So Much Foam

 

Writers are a bit strange and different from normal people. You have to be a little weird to sit for hours in solitude, pecking at a keyboard and stringing words together on the white screen in front of you, hoping to make some sense of whatever it is you’re putting there. And nerve to disseminate them.

Writers are frustrated philosophers, drawing parallel lines of invisible thought and following them like an itinerant hobo hobbling down some abandoned rusty railroad tracks into the disappearing void of a parallel universe. They make metaphors out of mysteries and convert hyperbole into hype, often for no other reason than pure shock value.  

For about sixteen years I’ve written weekly vignettes of inanity. More than 600 of them clog my data base, six book anthologies and some newspapers and magazines. Still I sit and peck, and somehow, from somewhere, ideas come. Like I said, writers are strange.

Our lives overflow with fodder these days. Pick anything, and there are parallel lines, metaphors and hyperbole to assail the situations. Boredom at the keyboard is impossible.

Take the political scene. It’s beginning to take shape.  Sides have been chosen, battle lines drawn, and the barbs of verbal plowshares are being sharpened into swords. Soon it will be mano a mano, and it’s anyone’s guess what’s going down from here. But one thing is for certain: the convention carnival atmosphere is lacking.

But today I am walking the dog on the beach where there’s plenty of metaphoric action going on. It’s awash with foam.

The surf is essentially calm, unlike the angry and anxious mood of millions of hunkered-down, out-of-work and disenfranchised Americans looking for unemployment checks, jobs and justice of every sort to magically materialize. Richard Pryor the comedian once said: “You want justice? Come to the courthouse and you’ll find it…just us.” Take it for what it is.    

Today there are no ponderous waves crashing the shore, just a calm, lazy surf depositing mounds of puffy white foam on the clean-washed sands. It is somewhat symbolic of the just-happened political conventions where a lot of syllables washed up on our tv screens uttered by voices in a vacant auditorium to an invisible crowd. There was no power or zeal to the pontifications. Just words. The content produced no compelling potency.  

But unlike vacuous words, the foam is beautiful in its ephemeral elegance. It usually rides atop the raging waves, driven by stiff winds that blow to shore its large frothy bubbles. They resemble what might be the topping of an ocean latte or a cool whip-topped peach cobbler, or, if your mind can grasp the thought, words from political candidates.

There’s a message in the foam. Who can imagine a presidential election without the party conventions? Aside from all the other havoc caused by Covid, blame it for ruining a few nights of living-room amusement and dire predictions.

Zoom can’t compete with the carnival sideshows, the hoopla staged by journalistic hacks, political blowhards and flash-in-the-pan pundits. Covid can’t compete with the innuendo to be drummed up by the media in its nefarious forays into the dark crevices of human minds of back-room, back-slapping and brown-nosing wannabe’s.    

And to have a presidential election without the carnival gyrations of conventions is like an SEC Championship game between Alabama and Georgia in an empty stadium. Ho hum is the response.

But things have changed. Fear stalks the streets; protests take the place of baseball and make the news lively. Amazon displaces the addiction to malls while churches survive on PPP government loans and gun sales are through the roof. Times have changed.

But the metaphoric world found in the beach foam remains as it has for millennia. Nature can always be counted on for substance and balance.

Walking home I notice the scorching sun has evaporated the once beautiful frothy foam into disappearing yellow globs. They litter the shore like so many well-intentioned promises that fall flat and fade into the light of another common day.

Soon the election will be over.  The winners will gloat, the losers will demand recounts. It’ll all get sorted out. And likely as not, we’ll still be breathing, cussing and discussing while life moves on.

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Meanwhile, writers will be holed up in their reclusive cubicles, typing away, trying to connect the dots and unite the parallel lines with metaphors and hyperbole to make it all interesting.

So much foam…life is all in how you see it.

 

 Bud Hearn

August 31, 2020     

 

      

From Tadpoles to Frogs…the Alchemists

 

     “In a moment, the twinkling of the eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.” 1 Corinthians 15:52.

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Life throbs with alchemy. Look around, see the transformation from moment to moment. Even you and I have already alchemized from what we were to what we are. More will come.

There was a time in the small towns and backyards of our youth when the cares of this world and the turbulent passions of life had yet to arrive. But they would, and on that day our child-like curiosity and amazement would be changed.

But until then, it was a time when we played in small streams and creeks and explored the mysterious alchemy of nature. These are distant memories now. Alas, the age of innocence is short-lived.

A small tributary flowed through the edge of our schoolyard, meandering down to some swampy bog off in the distance. It was mostly a wet-weather stream, but with the Spring and Summer rains it flowed wild and free, not unlike 10-year old boys on bikes, moving fast but not really going very far.

The stream was our babysitter, keeping us off the streets as we passed the days in exploration, playing among the vines and thorns of wild blackberries, strawberries and plums that lined the embankments. We captured lizards, small snakes, salamanders, crawfish and tadpoles. It was a young boy’s dream.

We only kept the tadpoles, housing them in quart mason jars, hoping to see nature alchemize them into frogs.  The term ‘alchemy’ had not entered our lexicon. Sadly, it was only an experiment without success. Apparently, tadpoles don’t morph into frogs in mason jars. We soon deposited them back where we found them. While we never saw the transition, we heard the frogs singing a few weeks later.

We’re living in a world where alchemy is a regular occurrence that’s reminiscent of the Yukon Gold Rush. Charlatans hawking mystic panaceas, political palliatives and messianic hokum like ‘quantum imaginations’ line the streets and clutter the digital universe with promises of salvation, wealth, healing and everything else that is designed to separate fools from their money. The laying on of hands these days has the distinct feel of somebody snatching your wallet.

But this is a cynic’s view of the street-corner variety. Successful alchemists are much slicker than this. They shroud themselves in mystery and double-speak. All counterfeiting is done covertly, in back rooms under the cover of darkness. They create an aura of power and invincibility while pandering to the basic instincts of fear, greed and the other deadly sins.  Some have degrees from Yale, others from mail order from the Maharajah Gupta.

Elijah, while not an imposter, created his own legacy. He was said to have transcended in a whirlwind.  Nobody saw him do this, but the story lives on after him, so who’s to say it didn’t happen? Some actually achieve this concept by manipulation of ‘fake news.’ I think it’s called illusions of grandeur.

Alchemists experiment with admixtures cooked up in sociopolitical labs with petri dishes teeming with statistical polling analyses. Psychological gurus mix concepts, like chaos with order, insanity with sanity, diatribe with dialogue to discover recipes to confuse the most logical minds. Dictionaries are sliced and diced; words are jumbled in a giant lottery bin that spits out new definitions of claptrap designed to form the basis of ‘woke’ new-speak.

The elites prefer the stasis of status quo to the turbid tides of the times. Their latest alchemistic craze is the ‘elixir of immortality,’ a snake oil concoction consisting mostly of self-delusion chased with an aged Grand Cru while dining on a cliff-side balcony overlooking the Pacific.    

Then there is the alchemy of rage, a stupefying brew cooked up by the PC editorial staffs of the nightly news, symbolized by a brick sailing through a window. The alchemistic genius in this admixture is the transformation of emotional rage into votes. Hooray for our side.  

Who can say what alchemy will prevail after November 3^rd? But be assured that financial voodoo is still alive and well. Gold will be created from thin air.

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Is there an alchemy that can transform anger to praise, hate to love? As far as we know only One can achieve this alchemy, and He is not a fraud.

Tadpoles to frogs…some alchemy is inexplicable.    

 

 Bud Hearn

August 17, 2020

 

An Afternoon Convercussion with Arnold

Sometimes it’s hard to know whether someone is malapropsic or just plain tongue twisted. Arnold is one or the other. The jury remains deadlocked.

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Arnold is an old friend of mine, literally and figuratively. We go way back to the days of shade-tree mechanics and corner service stations, the days when somebody would pump your gas, check your oil and wash your windshield, even with a couple bucks of gas purchase.

I think it’s safe to say I met Arnold’s feet before I met him. They jutted out from beneath a ’36 Rolls Royce Phantom he was lying beneath while trying to change the oil in the old clunker.

He rotated out on his little flat bed with rollers and I asked, “What’s happening under there?”

“Lugging an oil leak,” he said.

“You mean ‘plugging’ an oil leak, right?”

“Lug, plug, what does it matter when you’re back on your flat looking up at the bottom side of oil pan ready to lump its contents on your head?” It took me a minute to figure that response out.

Anyway, that’s when our friendship began. The year was 1967. And a lot has happened since then for both of us. He’s no longer ‘back on his flat’ but living well in retirement. Me? Well, us real estate speculators are still suffering from a nervous shakedown from the ’08 downmelt.

Arnold comes by when he’s on the coast and we catch up. He has a way of analogizing all events, past and present, with engine functions.

Like dialogues between friends, conversations provoke laughs from escapades of the ‘old days’ mixed with what’s happening now: in America, the Covid curse, the economy, politics but only peripheral reference to women. Age has a way of simplifying some things in life.

“What do you make of Basement Joe’s politics?” I ask.

“I’d like to illiterate him and the rest of them from memory. They all rewind me of burnt-out sparkplugs.”

“Some say the Covid curse is just a hoax. What do you think?”

“Well, you gotta take it with a grin of salt, I think. Now you take that Dr. Fogie. Why, he really didn’t say everything he said. He’s amphibious, talks from both corners of his mouth. Plus, he has lots of lavatories to develop the vaccine in.”

“Well, the president sure has a lot of confidence in him.”

“The President? Our Exhausted Ruler? The pineapple of politeness? He reminds me of that old pickup I once had that kept backfiring. A lot of hot exhaust. He needs a new set of ball bearings.”

“Are you referring to our Exalted Head of State by chance, the Immortal One, the suppository of all wisdom?” I’m finding it easy to fall into the malaprop trap.

“Yeah. I’d like to give him a mind of my piece, some well-frozen words to express my sentiments. Still, he did get rid of some of the allegories that live in the DC swamp.”

“What do you think about what’s going on in Portland and Seattle?”

“Things have got out of hand in those smelting pots. They should round up and comprehend all auspicious perpetrators and jail them off to herd.”

“Looks like there’s a race by women to be the Democratic VP,” I say.

“Oh, you talking about the woman’s lubrication movement?” He grins even as he says it. I think that comment had been simmering in his brain, looking for a spot to roll in ever since he rolled out from under the Rolls.

I complain about the 108-degree heat index, to which he comments, “It ain’t the heat, brother, it’s the humility.” Now, no truer statement has ever been uttered. Heat and humility are tough to bear.

We get around to speculating on the outcome of the upcoming elections. I ask him, “Arnold, which state do you think will tilt the balance of power?”

He thinks for a minute and replies, “I think California. It’s like the wiring harness in your car. California has a lot of electrical votes.” I think he means ‘voltage,’ but hey, this is Arnold doublespeak.

After we have disgusted, uh, discussed, the state of things, and dissed most politicians, we conclude that even Napoleon had his Watergate, which is the sure fruits of all fruits who have desecrated our national monuments.

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Old friends are the best friends. We go together like two peas in a pot or stay connected like a horse and carrot. Now you figure this all out.


Bud Hearn
August 3, 2020