a constipation
Devoutly to be wished away, and sooner rather than later, if you ask me.. To flush, to flash-
To flash–perchance to forget Cartier-Bresson’s warnings about flash and photography: ay, there’s the rub, and there will be no rubbing and flashing or flushing in public or the cops will show up muy pronto and you can take that to the bank, kids,
For in that flash of flush what dreams may flash of flushing, and make us wish we lived in SoHo or Tribeca or even Park Slope
When we have flushed off this mortal coil,
Must give us paws, which won’t do a damn thing if you’re stuck in the toilet bowl; just ask any rat who’s been caught in that situation. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long flash.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Time, Newsweek, or even GQ, for that matter,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, or the photographer fiddling with his gear while you’re sitting there smiling in your very stiff Sunday best and feeling the sweat start to run down your back and your face begin to hurt because this doofus doesn’t know the difference between a f/stop and a cheese danish, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make, out of papier-mache and half-empty cans of Spam, no less,With a bare bodkin?
(Bodkins are often bare; it’s some sort of religious thing. The last sighting of a clothed bodkin was in 1778, when a unbare bodkin was seen serving in the Continental Army at the Battle of Monmouth). Who would fardels bear, the fardels bear being a particularly rare species of European brown bear, for those of you interested in zoology, once used by the Romans in gladiatorial games for comic relief-they were finicky eaters and disliked eating Christians, although they just loved Dacians, for reason best left to the imagination,
To flush and flash under a weary life, and look, and vanity fair
But that the dread of something after flush,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn ultimatum
Only the plumber returns, puzzles the will, especially when you see how much he’s charging you just for showing up and looking at your damn piping,
And makes us rather bear those hot flashes we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus incontinence does make flushers of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Photoshop,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currants turn awry with pastrami and hot mustard, and some French fries on the side,
And lose the name of action, but not for very long, not if you insist on eating this kind of stuff on a regular basis. Crack out the antacids here, boys and girls!

FAMILY PIX: Family photographs are wonderful things, or so people keep telling me, but I have very little use for them. I will admit to a certain amount of prejudice in the matter, as family photographs of the Clan Bashmachkin invariably include members of the eponymous clan (and I know this for a fact, too; I’ve seen some of those photographs and there are family members in each and everyone of them). Given that I do not want to see these people in the flesh, a phenomenon that ineluctably leads to my handing out money I will never see again, I do not care to see them in photographic reproductions in either color or black and white. To be honest, I find the idea of willingly looking at those people more than a bit nauseating, if not actually perverse, a vile and unnatural act akin to putting spicy brown mustard on chocolate ice cream or rooting for the Red Sox.

I cannot say with metaphysical certainty when I developed this aversion to my own flesh and blood, but I am pretty sure that it arose in utero, when I learned that I was not going to be Bill Gates. I was profoundly nonplussed when I got the news, an understatement if there ever was one. I thought the interview had gone well and I knew that I’d scored high in the swimsuit competition and I was sure that things were going my way, so finding out that not only was I not in the running anymore, but that some little dweeb from Washington State had beaten me to the job did not make me very happy, as you might imagine. I knew that there was some chicanery afoot and I immediately demanded a recount, but alas, it was not to be. In such matters knowing the people who count the votes is much more important than having the voters on your side, and under the circumstances I had no choice but to concede. I didn’t like conceding, not by a long shot, but sometimes you’re just stuck with a bad hand. What can you do?

In any case, the folks who decide these things did not take kindly to my challenging their decision and, in their infinite wisdom and not at all in a spirit of malice, payback, or making an example for others who might think that they got a raw deal as well, they dropped me into the Clan Bashmachkin, as ill-fated a crew that ever stepped into a pile of bad karma while walking down a city street. The relatives keep telling me that things could have been worse, which is an Irish way of keeping things in proportion: no matter how positively awful the bad thing that just happened to you was, it could have been much, much worse. They will then regale with a story about their Uncle Liam in Mullingar, who had a stroke in a barn while trying to saddle a horse and couldn’t move or call out for five hours and had to lay there up to his neck in chicken crap while the pigs ate his left leg down to the bone. The story is usually pointless: Uncle Liam is back in the saddle now, the stroke was minor, and he never liked his left leg when he had it nor does he miss the limb now that it’s gone; and even if the story is not entirely pointless, which is only true in a miniscule number of cases, I find that this is usually the sort of willful denial of reality that I would prefer to skip without hearing the punch line.

You find this sort of denial everywhere these days if you really know where to look. Take squirrels, for example. Squirrels are homicidal little bastards, not that you would learn this from the press these days. Squirrels are one of the many species protected under the terms of the Disney Dispensation, which declares that all cute, furry mammals are cuter than a bug’s ear, an idiom I’ve never really understood, since if you could see a bug’s ear, assuming the bug in question has ears at all—some don’t, you know, even the ones who used to work for Richard Nixon—you would probably find the bug’s ear just as repulsive as the rest of the bug. Bugs, as a rule, do not fall under the protective folds of the Disney Dispensation; they tried, even picketing Disney Studios to get themselves included, but Walt brought in the strikebreakers—the Beagle Boys did the dishonors, as Uncle Scrooge McDuck was in Howdoyoustan that week foreclosing on a dung beetle—and broke the union; and now everyone everywhere may slaughter bugs in droves, hordes, masses, or whatever other collective adjective you wish to use without your conscience bothering you in the least.

Squirrels, by contrast, are too damn cute for words. I realize that cuteness has its place in the world, preferably a place as far away from me as possible, but I should point out that no one thought the Nazis were cute either, except for the occasional lonely Naziette. I realize that this bit about Nazis has nothing to do with squirrels and their effect on twenty-first century American social and political reality, but it does give me the chance to use the neologism Naziette in a sentence. If you don’t like Nazis, Naziettes, or neologisms, just skip this sentence and move on to the next one. It’s a pip… not this one, the next one. Cute or not, it is difficult to get Americans to see squirrels for the vicious and violently territorial critters they really are. Your average American will look upon a knock down, drag out, winner take all grudge match between two squirrels over who gets an especially big acorn and smile and tell themselves, oh, isn’t that cute, look at those two sweet little squirrels playing with one another when what is actually going on is that the squirrels in question hate each other’s guts and are trying to sink their teeth into each other’s necks. I also doubt that most mothers in this country would want their offspring to hear the profanity laced abuse these two squirrels are heaping upon one another as this fight gets nastier and nastier. Like modern twelve-tone Moldavian folk opera, one appreciates the spectacle better when one doesn’t understand a word anyone is saying. Knowing only spoils the mystery.

The same is true with your average family photograph. You’d never know from looking at them just how much your Uncle Harry hates his deadbeat brother in law who lives in the cellar of Uncle Harry’s house rent-free because his wife says so or how many people in a wedding picture know that the father of the bride is not the proud man walking arm in arm down the aisle with the blushing bride, but the older gentleman with the incredibly fake looking toupee sitting two rows behind them on the left, the somewhat seedy looking man leaning over and whispering something into the ear of his fourth wife, a once and future ecdysiast who did not get the memo on what to wear to a wedding and consequently looks as though she’s just looking for a handy Pole to leap onto. No, when the photographer is around snapping away everyone’s just one big happy family and don’t you forget it, buster, even if the family involved makes the Borgias look positively warm and fuzzy by comparison.

I've been here for the past week or so. I'm working on something for here now.

AND FOR SNOOP. and for anyone else interested in this sort of thing, this is the pic that's made me $22.80 richer than I was before.

IT'S ORGANIC AND HUMANE...REALLY: I sold a picture this week at a photographic exhibition just down the road from our happy little burg, which made me feel better but did very little for my bottom line. It was a photograph of Pete Seeger and went for $30, of which I got $22.80. It ain’t much, no two ways about it, but it’s more than I had before and I was trying to get rid of the frame anyway. I used the frame in last year’s show; in fact, the picture I had in the frame last year is still there—I just turned the cardboard backing around. Last year’s picture was that of Jesus hanging from the Cross, which, when you think about it, is a neat lesson in how being an anti-government agitator has changed from that time to this. In America, Pete Seeger got investigated by a bunch of sweaty pols hoping that investigating subversive banjo players made them look good to the voters back home and then he goes on to receive Grammys and a hotst of other honors and gets to live to a ripe old age, a time where he can look back at a life spent fighting the good fight for the poor and oppressed of the world. Jesus of Nazareth had no such luck. The Romans, who didn't give a rat's ass what the folks back home thought about anything one way or another, beat the shit out of Jesus and then nailed him to a tree as a warning to any other smart-mouthed Jewish agitators who thought that the poor and oppressed of the world had anything other than a good swift kick in the teeth coming to them and that anyone other than Tiberius Caesar was King of the Jews. America, though, is a different kind of place. Amongst other things, we have flush toilets and high definition television, not to mention Pete Seeger.

Still, the success with the Seeger picture has led to other things, as things are wont to do. After seeing the photograph, a local organic hamburger shop (no, I am not kidding) wanted some of my pictures of our happy little burg to hang on their walls. I emailed them some sample black and white pictures and they were enthusiastic about getting some 11 x 14’s of them up on their walls. I must admit that I was mildly surprised at this; urban blight looks good in black and white, to be sure, but I am still failing to see the connection between economically distressed Rust Belt areas and selling organic hamburgers. Perhaps seeing urban decay sets off an atavistic demand for meat that tastes the way it used to before refrigeration—perhaps some psychologist can explain this phenomenon—me, I just don’t know.

And what I found especially interesting was this: their hamburgers are 100% organic, they are 100% local, they are 100% grass fed, and they are 100% humane. I was not sure what a humane hamburger might be; is humanity a special topping, along with the onion and pickle, and will it cost you extra to have your burger with some humanity on it or will the cops, spoilsports that they are, let you get away with something like that? When I enquired, the young man behind the counter told me that humane in this case meant that the butcher killed the cattle with as little pain as possibly and by the most humane methods available.

If our young beef pusher meant to ease my mind, he failed. One may quibble over words like humane or painless in regard to the cow, but to the cow, the difference is largely semantic—they still wind up ground up and cooked between a bun with a side order of French fries and a frosty cold Coke. And what do they mean by humane? Did the butcher or his assistant, in an attempt to ease the cow’s mind about its imminent demise, dress up like a pair of milkmaids and creep up on the cow from behind and then shoot it a couple of times in the head when it wasn’t looking? And once they shot the cow, did they leave the gun and take the cannolis? Our young beefslinger had no answer for any of these important questions and neither did I; I didn’t even stay for a burger. Once they get my pictures up on the wall, I must go back there and see how they taste. They’re organic, after all; they must be good, right?

This guy (I am assuming that it's a guy, not that I would actually look down its underwear and check for myself) is sitting on the roof of my porch, whereas I am standing in my kitchen taking this picture of him/her. In any case, I have something on the griddle now and I will have something new for you folks to read in a couple of days. Until then, there's this bird. Enjoy yourselves.

HELLO, I'M NOT MIKE WALLACE AND THIS IS NOT BIOGRAPHY: In the past few months, thousands of people haven’t bothered to ask me for any biographical information about myself and for all I know they intend to continue to not ask for biographical information about me well into the foreseeable future. Faced with this ongoing and, to my mind, completely understandable lack of interest, I have had to think long and hard about my long-time position on this sort of thing. I’ve long opposed releasing any information about my personal life in any forum; an artist’s reputation should rest on his work, not on his biography, but since I am not an artist my desire for anonymity has little to do with my work, such as it is, and everything to do with avoiding people who want to ask me for money. This is sometimes hard to do, as the majority of these people tend to be my relatives, most of whom already know where I live and have no compunctions about showing up on my doorstep at the most inopportune moments to borrow twenty bucks to tide them over until payday. You can always lie to the bill collectors, but getting rid of your family is an altogether much harder feat to accomplish.

I also know that it is next to impossible to be objective about yourself. If, as the old saw has it, biography are the lies other people tell about you, it stands to reason that autobiography then must needs be the lies you tell about yourself. So, to assuage the undying lack of curiosity about me and my background, I thought I would just do a short autobiographical timeline, thereby editing out the most excruciatingly boring parts of my life and leaving the merely mind-numbingly boring parts that the reader is already not at all interested in. So, here goes:

26th July 1958—I am born. I do not actually remember this, important as my arrival here in this our Great Republic was in terms of my long-term job prospects, and as strange as such an utter lack of empathy for my mother’s anguish might seem to the casual observer. The event occurred at approximately 7:30 in the morning, however, so I was in time for breakfast, unlike some other people I could mention here. I shuffled onto this mortal coil in the City of New York, during the administrations of the Honorable Robert Wagner, Mayor, the Honorable W. Averill Harriman, Governor, and the way more than a little dishonorable Vito Genovese, Boss, at the institution then known as Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. This has always seemed strange to me; you wouldn’t think there were enough Columbian Presbyterians in Bogotá, much less New York, for them to support a hospital that size. They must all be very wealthy or very unhealthy to afford that level of care. The hospital has a different name now, though what that different name might be escapes me at the moment.

In any case, my links to a hitherto unpersecuted religious minority and its Calvinist heresies ended a few days after my birth when, at my mother’s insistence, I was baptized into the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church [hereafter, the Church and don’t you forget it, smart guy]. I do not remember this event, either, although I do remember thinking that this was a fairly strange bar, what with the bartender giving me salt but no lime or margarita, and then washing my hair without using shampoo or a blow dryer. I dislike this sort of occupational multitasking lest it breed it cause confusion among those consumers who think that going to a plumber for a kidney transplant is a reasonable idea. Needless to say, I did not tip the bartender.

1958—1962: I am a prisoner. I am not sure what the charges were, but in some way—I may have been a victim of mistaken identity, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest—I became trapped in the labyrinthine snake pit of undercover Cold War politics. I was kept in a barbaric open air cell with no toilet facilities where people came to poke, prod, and make strange faces at me in an effort to make me talk. This does not happen; I made the determination early on that I wasn’t going to tell those no good Commie rat bastards anything, but I admit that on more than one occasion, I came perilously close to cracking under the strain of my captivity. To maintain my sanity, I translate the lyrics of Ira Gershwin into Bhutanese, no easy task when you don’t know Bhutanese, have no access to a Bhutanese dictionary, or even know where Bhutan is and if anyone actually lives there. The result, as you might imagine, was pure gibberish, comprehensible only to mentally deficient gibbers, who appreciate the true genius of the Gershwin brothers, and civil servants, who appreciate gibbering for the fine art that it is and wish that more people would take gibbering up as a hobby so the civil servants wouldn’t look so dumb when they gibber; one person gibbering is foolishness personified—five thousand people gibbering at the same time is our government at work. Sometimes I sang Sinatra songs backwards, too; it passes the time. I still miss Frank.

During those first few years of my captivity, the filthy screws tossed another two prisoners into my cell. They are turncoats, Benedict Arnolds of the worst sort. They constantly tried to curry favor with the guards by betraying my escape plans. I had to abandon three tunnels, including one that had almost gotten to the wall; the risk of discovery was just too great with those rats around. I waited for the Red Cross to come, but they never did. I believe to this day that my captors held me incommunicado so I could not pass on what I knew to our government. What did I know? I don’t know what it was, and if I did, I’d have to kill myself to keep it secret. That’s how important it was.

1963: The guards sent me to some sort of recreation facility. I spend my days plotting to bust out of there, but finger painting and Dr. Seuss keep me from going. There is deep philosophical meaning in Green Eggs and Ham, I think, and I am sure there was a coded message from HQ in there as well. I could not decode the message, however; my secret decoder ring broke after I got it out of the cereal box. This was not the brightest idea HQ ever had, but I took comfort in the fact that they knew I was stuck there and were planning assiduously to get me out of that awful place.

1964—1965: My captors stop playing around with me. They mean to break me, once and for all. They ship me off to a re-education camp for brainwashing and dance lessons. The dancing does not work out; I am rhythm deprived. This makes no difference to the camp administrators, who are mostly women in strange uniforms. They attempt to break my will by beating me with multiplication tables. They fail at this, as do I on a consistent basis, and so they beat me regularly. On the other hand, the ice cream isn’t all that bad and I play well with others.

1966—1967: I escape from the camp. Taking advantage of this opportunity, I join Magnum Photos as an associate wastepaper basket. I do not last long; the high-fiber/low protein diet all wastepaper baskets must endure sickens me and makes me unable to perform my duties. Worse yet, someone tosses a lit cigarette into my shoes after a long day at the office and I burst into flames, leaving me slightly singed around the edges. As there seems to be no future in wastepaper containment, I move on to other occupational opportunities. I decide to kill carp instead.

1967—1968: I do not kill carp for a living, due to the general lack of suitable carp in the Bronx. There is, and was, of course, plenty of carping in the Bronx; there always is when the Yankees aren’t doing well; but most of this carping is already dead on arrival. This revelation crushes me and snaps the last tenuous hold I have on my ratty sneakers. I have to glue them shut now, as there are no shoelaces in a five-block radius. Sneakers aside, this news annoys the hell out of me. No other species of fish would do for the full expression of my icthyocidal urges. I had no interest in killing tuna, flounder, swordfish, or even the deluded Patagonian dogfish; I only wanted to kill carp and then I learn that I was not even going to get the opportunity to wound one slightly with a slingshot. The best laid schemes o’mice and men, the poet Robert Burns wrote, gang aft agley, and no man ever spoke truer words, even if I don’t know what the hell Burns was talking about after he stopped making sense. You have to expect this sort of thing from someone who thought eating haggis was a good idea.

1969: My wife is born and immediately moves to Ohio with her entire family, where I will never see her again, thereby sparing me the cost of both marrying and divorcing her. I congratulate myself profusely when the news of her impending move reaches me; I know I’ve really ducked a bullet on that one. She took the kids too, I think, although I might have sold them to the neighborhood deli instead. The truth is I don’t remember what I did with the kids, and that’s the God’s honest truth of the matter, your Honor.

June 1969: My captors move me from the city of my birth to the wilds of exurbia. I am ten years old at the time. Nothing interesting has happened to me since.

I trust this satisfies the incessant lack of interest in my biographical particulars and I must hasten to point out that there will be no personal pictures available at any time in the near or distant future. I dislike pictures of myself intensely and I prefer the mental picture you have of me, as I am much thinner in your minds than I am in real life. Thank you and have a nice day.

DIGITAL GENESIS: I suppose it does not matter to you one way or the other, but yes, I have, in fact bought myself a brand-spanking new digital camera. That’s right: yours truly, one of the few remaining photographic Luddites still extant here in this our Great Republic, now has a digital camera. I haven’t figured out how the damn thing works yet, but I have one and here in America it is always more important to have the goodies than to actually use them. Nor should anyone believe for a second that this small cession to the digital cause means that I will be getting rid of my film cameras any time soon, nor will such a cession in this particular case ever, ever, mean that I will be buying a cell phone any time in the immediate or not so immediate future. Any number of well-meaning friends have explained to me, usually in the most intricate and tedious of detail, the benefits of owing such a device, and then, having made no purchase on my recalcitrance, often employ the most apocalyptic of scenarios in order to frighten me into purchasing a cell phone and a plan—the plan, I’ve noticed, is almost always their plan, for reasons I am not sure I fathom. I am not sure if part of the contract the unsuspecting cell phone buyer signs with a phone company for cellular service demands that they proselytize vigorously amongst the unwashed noncellular heathen or whether, having committed some portion of their hard-earned largesse to the phone and the plan, these friends now feel the urge to have their own telephonic choices validated, a phenomenon familiar to people over the age of thirty or so whose married friends are always after them to get married. It doesn’t matter who you marry, just so long as you get married and are just as happy as they are. The problem here, insofar as I can tell that there is a problem, is that none of these friends who want me to buy a cell phone has, as yet, come up with a satisfying explanation for why I would want to make it easier for people I don’t want to talk to in the first place to get a hold of me whenever they take a notion to.

I think I can say, without too much fear of contradiction, that the world would be a much better place today if Mr. Watson had not heeded Alexander Graham Bell’s poignant plea of “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” and had gone out for pizza instead. The acid Bell spilled on his trousers that night would have eaten through his leg and come out the other side, and then Bell could have lavished his inventive genius on building a new and better wooden leg, which is something the world can actually use, as opposed to that infernal squawk box that makes it technologically possible for my relatives to hound me for money at all hours of the day and night. I suppose it is too late at this point in time to go back to some civilized form of communication, like smoke signals, for example, or running signal flags up the yardarm like Nelson did at Trafalgar, although, in the interests of fairness, I should point out that in Nelson’s case, he didn’t read all that legal boilerplate that came with the flags and wound up dead as a result.

As far as I can tell, the only practical use of the cell phone is that it allows you to call in an order for an Italian combo on a hero and some macaroni salad to your local deli from your car. The thing of it is, though, I wouldn’t order anything from my local deli if my life depended on it. Now that I think of it, my life does depend on not ordering anything from them. I do not know if the people who own and operate this establishment are familiar with the concept of ptomaine poisoning and I have no intention of finding out. I am sure that there must be swarms of people interested in having a near death culinary experience; I, however, am not one of them. There are no thrill seekers here, thank you very much.

In any case, there is something about an establishment that sells food and also advertises that it sells live bait above its entrance that makes for some queasiness on my part. Live bait, for those of you who are entirely urban in your day to day life, means exactly that: the earthworms, nightcrawlers, and other invertebrates sold to the local fishing fanatics are all alive and sufficiently yummy to attract the attention of even the most finicky of fish. Obviously, there are many places in this country where such a sign is so utterly commonplace it would cause absolutely no head to turn at all. In almost any Southern state you care to mention, for instance, not only is it possible to buy live bait, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, a six pack of Budweiser and a Slim Jim in your local deli, you can also get yourself a couple of boxes of ammunition for your shotguns or pistols if you feel the need to shoot something before going home for the night. It’s just that I’ve been in this deli on more than one occasion and I know they keep the live bait back near the cold cuts, and I like knowing that my salami, tomato, and provolone hero is pig, plant, and cheese, and in no way, shape, or form includes a nightcrawler busting out of this lousy joint and making a run for it. I am in no way a vegetarian; I have no moral qualms about consuming meat and I think that most of the animals human beings consume have it coming; but I draw the line at live bait, or even dead bait, for that matter. It’s just a personal quirk, I guess.

BALD EAGLE PORNO: I’ll have you know, just so we don’t get started off on the wrong foot here, that I am as a loyal and patriotic an American as the next guy, assuming that the next guy is not your average hysterical semiliterate jihadicommie fanatic whack job, and therefore I have no objections to many of the steps taken to preserve, protect, and extend the nation’s population of bald eagles. I think this is a noble venture, one many Americans do not appreciate, and I think the news that the bald eagle population in the lower 48 states is growing, if not by leaps and bounds, then at least steadily, over the past few years is one of the great rescue efforts in the history of species preservation in particular and ornithology in general. Clearly, the scientists, ecologists, lawmakers, and local communities throughout this our Great Republic deserve our thanks and gratitude for pulling this great symbol of our nation back from the edge of extinction, but now they’re becoming a pain in the ass. Not the birds, of course; the birds remain as noble and proud a group of creatures as any mob of pea-brained sushi eaters can be; it’s not their fault that they pig out on Japanese cuisine on a more or less constant basis. No, indeed, the birds are paragons of virtue, if a bit sloppy with their table manners; the people saving the bald eagles, on the other hand, have undergone that most ugly of metamorphoses, having entered the chrysalis of the state capital as the righteous crusaders for a great cause worthy of all of our support, and having emerged from this two-bit pupal state as bureaucrats.

The regular reader of The Passing Parade will know by now that I have two major hobbies, one of which you are perusing at the moment, the other being photography, which is a damn sight more expensive than writing is. If you take a look to the right of your screen, you will see a link to Akaky’s Amateur Photo Hour, wherein you can take a look at some of what I do with my spare time when I am not thinking up these frivolous concoctions for your dining and dancing pleasure. So this past weekend, wherein our happy little burg enjoyed 71 degree temperatures, blue skies, and a warm and variable wind, I decided that the time had come for me to take a long walk down to an abandoned brickyard along the shore of the river that flows two ways; the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, apparently forgot to jiggle the handle on this waterworks after flushing on the seventh day; and take a great many black and white photographs of said brickyard, if, for no other reason, that industrial decay looks good in black and white, especially if you catch the sun shining in columns through the holes in the ceiling. I even bought a roll of Kodachrome 64 in order to show the brickyard in its full tacky stained brown brick ruin. I set off the for the river, my mind full of plans for how to get the best angles, what lenses to use, and wondering if I ought to bring my tripod and maybe another five rolls of film, just in case.

This neurotic need to make sure I have all my bases covered is an ongoing problem with me, I fear. I need not have worried so much about the problem: as I approached the brickyard, I noticed there was a sign telling me to stop. I shouldn’t say that I noticed the sign, as that gives the impression that I could have missed this sign, which was a physical impossibility for anyone except the blind or the truly absent-minded, given that the thing was at least five foot square and parked squarely in the middle of the path down to the brickyard. Stunned by the appearance of this sudden obstacle to all my photographic plans, I stopped and read the sign.

I did not know this, but it seems as if bald eagles have been using the area around the brickyard as a breeding ground, and the state department of conservation, the authors of the sign, put up this sign to ask all of us hikers to kindly go in another direction until the beginning of March; having people wander by as they tried to do what other birds, bees, and educated fleas do annoyed the eagles no end and kept them annoyed for hours afterwards. At the end of this otherwise very polite sign there was the standard warning that if I didn’t take the state’s hint and buzz off, the state department of conservation would be more than happy to toss my backside into the clink for a few years and lay a whopping fine on me as well, just so the message got through. Not wishing to do time for my art, I walked in the other direction, furious at this development, or rather, lack of development.

Do you know how bald eagles copulate? Well, if you don’t, here’s how: male and female fly about as high as they can stand, grab each other by the talons, and then tumble ass over heels down towards the ground while doing the wild thing. Yes, you read that right; that’s how bald eagles get their rocks off. This is what the state does not want me to photograph. First, I resent the hell out of the implication that I am some voyeur who gets some kind of weird thrill out of watching avian live sex shows. Second, I really resent the notion that I am some kind of purveyor of bird porn; I think at this juncture I am a fairly competent amateur photographer and I really dislike the state’s unspoken yet definitely clear belief that I would be willing to go pro selling pictures of this country’s national symbol disporting itself in a manner definitely unbecoming a national symbol. And third, and what I truly find offensive, there is the state, the state where I have lived and paid taxes to all of my adult life, a state, I’ll have you know, where more and more people are leaving because they cannot bear the high taxes and the overwhelming, and this case overreaching, bureaucracy, my native state, spending my hard-earned money to promote weird and kinky sex amongst these irresponsible nitwits.

Now, before we go any further, I want you to know that I am not one of those conservatives who thinks that the government should stay out of every room in the house except the bedroom. What people do in the privacy of their own homes is none of my business, but I don’t think the government should be openly promoting perversions with the public’s tax monies or allowing winged freaks to perform them over large bodies of water where unsuspecting children can see this sort of thing and have their psyches scarred for life. I’m sorry, that's just the way that I am. I am a taxpayer and a property owner and I think I have as much right to photograph the industrial decay here in our happy little burg as the bald eagles have to their psychosexual quirks, and maybe more; having your picture on the tax money is not the same as actually paying those taxes. If they don’t like my taking pictures near their dens of iniquity, fine, they can go somewhere else, which is pretty easy for them; it’s not like the state has to pay their airfare, is it?