Beautiful and Pointless*

Poetry is the lava lamp of literature. The lava lamp is the poetry of Spencer gifts.


*The title is of an interesting new book about modern poetry by David Orr. The lava lamp analogy, however, is mine.

Service Call

Back behind the Safeway

a short unpaved road
cuts through a line of scraggy trees
blocking the view of trash dumpsters
and a large mound of fill dirt.
Beyond that the road wends

to a dusty gravel parking lot.

And beyond that a lovely park:

an unexpected wonderland

with picnic tables
charcoal grills
a horseshoe pitch
sand volleyball court
even a butterfly garden.
The pond in the distance is swimmable.
There are people here.
The parking lot is nearly full.
Laughter and friendly conversation

compete with the eager summer cicadas.
The people here wear uniforms
of one sort or another
except for the swimmers
who have left theirs

on the Adirondack chairs
or back in their vehicles —
vans mostly with colorful logos
for the cable company
plumbing firms
exterminators
heating and air conditioning.
This is the morning shift.
One of them will be at your house
between the hours of 8 and 12.
But it’s only 9:30.
No one here is in a hurry.

Dear Valued Customer

This morning at 06:52:27 PDT a small earthquake registering 3.2 on the Richter scale hit just outside Palo Alto, California – really nice city, Palo Alto, albeit a bit pricey. The epicenter of the temblor was a mile or so below where one of our TX-24b fiber optic cables is buried. This is a very big cable, the TX-24b, with respect to its data-carrying capacity, which is why it carries the TX prefix, as in Texas-sized. Simultaneous with the strike-slip release of energy from the earthquake – that's geologist talk; you get to know their lingo out here in the shake zone – there was this electronic zap heard inside our server room, followed by the faintest whiff of something burning. A zap followed by a whiff in the computer world is never a good thing. Well, things just went from bad to worse. The power flickered on and off a few times and we lost communication with our geostationary satellite, which, for all we know, is no longer geostationary, but tumbling its way through the stratosphere. Heads up Space Station guys and gals! After that, our computers locked up like Fort Knox. So, this is why we are writing to you, dear valued customer. Sadly, we've been forced to shut down service to nearly all 3 million of you worldwide. We've been working hard on this problem since, like, 06:52:28 PDT but so far no luck. We've tried unplugging the main server, counting to 30 and plugging it back in. Also, we've tried hitting the side of the case with the flat part of our palm, which works sometimes, like once when it developed an annoying rattle. We checked the fuse box, of course. No problems there. What we are seeing at the moment is an error message flashing on our monitors with a lengthy ID number, which we can't find in any of our manuals. It's like they're written in Greek! OK, this would probably be a good time to admit that we don't really understand what we do here and haven't for quite some time now. The technology that underlies this business has just gotten too complicated. The one guy who really knew all of this stuff retired last year. He lives in Palm Springs and won't return our calls. (Come on, Bob!) Basically, all we can do at this point is keep trying different things – maybe it will fix itself, who knows with computers? Most importantly, we would like to take this opportunity to apologize to you, dear valued customer, for the inconvenience. Whatever that might be.

Clean as a whistle

I had this dream recently where my doctor woke me from my colonoscopy exam and directed me to look at a high definition monitor up on the wall of the operating room. I was still a little groggy so it took a moment for me to realize that this was a live shot and that the camera was still inside of me. The doctor pointed to the screen and said, "just look at that." When my eyes came into focus I saw clearly what had him so disturbed. There, clinging to the walls of my colon, were hundreds of small colorful emoticons: smiley faces, sad faces, crying faces, winks, devil grins, puckered lips, the whole kit and kaboodle. "Wow," I said, "I had no idea. So this is where they end up." The doctor just shook his head. "It's going to take me all day to clean up in here," he grumbled. I watched as he got back to work, plucking a Facebook "thumbs up" emoticon from a dimly lit crevice of this heretofore uncharted territory. This place where the sun doesn't shine.

Word of the Day

A few weeks ago, I found my dictionary in the bathroom and started reading. The dictionary in question is a pocketbook-sized edition by Random House that dates back to 1980. Its pages are yellow from age, crumbly and folded from heavy use. Most of the time, it is stowed in a nightstand next to my bed along with a chaotic stack of books. Whenever I am reading in bed and need to look up a word, I can usually reach over without looking away from the book in my other hand and find the dictionary by its weathered feel.

I’m not sure how my dictionary ended up in the bathroom, but one morning I saw it there, picked it up and began flipping through the pages. It opened to a page seemingly of its own choosing. Two words in particular caught my eye, one right above the other: submerge and submerse. Submerge was defined as “to sink or plunge beneath the surface of a liquid.” Submerse was defined as “to submerge.” The question that came immediately to my mind was: why do we need two words, one letter apart, to say the same thing? I kind of feel bad for submerse, which seems to me like the underachieving and unpopular younger brother of submerge. Submerse? Oh yeah, we knew his brother submerge. Nice guy. He drowned, didn’t he? I am sure there is an etymological evolution that led to the “submerge versus submerse” distinction, but the pocketbook Random House volume simply does not have the space to devote to it.

Pretty much every day now, I pick my dictionary in the bathroom and allow it to randomly open to a page. Some days are more interesting than others. I am not so much looking to expand my vocabulary by learning long complex words. No, I am much more interested in the stories behind the words that point to the quirky nature of our language. The fact that there is a long word in English, sesquipedalian, that means “a long word” is reason enough for me to pick up a dictionary.

Sometimes, the words I focus on in my morning dictionary reading are words that I think I know, but always get wrong. Hoi polloi comes to mind. I always think that the word refers to “pretentious upper class people,” when in fact it means “common people, the masses, riffraff.” I wonder if the reason hoi polloi trips me up is because of its rhythmic pronunciation, not unlike highfalutin, which does mean pretentious!

Sometimes it is the second meanings of words that are more interesting to me than the first. Take “measly” for example. The first meaning, not surprisingly, deals with the infection commonly associated with the measles. The second meaning is “wretchedly scanty or unsatisfactory.” Huh? Waiter, this portion of lasagna you served me is measly, it reminds me of the red puss-filled sores that covered my body when I was younger. Take it away.

Then there are the words that I have never been able to spell. When I see them on a page of the dictionary it is as though I have turned the corner and encountered an old nemesis in an alleyway – Oh, you again! Despite my determined stare-down of the word, (damn it, I will get you this time!), despite projecting the word, letter-by-letter into my mind space using enormous bold fonts, I will still forget the correct spelling within ten minutes. That’s the way it is with bad spellers; it’s in our DNA. The other day, the dictionary opened to a page that contained the mother lode of words I can’t spell: the “bou” page. Bouffant. Bougainvillaea. Bouillabaisse. Bourgeois. Boutonnière. Hopeless, I tell you.

This morning was a great word: hors frost. It means simply “frost.” What’s the hors part? The Random House editors didn’t say. I could look it up in a bigger, more comprehensive dictionary. I could even Wikipedia it. Then again, the mystery is probably more interesting than the explanation.

What can I say? I like reading the dictionary. I have begun to look forward to my minute or two with the dictionary every morning. It beats the bad news of my morning newspaper. OK, one last dictionary gem: inestimable, "not able to be estimated." Seems straightforward enough. Would it be safe to assume, then, that the word estimable means the opposite: "easily estimated”? Well, no. Estimable means "deserving of praise." Go figure.

September 21, 2009

It was snowing hard on the last day of summer in the Rocky Mountains. I was with three work colleagues tired from a long day in the field. We were stopped in traffic at the entrance to the Edwin C. Johnson tunnel, the highest vehicular tunnel in the world, on our way back to Denver in the late afternoon. Freakish white-out conditions at over 11,000 feet. Too soon, even for up here. Through my fogged up window in the rear seat of our SUV, I could barely make out the dimensions of a tractor trailer in the next lane. The truck was squealing even though it was fully stopped, as we were. I wiped the condensation from my window with the sleeve of my jacket. It was a livestock truck. I wiped the window again for a better view. The trailer was filled with pigs. Little bitty pigs. Hundreds of them, on three levels. I had never seen a stacked array of so many animals like this before. They were agitated. I watched flashes of pink appear and then disappear through the slats of the container as the pigs maneuvered and fought for position. Flat noses pressed through the ventilation holes blowing steam into the freezing alpine air. Most troubling were the faces pressed firmly against the trailer wall, just a few feet away form me, bright eyes peering out of the holes, searching for clues as to what was going on out there. I was wondering the same thing.

Template Contemplation

There are a million new templates here at Blogger since I last checked. I'm going to play around.