Magazine

Thin, perfect-bound, glossy, with thick pages and full-color photographs, inspiration and information and advertisement and article cut and pasted together on nearly any bizarre subject; there is a magazine for all occasions. Whenever I contemplate exploring something strange and different, the first place I go is the newsstand, to find a magazine on the subject. It doesn't matter what it is, there are magazines for folks who build hot rods, have tattoos, collect ceramic figurines, play bridge or poker or blackjack, write, read poetry, ride motorcycles, have any kind of pet of any kind of breed or type, are gay or straight, live in whatever state or city or town, ride a BMX bike or mountain bike or racing bike or a skateboard or a kite board, go to movies, shoot movies, write movies, are fans of movies or teens or rock stars or rappers or classical music, build model railroads or models of anything, fly an airplane, own a yacht, fish for crappie (yes, Crappie magazine), are getting married, have been divorced, are single, like to cook and eat and scrapbook and read the airline magazine while on their way to distant lands that they read about in a travel magazine.

Petrol

Petrol, Brit-speak for gas, gasoline, a refined petroleum product: "Let's put some petrol in the lorry and motor down to Bishops Itchington for some fish and chips and bit of cricket." The Brits and their ilk would probably make fun of the Steely Dan lyrics in Kid Charlemagne: "Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car! I think the people down the hall know who you are." What kind of lyrics are those? Genius ones, I tell you!

I'm old enough to remember when gasoline (petrol) was mere cents per gallon, 29.9 or less, so I'm going to take an old fart's walk down Nostalgia Alley and reminisce about them good ol' days buyin' gas (petrol) at the Humble or the Ulrich or the Union 76 station, so screw you, whippersnapper, and get the hell off my lawn, damn kids!
Entering the station, you rolled over this rubber tube see, and the bell would ring, ding ding, alerting the attendants to your presence. They came hustling out like an Indy 500 pit crew, washing your windows, checking your oil and tires, putting 29.9 cent per gallon gas (petrol) in your car, "Fill it up?" And you would be driving a big car, damn it; we had a Studebaker Lark, a piece of crap whose driver side door would fly open whenever you made a left-hand turn. We called it mostly by its nickname, "The Junker." The Studebaker was so notoriously crappy that Warren Zevon actually wrote a song about one just like ours (it may have even been ours, purchased by Warren late in the Sixties from my Dad after he bought an English Ford Cortina):

I left my home in Monterrey
Just another low prospects man
Who'd rather work in the foundries
Than put fishes in a can

I'm twenty five but I haven't travelled far
And I spend all my money on this misbegotten car

I'm up against it all, like a leaf against the wind
And this Studebaker keeps on breaking down again
This Studebaker keeps on breaking down again
I thought I'd go to Fresno to see my friend
But this damn Studebaker keeps on breaking down again

I was speeding south on 99
When the manifold started smokin'
I ran her off the shoulder
And now the axle's broken
Made a sound like crackin' my heart in half
With less than half a
Half pint of vodka left

I'm up against it all, like a leaf against the wind
And this Studebaker keeps on breaking down again
This Studebaker keeps on breaking down again
I thought I'd go to Fresno to see my friend
But this damn Studebaker keeps on breaking down again

- Studebaker, Copyright © Warren Zevon

My Dad and Warren Zevon, now both dead, are probably comparing notes on their damn old Studebakers, and having a good laugh.

Wardrobe

I don't really know what they mean here, are they referring to the thing which contains the wardrobe, which is also called a wardrobe, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? Or are they referring to the contents contained by the wardrobe, the clothing, also called the wardrobe? And who is "They"? We have a wardrobe (the container, not the contained), and we also have a chiffarobe (smaller, here). The smell of cedar is prominent, the nice one is solid oak and walnut veneer, tall enough to hide a few men, or several small children. You probably couldn't get the whole of Narnia in it, though we did have quite a time getting it up the stairs and around the corner into the first bedroom. We had to start taking things apart, light fixtures and trim pieces. In the end, we just gave it a good shove, and didn't break anything. I think we had to take a door off its hinges. I don't have a wardrobe (the contained, not the container), which is somewhat ironic considering that I have at least two of the damn things in my house (the container, not the, well, you get it), not in the formal sense; I might be able to dig up a sportcoat, nearly matching pants, and a tie leftover from the early nineties when I had to wear such things on a daily basis. My suits don't fit anymore, I've added nearly half a foot to my formerly trim waist, a 42 regular doesn't seem to cover the girth anymore, the pants way too tight, as if they were spray-painted onto my thighs and ever-expanding ass.

Quiz

More friendly and less critical than a Test, 10 Ways to Enrich Your Word Power or Your Sex Life or Your Poor Career Choices. Usually, these things are preceded by the short test, where There Are No Wrong Answers, we're just trying to establish a baseline, a starting point, a reference. There actually are wrong answers, or you wouldn't be doing this to begin with. You feel stupid because you don't understand big words, or your sex life sucks, or you have a crappy job. There are wrong answers, to life, and those are some examples. You seek to improve your situation, but first, let's find out Where We Are (meaning, of course, Where You Are). Remember, there are no wrong answers, as long as you don't deviate from that high spot on the bell curve, stray off the reservation. Those on the left of the curve, thanks for playing, but you're probably too stupid to be reading this, or too oblivious to care, hated and unappreciated because you are miserable dullards with less personality than a cabbage. Those on the right of the curve will be forever publicly subject to the petty tyranny and whim of the majority, hated and unappreciated because you are pedantic pontificating nettlesome trolls with less personality than a cabbage.

Museum

We used to take her daughter there, when she was younger, 9 or 10 or so. She was a smart girl, and modern and classical works of art simply added depth and breadth and experience to a developing foundation. It was a better time back then, we were poor and lived in the city but we were happier, newlyweds. Viewing works of art was cheap and accessible, an afternoon of culture for very little money. I thought then that we might actually become a family, and happy, but this was before smart little girls turn into reticent teenagers, before the shine comes off being "newly wed", before the new car smell gives way to that of cigarettes and fast food and gasoline and burning oil. Before workaday life takes over, the "salad days", according to Joel and Ethan Coen. You dream big during the salad days, about perhaps creating fine works of art yourself, but then you have to go out and make a living and suddenly there's no time for that sort of nonsense anymore, it's not serious, not productive, not essential, not useful, you can't make any money doing that. Just things to fill a museum.

Minimart

Orange is the color, and 11 is the number, 11:00 PM to be exact. That's when the graveyard shift starts; I get about a fifty-cent an hour bump (back in the day), but I work all night and sleep during the day, and just when things are starting to liven up around here, I have to go to work. My friends have already come and gone from work and are into about half a case of a case-a-day end of work celebration. I participate, knowing that in a few hours I'll be up all night, with nothing but cops and drunks to keep me company; and the lonely people who themselves work the graveyard, or don't work at all and are up all night anyway, looking for drugs or sex or just something to do, suburban vampires. A vampire named Christy comes in at night and plays video games. She still lives at home, she's a year or two out of high school and still hangs at the 7-Eleven, drinking and smoking with her high school friends, the ones that didn't go off to college. Occasionally she'll leave with one of them, her car still in the parking lot when dawn starts cracking. I'll be stocking the walk-in when she returns for her car, her hair all wrong, her clothes not fitting right. Mostly I don't like the sleep deprivation, or drinking alone at 7:00 in the morning. I quit, finally, after being transferred to a different store in a rougher part of town, right next to a bar a couple blocks up from the 'hood, still working graveyard. The guy they hired to replace me was shot to death a week later.

Night

Cool light so bright you could read a book out here under the full moon. It's hot and muggy, no breeze in July, quiet, birds and cicadas finally asleep, only the crickets and frogs down by the pond make any noise now. I can see everything, lit up almost like daylight, like night vision; but I'm unseen by anyone, now effectively invisible. I am far away from the city, from any city, no pool of amber or green sodium or mercury vapor street lighting on the horizon, just a black dome, pinpricked by white stars, and a bright bluish-white xenon light reflecting off a gray surface a quarter of a million miles away, the light coming ninety-three million miles before that.

Raconteur

I don't really know if they were true or not, all those things he talked about. He had some stories, about all kinds of things, adventures and misadventures. Tales of life and death, of chivalry and larceny, facts, statistics, lies, and damn lies. I would be sworn to secrecy, only to overhear it slurred out months later at party, the tongue loosened after consuming several six-packs, names changed to protect the innocent. I believed when I first heard, but later became jaded and skeptical after hearing the same stories told again and again and again, always after too much alcohol, trying to win acceptance from people decades his junior; perhaps spoken repeatedly as an incantation against growing older, tales of near-death to keep Death at bay.

Rickshaw

The streets here are dark and narrow, glorified back-alleys, city smells coming from sewer grates and dumpsters and bus exhaust, everything crowded and makeshift, multipurpose. People cooking in improbable locations, cooking improbable meals, fishy and starchy. Smoke and steam and brick and noise, this part of the City hasn't changed much since it was rebuilt after the fire. Way before then, people who built one of the most audacious engineering achievements of the day, all that wood and iron over and through those damn granite mountains.

Blackberry

A pair of pruners in one gloved hand, the other hand bare, gingerly venturing forth with fingertips into a sharp forbidding mass of razor-sharp thorns, poked and sliced, pricked, hundreds of pinholes in my arms and hands and fingers, blood and berry juice mixing and turning a purpleish-red. A cluster of dark-purple here, snatched and placed in the bucket, a mass of red ones there, ignored for now, they'll be ready next week. Damn, it's hot out here; shouldn't be doing this in the full July afternoon sun. The pruners cutting away parts of the plant that will never give berries, these offshoots only produce thorns, green and sharp, shielding and obfuscating the fruit, keeping the fragile humans - who cut easily - away.

Lifejacket

Not as stylish as a P.F. (Personal Flotation) device; for starters, there's that safety high-visibility orange color. You wouldn't look cool on a jet ski wearing one of these. Waterskiers and boogie-boarders usually have those cool vest things, which, above all things, are not safety orange. The lifejacket is usually cold and clammy (from being stored under the seats in a boat) and kind of musty and moldy smelling (from being stored under the seats in a boat), puffy and foam and the cheapest safety device that still meets the requirements of the Coast Guard and whichever constabulatory body has jurisdiction over your local waterways. Since they're smelly and hideous looking, it's hard to get anybody but kids to wear them, which is probably why a bunch of folk drown in boating accidents around here every year. At least the orange foam device would have prevented them from sinking to the bottom when they got drunk, passed out, and fell out of the boat.

X-Ray

"Alright then. Stand right here, back straight. Rest your chin up here. Good." She walks to the back, behind a lead-lined wall, and peers through glass (probably impregnated with lead). She wears a lead apron, I've got a thin cotton hospital gown (gown indeed, as if I'm going ballroom dancing). "Take a deep breath and hold it." A buzzing sound, and I swear I can feel the radiation, tingling, briefly boiling white and red cells, microwaving my intestines at the speed of light. We wait for the picture to develop, a spooky black-and-white of what I will look like in the far future, after I'm long dead and buried; bones, on my way back to ashes and dust.

Embassy

Some third-world banana republic jail, built when the French or the British or the Spainiards were here, back in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, quarried stone and iron doors, iron bars and rats. Lots of rats. Remodeled throughout the centuries, retrofitted at various epochs with terra cotta floors, indoor plumbing, electric light, the telephone. The smell of rat piss and human piss and Lysol and Pine Sol, damp and moldy; the criminal incense of cigarette smoke and flesh charred by arcing electricity from car batteries and jumper cables. Echoes reflecting now off the tile, wing tips and combat boots, broken English and Spanish vaguely recognized from yesterday's conversation on the crackly dial-up phone; the guy from the embassy has arrived.

Interview

"So, uh, Mr. Rhubarb, is it? And how are you today?"

"Uh, it's actually Ranch, Rhubarb Ranch. I get that a lot."

I do, really. My first, middle, and last names could all be first, middle, or last names, and people have been screwing it up for years. I started using all three names on resumes so there wouldn't be any ambiguity: Rhubarb Frigging Ranch. That's my name, don't wear it out. It didn't help much. My eighth-grade English teacher never could get it straight, Mrs. Munson, senile old bat. "Ranch Rhubarb, diagram this sentence. Mr. Rhubarb, get rid of that gum." I spat it on her desk, right in the middle of her attendence book. I hated English.

So, here I am, talking with someone from India or Pakistan about an information technology job. I'm a contractor, so I interview a lot. Pressed slacks, sport coat, starched shirt, tie. Clothes I don't normally wear, except to an interview. Once I have the job, most folks don't even see me. I usually wear cargo shorts, t-shirts, and sandals. I'm nervous that he'll ask me some obscure computer science question about design patterns, which everyone likes to say they use but nobody really does. Indians love design patterns. And UML. And Java, probably because it's free. And Ruby. And Ruby on Rails. And Ajax. Hell, I was using design patterns before they had a catchy computer science name. To me, they're just tools, just another way to get the job done. But for a lot of folks, they're religions. They'll even use terms like "language agnostic." And I'll probably kill the next person that uses the term "syntactic sugar" in my presence. Already I hate this job, and I haven't even finished the interview.

Franchise

It would've been about 1968, inside a Pizza Hut or a Pizza Inn or a Pizza something, but it wasn't Shakey's pizza. This was on the other side of town, and it wasn't open yet; a new business, lots of folks bustling about trying to get things done. It was a business venture, my Dad was a biochemist by trade and training, not a pizza monger. I don't know what he was doing in a Pizza Inn in 1968, drinking beer and eating pizza, somehow affiliated with the owners, giving me enough money to play songs on the jukebox. A psychedelic number by The First Edition (yes, Kenny Rogers, before the gambler. Way before.) "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)", backwards guitar intro by Glen Campbell (always underrated). I didn't like the pizza, there were too many green peppers, in rings rather than diced like Shakey's. The mushrooms weren't cooked right (Shakey's seemed to saute theirs or something). The crust was thin and burnt. But all the root beer I could drink and jukebox somehow made it O.K. I can't hear the word "franchise" without smelling pizza and hearing that stupid song.

Audience

Kind of like fire, inanimate but alive. A contradiction, moving without thinking, responding autonomously, a collective hive consciousness like the Borg. It's docile when it is at rest or content, but don't piss it off or cause it to panic, it'll turn on you - perhaps kill you - trampled underfoot. Don't bore it with something it can't understand, it will respond with indifference, perhaps polite clapping - the same sound you hear at golf tournaments. Or, instead of applause at the end of a number, crickets chirping, silence. Something has so greatly increased the gravity of the audience that not even sound can escape: it has become an audio black-hole.

Airport

I'm sitting in the left seat of a mid-sixties Piper Cherokee 180, white and blue, with red stripes. I'm on the ramp at Love Field in Dallas, and shout "Clear!" through the little vent window on my left. This is more of a formality than anything; jets are taxiing everywhere, the air smelling of kerosene. I seriously doubt anyone can hear me shout "Clear!", but you don't want somebody getting tangled up in the prop, either. My instructor has just received a bunch of garbled radio jargon from "clearance delivery", and I turn the key to start the airplane. We get ground control on another frequency, and I inform them that I'm in front of Avial with information Bravo and ready to taxi to the active, trying to sound like Chuck Yeager on the radio. They reply in garbled radio jargon with a bunch of cryptic nonsense concerning taxiways and runways and tower frequencies. I do a mechanical readback using my best Chuck Yeager-like manner, completely without a clue. Jesus, those guys talk fast. My instructor deciphers it all and points his finger, saying "Turn left here" and "Go this way!" I stop at the runup area, throttling the engine to the runup speed, switching magnetos back and forth, looking for the slight drop in RPM that will tell me everything is working properly. I inform the tower that we're ready, trying to sound like Chuck Yeager, and they reply with garbled radio jargon about us being "number 2 behind the Citation" and then "hold short" and then "position and hold" and finally "cleared for takeoff. Caution, wake turbulence." I roger the last instruction like Chuck Yeager, but I'm sure my voice is cracking in a very non-Yeager-like way. I'm no sooner down the runway and up in the air where more garbled radio jargon is received over the crappy mid-sixties speaker, something about turning "left to heading one-eight-garbled, ascend to and maintain garbled thousand five hundred, contact departure on garbled." I do a mechanical readback, trying to sound like Chuck Yeager, and finally a "Good day" from the tower.

London

Full disclaimer: I ain't never been. I'd like to go, I'd like to be an experienced world traveller, but that sort of thing takes disposable income, and mine has already been, uh, disposed. I can go in my mind's eye, to a claustrophobic, cobblestone lined city, stone buildings covered in soot, folks with bad teeth dressed in rags, everything gray, Oliver Twist picking your pocket, Jack The Ripper lurking in the alleyway, Bob Cratchit hoisting Tiny Tim on his shoulders, Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke singing and dancing and sweeping chimneys. That's kind of the reverse of what the English think of us Texans, isn't it? Gun-toting, ten-gallon-hat wearing cowboys, sporting chaps and spurs and fancy pointed boots, drawling and spitting tobacco, shooting first and asking questions later. Yee-haw. I'm sure London isn't nearly as Dickensian as I think; no more so than all of us Texans having oil wells in our backyards. More's the pity. The food sounds a little weird: spotted dick and bangers and fish and chips. My wife says, "But Gordon Ramsay, your hero, is English, isn't he?" I think he's Scottish dear, but then there's haggis.

Bus

In April of '81, everything I owned consisted of a Les Paul guitar, and whatever would fit into a metal strongbox and a duffel bag. I had already sold my amplifier, and it would be five years before I got another one. I checked it through on a Greyhound bus to Medford, Oregon. It was two in the morning and I was sneaking out of town, and my friends (who had written me off) would never hear from me again, except for once, about a month later. That phone call would be like Kurt Vonnegut's phone calls in Slaughterhouse Five: fueled by alcohol, breath smelling of mustard gas and roses. It wouldn't go well. Shortly thereafter, I would go down to the park by the Rogue River, and burn all of the documents and pictures linking me to that prior period of my life, my friends and I both dead to each other. So it goes, as Kurt would say. I enjoyed the bus ride through Central and Northern California, the stop in Sacramento, seeing Mount Shasta in the early morning sunrise. I enjoyed it until Ashland, only about 15 miles from my destination, where this idiot who had embarked at Reddding or Red Bluff or Eureka or Yreka or some damn place sprinted from the front of the bus in my direction. I was seated at the rear of the bus, in the smoking section, next to the lavatory. His hand was over his mouth, he was gagging, and saying "Sorry, sorry." He was desperately trying to reach the lavatory, but he had waited too long. He was bus-sick. He damn near made it, but stopped short mere feet from the lavatory door and Blew Chunks. Puked. Bought Buicks. Would have Driven The Porcelain Bus, had he made it. Missed his conference call to Huey, Ralph, and Earl on the Great White Phone. It was a cottage-cheese and lite beer-looking mixture on the aisle floor of the bus, smelling of mustard gas and roses. The Smokers (including myself) instantly forgot about our deadly addiction and moved en masse to the front of the bus. So it goes. It was the longest 15 miles ever travelled on a bus. I never rode the bus again, except once to a recruiting facility for my military physical. I didn't pass; I have a non-contagious, non-debilitating genetic skin disease which was used as a technicality to keep me out of the Air Force. My skin dies and replaces itself at three times the normal rate. So it goes. But on the way back, in the dark, I made out with a totally slutty really cute drunken girl in the smoking section. I was drunk too, and our breath smelled vaguely of mustard gas and roses.