Shapeshifter

Fuck the Bach

Corrine was less than forthcoming about her extramarital activities, and who could blame her? 
Doing it was one thing, talking about it with her husband quite another. Which is why Larry was forever loath to inquire after his wife’s nocturnal outings. He knew he risked a shot to the mouth or a slap across the face just for asking.

Like for instance the rain-soaked morning she arrived home, panties in one hand, flip-flops in the other.

“You must be freezing,” he said, having risen from a fitful slumber to answer the bell. “And where’s your key?”

“Mind yer own freakin’ beeswax. Laaarry.” She’d said, sauntering to the shower, tracking mud down the hall behind her. 
Had she rolled her eyes when she said his name? Larry couldn’t decide.

As always, he was cordial and obedient. In all his life he’d never known a woman like this. She was paradise run amok, a wild, untamable mystery, and in the thrall of that mystery he was lily-livered, yellow-bellied, gutless—putty in her hands his father liked to say. 
Larry could no more protest her infidelities than he could defend his own pathetic groveling. He simply adored every inch of this woman and had long ago decided that he would tolerate any abuse she might see fit to rain down upon him, so long as he could daily inhale her divine scent, so long as he could snooze an occasional night away at her blessed side.

He smoked a cigarette and tidied the magazines on the nightstand while he waited for her to return from the bathroom. He looked out the window. There were people in the street. It had stopped raining. Maybe they could go for a walk.

Finally he heard her coming. She was whistling “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, a favorite of his.

“Oh, I love the Bach,” he chirped as she entered the room.

“Fuck the Bach,” she said. “I need a nap.”

Top Sergeant Vernon Williams

I should mention Top Sergeant Vernon Williams here. Williams was a 40-year old African-American, a Spec 8 with twenty-three years in the service. He'd done time in Korea and other hotspots, and had recently returned from a third tour of Vietnam, where he'd been wounded and commended for bravery under fire. He was a soldier's soldier: ramrod straight, uniform always immaculate and sharply pressed. His boots shone brighter than any I ever saw in a world where shiny boots are the undisputed badge of the fully actualized fighting man.

Top had his shit together. He had developed the Williams Method, a technique for shining boots that had no equal: It started out with the tried and true spit shine, a method of applying a mixture of boot polish and saliva with a soft cotton rag.  A tight circular polishing motion was employed to work the mixture into the leather. Practiced for hours at a time, spit-shining eventually yielded up a startlingly bright finish, but the diligent Sergeant had taken the process to new heights. He had determined that by alternately polishing the boots and baking them for ten minutes in a slow oven at 175 degrees, mere brightness became eye-blinding brilliance. Boot polishing amateurs were warned to wear sunglasses when staring directly at his boots. I remember us toiling for hours to raise a dull luster on our own footware; when Sgt. Williams arrived, no eye could ignore the blazing mirrors that adorned his toes. We begged him for the secret and sat adoringly at his knee as he revealed it.

Of all the men I met in the military, Top Sgt. Vernon Williams was the ablest, most effective leader I encountered. He won admiration and loyalty simply by being direct, kind and fair. Whether you were a conscientious objector or a Green Beret, he viewed you as a human being and he treated you with the respect he held for any soldier that might one day fight by his side. It was that simple. He was the first of several men I met during those years who showed me that even in that vast sea of inhumanity and ineptitude, there were fine people who maintained their personal dignity and, within the limits of the social order, their individuality and independence.

Anthem

I wouldn’t call drinking so much a problem as I would a habit. And once you get into a habit, why then it becomes a problem. So how is one to drum on such a conundrum? Well, probably let it go. Live with it, let it eat away on certain parts of you, and die with it; the rest is history. Oh c’mon you progeny of the middle class, the greatest generation since the greatest generation. Bunch of stooges, electors of Bush and Bumsquat. Non-thinkers. No. We know what’s up and we know what’s down. For we have pocket TV sets and twitter accts. Long may we drink, long may we wave.

Up and tap-tap-tapping

Not sleeping too good tonight, hell, I never have slept too good, so I’m up and tap-tap-tapping, trying to make some sense out of this life of mine, of this world of ours. I’m not sure there’s any sense to be made of it, but at my age you delude yourself. I can compare it to a book I’m reading, A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi: a couple of brain scientists hypothesizing about how consciousness happens, how we generate thought. A tall order, no? While they succeed in giving the reader a new and deeper respect for the complexities of our brains, they shed little new light on how the process happens, no more than say William James did a hundred years ago in his masterpiece Principles of Psychology. WelI, OK, maybe that’s unfair, but you get the feeling of two perplexed scientists fumbling around trying to be the first on their block to come up with an acceptable explanation of something that is essentially unexplainable—at least at this point in our development—because they’re using the brain to explain itself. Brain-generated language doesn’t suffice. Can thought fathom thought? Can language reveal its source? More to the point, can thinking extricate itself from the thought process in order to understand the thought process? Quien sabe, Kemo Sabe? But these dudes have the cred, bravado, and intellectual self-assurance to give it a shot. Unfortunately it comes out mostly as wishful thinking. Close, but no banana. Which, to return to where I started, is pretty much where I’m at at 2:00 in the morning trying to make sense out of life and the world: wishful thinking. I suppose this is what happens when you get to your mid-sixties and start looking across whatever number of years you have remaining and suddenly realize you don’t know shit and never did, and there’s this long lonely gulf where you fall away from life as you’ve known it and you’re faced with an image of a tiny pea rolling around in a vast, dark, unfathomable cosmos, unanchored, untethered, unprepared for what’s to come, so you start telling yourself stories that are guaranteed to keep you awake at night. Eventually you get out of bed, throw a log on the fire, eat some peanut butter toast and, like I said up top, try to make some sense of it all. I suspect I’ll have about as much success with this as Edelman and Tononi did with their self-consciously twisted image of the mind all doubling back on itself in the throes of thought-birth, or re-entrance, as the process is known to brain explorers: the idea that consciousness is a roaring flow of energy coursing through our neural nooks and crannies at the speed of thought, incessantly recirculated to new compartments of the brain for nourishment and inspiration, over, under, around and through the neural mass, until the un-thought thought train hits all required neuronic stations, is tinkered with, touched and retouched, adjusted and readjusted, until each of billions of participating nerves and sparking synapses has made its infinitesimal contribution. Thusly are thoughts--and consciousness itself--born and reborn like stories from nowhere, like shimmering fish from the white-hot volcanic depths of the seething cauldron we call mind. But what the heck. What else is there to do?